FORMER FOX NEWS chair Roger Ailes is the single individual most responsible for the toxically divisive and fact-challenged nature of America’s current political culture. So it would be nice to think that Ailes’ disgraced departure from the cable news channel he created might mark the end of an era. Nice, but probably delusional. For one thing, at this writing, day-to-day control of Fox News remains in the hands of Ailes acolytes, and Ailes himself may be back in the political consulting game as Donald Trump’s debate coach. The Ailes era has been a very long one, and the changes he helped make are now deeply imbedded in the way we do politics, and even the way many people live their daily lives.
The scope and magnitude of Ailes’ accomplishments are truly staggering. Forty-eight years ago he helped Richard Nixon become president by devising a media strategy that allowed the candidate to almost entirely avoid dealing with actual journalists. Instead, Ailes staged a series of “town hall” meetings that were designed to look like open forums, with the candidate answering questions from “real people.” But the audiences were carefully selected, the questions were scripted, and the sessions were edited for national broadcast as paid advertisements.
This strategy of disguising propaganda as “real” events became a keystone of Ailes’ career. In the 1970s, he ran a short-lived operation called Television News Inc. (TVN), funded by right-wing brewing tycoon Joseph Coors. TVN aimed to supply local TV news programs with professional, prepackaged “news” stories, reported by real journalists, that were actually thinly veiled right-wing messages. This turned out to be a world-changing idea whose time had not yet come. The TVN motto, by the way, was “Fair and Balanced.”
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