HOW ROGER AILES REMADE OUR REALITY:
Ailes and Fox News would never have had the footprint they had, or been able to command the audience that they did, were it not for Ailes’ other lightbulb-above-the-head moment. Ailes realized from inside the media bubble that during the entire heyday of Fox News, the “mainstream” media (very much including the broadcast Fox Network) had been deliberately throwing Fox News’ target audience into the demographic trashcan.
Over the past 25 or 30 years, American pop culture diversified itself to a previously almost-unimaginable degree, with gangsta rap and hip-hop, banda and mariachi and “press 2 for Spanish”, Japanese and Korean-made cars and home appliances, out-and-proud LGBTs, and hijab-wearing Muslims. The Obama era delivered a bumper crop of films and TV shows specifically dedicated to the African-American experience, with Moonlight, Chi-Raq, Twelve Years a Slave, Django Unchained, The Butler, The Help, Precious, For Colored Girls, Loving, Hidden Figures, Talk To Me, Miles Ahead, The Birth of a Nation, and Fences joining top TV shows like Empire, Scandal, Blackish, and How to Get Away With Murder. Empowered LGBT millennials likewise insisted on seeing themselves represented in the media—and not just as token sidekicks or victims, but as sexualized, three-dimensional characters in movies and TV shows like Milk, Brokeback Mountain, Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk, The L Word, Will & Grace, and Shondaland Thursdays. People from once-marginalized racial and sexual minorities spent the entire Fox News era bursting with pride, and celebrating how long-overdue and nice it was that they could finally “see people who look like me!” reflected in the magic mirror of the media.
For better or worse, it was almost natural that the rural and Rust Belt lower-middle and working classes would react with shock and awe to seeing their once-dominant pop culture (not to mention political) “white privilege” get revoked. Suddenly, it seemed to many of them as though everybody else had a platform in the media, while they – the older and whiter, the outsourced and downsized and early-retired, the ones who didn’t live in a hip Chelsea flat or Silicon Valley split-level with a bunch of sexy, glammy 30-year-old Friends to hang out (and have Sex in the City) with, had just as suddenly disappeared. Where could they “see people who looked like me” in modern pop media?
But Fox News would never have been as successful as it was during Ailes’ reign if it wasn’t for his innate sense of showmanship; in his obit Thursday, Andrew Ferguson dubbed him “The Ziegfeld of Political Theater:”
One of the few extended conversations I had with him came many years later, not long after he had conceived of and then launched the Fox show The Five. He needed a program to fill the time slot left by Glenn Beck, who had quit Fox in a blaze of controversy and bad feeling. Ailes couldn’t replace Beck’s hourlong gasworks with another show built around a single performer. “No matter who it was,” he told me, “the comparisons with Beck would kill ’em.”
And so, like a theatrical producer, he put together an ensemble show. He made it clear he didn’t care much about its political content, which would be the usual Fox palaver. What he worried over was its look, its “dynamic,” he said. It would air at 5 p.m. Eastern Time and would have five stars and would be called The Five. But the key was the set of types that would make up the ensemble.
“Go around the table,” he told me, delighting in his own ingenuity. “Over on this end, we’ve got the bombshell in a skirt, drop-dead gorgeous.” He raised a chubby finger: “But smart! She’s got to be smart or it doesn’t work.” Next, he said, “we have a gruff longshoreman type, salty but not too salty for TV. In the middle there’s the handsome matinee idol. Next to him we have the Salvation Army girl, cute and innocent—but you get the idea she might be a lotta fun after a few pops. On the end, we need a wiseguy, the cut-up.”
He sat back in triumph.
In addition to his showmanship and casting decisions, populism, not his conservatism, is what made his channel work, Jonah Goldberg adds:
“My first qualification” for running Fox News, Ailes once said, “is I didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School.” Dramaturgically, Ailes’s vision for Fox News was predicated on the belief that America is a decent country — particularly in the vast middle where coastal elites do not dominate — and that there is no inherent contradiction between good reporting and the sort of patriotism common to journalists such as Walter Cronkite and Ernie Pyle.
As Mark Steyn writes, “It’s not often that a man builds a 24/7 television channel in his own image, and keeps it that way for two decades.”
