Roger Ailes “is the most successful executive in television by a wide margin, and he has been so for more than a decade. He is also, in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power in the national media in favor of the Republicans. ‘Because of his political work’—Ailes was a media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush—‘he understood there was an audience,’ Ed Rollins, the veteran GOP consultant, [said in 2011]. [Ailes] knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them.’ For most of his tenure, the roles of network chief and GOP kingmaker have been in perfect synergy. Ailes’s network has dominated the cable news race for most of the past decade, and for much of that time, Fox News attracted more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. Throughout the George W. Bush years, the network’s patriotic cheerleading helped to marginalize the Democrats. . . . The problem wasn’t that ratings had been slipping that much— [Glenn] Beck’s show declined by 30 percent from record highs, but the ratings were still nearly double those from before he joined the network. It was that, with an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates’ poll numbers remain dismally low (Sarah Palin is polling 12 percent; Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively). Ailes’s candidates-in-waiting were coming up small. And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative—he wanted to elect a president.”[1] The last sentence of the quoted passage is particularly revealing: “(H)e wanted to elect a president.” With Beck’s 30% drop in ratings still leaving him with a profitable rating, Ailes’ motive was not commercial, neither was it to improve the network’s journalism. Typically, news networks are criticized for sacrificing good journalism for commercial interests. Here, journalistic integrity and profit played second fiddle to partisan objectives.
The full essay is at "Partisan Journalism."
1, Gabriel Sherman, “The Elephant in the Green Room,” New York Magazine, May 22, 2011.
