Biographer Kerwin Swint explains how news honcho Roger Ailes has pushed the country to the right for the past four decades.
When Richard Nixon ran for the presidency in 1968, eight years after his pasty, glowering visage in four televised debates with John Kennedy had, arguably, cost him the White House, he knew he needed a makeover. He hired a young producer from "The Mike Douglas Show" to repackage him for mass consumption. Roger Ailes sold Nixon to the American public, and became a sought-after Republican political consultant. Between 1968 and 1989, he advised everybody from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Rudy Giuliani. Americans know Ailes best, however, as the founding father and guiding hand of the "fair and balanced" Fox News network, the favorite cable news source of conservatives and the bête noir of liberals.
In "Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes,"Kerwin Swint details Ailes' role in the 40-year ascent of conservatism, and in the development of a new kind of "news." Salon spoke to Swint recently by phone.
Why a book about Roger Ailes?
I couldn't believe that no one had written a book on him yet. He's been such a central figure for so long. And you see biographies and analyses of other figures in media and politics but not on him. So I said, it was past time to look at his career. I just thought he'd make a great character study.
One of your central arguments about Ailes is that "he is not so much a newsman as he is a showman." But couldn't you also say "he is not so much a newsman as he is a politician."
I don't mean to underestimate his political abilities. What I really meant to say in the book was that he is really a communications expert and one of the foremost people who know how to use television, whether it's for a political candidate like Nixon or Bush, or for a TV news program. I do think that he's been very political for the last four decades beginning with Nixon. This is a guy who has been at the center, really, of this huge effort to push the country to the right wing for 40 years. He says he's not, he makes all these claims that he's objective, but when you look at the record, there's just no way.
By now it's not exactly controversial to charge that there is a slant to the Fox network's news coverage. And the numbers show that Fox's viewership skews heavily Republican. In 2004, for example, Fox viewers voted for Bush over Kerry by something like 88 to 7 percent. What if Rupert Murdoch and Ailes just dropped the "fair and balanced" motto? Why not come out and proclaim overt allegiance to the GOP?
They're really good at marketing for one thing. Ailes and Murdoch have been marketing geniuses at identifying a niche for a product. That's what Murdoch does, that's his specialty. He looks for niches, a way to fill those product needs, and that's what Fox News does. They would be cutting off their nose if they admitted it wasn't what they had been saying it had been. And also, communications 101 is, "Say it loud and long and often and they'll believe it."
As you point out in the book, many people are unaware of what Roger Ailes was doing before he launched Fox News.
There was the political consulting work for Republican candidates from Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush. There was also a sort of early, failed forerunner to Fox News. From 1974 to 1975, Ailes worked for Television News Inc., a conservative television network funded by the Coors family. TVN produced conservative video content that it shopped around to stations and networks, and it was intended as a counter to the supposed liberal bias of the news media.
What did Ailes learn from the TVN experience?
To me, that's the smoking gun if you're looking for evidence that Fox News is as much a partisan political machine as a news organization. I think TVN is a great piece of evidence in that whole puzzle. And Joe Coors played the role of Rupert Murdoch in that. Basically, Ailes learned how to run a national news service. He learned how to get stories to deadline, he learned how journalists work the news, but most importantly, he learned from Coors and his associates, people like Jack Wilson, how to try and manipulate the news product. Because the Coors people, they wanted a conservative news service, they were frustrated they couldn't get that because it turned out the reporters they hired were too professional. Like Charlie Gibson got his start there. But they tried and they tried hard and I think that one thing that Ailes took away as a lesson was how to push your news staff in a certain direction....
Read entire article at Vincent Rossmeier at Salon.com
In "Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes,"Kerwin Swint details Ailes' role in the 40-year ascent of conservatism, and in the development of a new kind of "news." Salon spoke to Swint recently by phone.
Why a book about Roger Ailes?
I couldn't believe that no one had written a book on him yet. He's been such a central figure for so long. And you see biographies and analyses of other figures in media and politics but not on him. So I said, it was past time to look at his career. I just thought he'd make a great character study.
One of your central arguments about Ailes is that "he is not so much a newsman as he is a showman." But couldn't you also say "he is not so much a newsman as he is a politician."
I don't mean to underestimate his political abilities. What I really meant to say in the book was that he is really a communications expert and one of the foremost people who know how to use television, whether it's for a political candidate like Nixon or Bush, or for a TV news program. I do think that he's been very political for the last four decades beginning with Nixon. This is a guy who has been at the center, really, of this huge effort to push the country to the right wing for 40 years. He says he's not, he makes all these claims that he's objective, but when you look at the record, there's just no way.
By now it's not exactly controversial to charge that there is a slant to the Fox network's news coverage. And the numbers show that Fox's viewership skews heavily Republican. In 2004, for example, Fox viewers voted for Bush over Kerry by something like 88 to 7 percent. What if Rupert Murdoch and Ailes just dropped the "fair and balanced" motto? Why not come out and proclaim overt allegiance to the GOP?
They're really good at marketing for one thing. Ailes and Murdoch have been marketing geniuses at identifying a niche for a product. That's what Murdoch does, that's his specialty. He looks for niches, a way to fill those product needs, and that's what Fox News does. They would be cutting off their nose if they admitted it wasn't what they had been saying it had been. And also, communications 101 is, "Say it loud and long and often and they'll believe it."
As you point out in the book, many people are unaware of what Roger Ailes was doing before he launched Fox News.
There was the political consulting work for Republican candidates from Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush. There was also a sort of early, failed forerunner to Fox News. From 1974 to 1975, Ailes worked for Television News Inc., a conservative television network funded by the Coors family. TVN produced conservative video content that it shopped around to stations and networks, and it was intended as a counter to the supposed liberal bias of the news media.
What did Ailes learn from the TVN experience?
To me, that's the smoking gun if you're looking for evidence that Fox News is as much a partisan political machine as a news organization. I think TVN is a great piece of evidence in that whole puzzle. And Joe Coors played the role of Rupert Murdoch in that. Basically, Ailes learned how to run a national news service. He learned how to get stories to deadline, he learned how journalists work the news, but most importantly, he learned from Coors and his associates, people like Jack Wilson, how to try and manipulate the news product. Because the Coors people, they wanted a conservative news service, they were frustrated they couldn't get that because it turned out the reporters they hired were too professional. Like Charlie Gibson got his start there. But they tried and they tried hard and I think that one thing that Ailes took away as a lesson was how to push your news staff in a certain direction....