Fox News. You have Roger Ailes’s lawyers confirming he’s in negotiations to step down as Fox News chair and more than a half-dozen accusations of sexual harassment. You’ve got former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson, who has sued Ailes. Now, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly has also accused him of harassment. Many are celebrating Ailes’s anticipated departure, though, as some are saying, it’s not just about Roger Ailes. In fact, Carlson, who sued, said that the newsroom itself was rife with sexual harassment.
John Nichols talking:
There is epic stuff. I mean, there is a very good argument that we probably shouldn’t be discussing the Republican National Convention as much as we are discussing this transition, because if we accept that media is now such a dominant force in our politics, the change of command at Fox, an operation really created, conceptualized by Roger Ailes, is an incredibly big deal. And people need to know who Roger Ailes is.
Roger Ailes is a guy who used to be a TV—he was a TV guy in the ’60s, and this political candidate, Richard Nixon, came on his show. And off set, Ailes and Nixon started to talk about stuff, and Nixon said, “You know, you’re the kind of guy I think I could work with.” And Ailes left media to go into politics. He literally was a critical figure in defining the modern way that we do politics. When people say they hate politics, they hate how cruel it is, how negative it is, how much money is flowing from all these different places, that’s a Roger Ailes construct. He literally developed that.
And famously, I think folks who know your show will reflect back and remember the 1988 campaign, which was really a transitional presidential campaign in this country. In that race, Roger Ailes helped to script an ad called the revolving door ad, which showed criminals—or, sorry, people convicted of crimes going in and out of a door, finishing their sentence and then coming back, suggesting that Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, was so soft on crime, he was putting criminals on the street.
– This is that ad from 1988, yes, arguing that Michael Dukakis was soft on crime. It shows actors portraying prisoners who are casually walking in and out of a prison. That ad, produced by political consultant Roger Ailes, who went on to oversee the creation of Fox News.
And paralleled the Willie Horton ads at that time.
Coming in from a side group, but the clear combination of messages. I mean, you want to think about our modern politics, you want to think where a Donald Trump came from. People say, “Oh, well, Donald Trump’s building on things that happened in the Republican Party.” A lot of what happened in the Republican Party was started by Roger Ailes. There’s simply no doubt about it. This fear-based kind of—you know, the suggestion in that ad that there’s still people that lose— to Nixon.
He was a consultant to Reagan. He was a consultant to George H.W. Bush.
this guy, who started in the media and went into politics, defined so much of how our national politics works, then went back into media, with Rupert Murdoch at Fox, and created what can best be understood as a partisan media. People often think of Fox as conservative, but Fox often deviates from the conservative line. Where it gets its real traction—and we see this again and again—is sort of in defining the modern Republican Party. Look at this 2016 campaign. Look at the interplay of Donald Trump with Fox: Sometimes he’s in a fight with them; sometimes he’s, you know, getting along with them. There were negotiations on how Fox would cover Donald Trump. And so, here you have this amazing thing, Donald Trump running a campaign that fits into a modern Republican Party, in many ways defined by Roger Ailes, negotiating on how to appear on a network defined by Roger Ailes.
This guy is now about to depart. I will tell you that it will be impossible to recreate him. He is an entity unto himself. But the reality is that he has set in place a way of doing politics and a way of doing media that is so definitional on the right in America, and, frankly, well beyond it, that we have to look at what’s developing there as a very historic moment, but, I would suggest, unfortunately, not a moment that will necessarily change our politics, because I think Roger Ailes’s imprint is baked in at this point. It’s real in our politics, and it’s real in our media.
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John Nichols
political writer for The Nation.
— source democracynow.org