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.”
Ailes’ impact in the 1980s was mostly as a political consultant. He fed one-liners to Ronald Reagan for his 1984 campaign debates. In 1988, he helped George H.W. Bush dodge questions about the Iran-contra conspiracy and perfected the art of dog-whistle politics with the Bush campaign’s exploitation of the Willie Horton case. Horton was an African-American inmate of the Massachusetts prison system, who, during the governorship of Bush opponent Michael Dukakis, used a weekend furlough as a chance to escape, later stabbing a man and raping a woman. During the campaign he was the explicit subject of TV ads, including one produced by a former Ailes employee working for an independent group, and an Ailes-designed official campaign ad that attacked Dukakis’ criminal-justice record over images of prisoners walking in and out of a revolving door, including a black man resembling news photos of Horton.
READ: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes Resigns After Sexual Harrassment Allegations
In 1996, Rupert Mur-doch made Ailes CEO of his new 24-hour news channel, and the rest is history. As exhaustively detailed in the 2004 documentary Outfoxed, Fox looked and sounded like a news channel. But if you actually paid attention, stories were presented with a right-wing spin and most panels were stacked against the token “liberal” participants. The channel created a distorted version of reality that quickly became the new normal for millions of Americans. Fox’s mind-numbing array of fast-moving graphics, multiple news crawls, blaring music, screaming heads, and mini-skirted blonde anchorwomen became a permanent backdrop in American living rooms, and even unavoidable in many public places. For instance, it’s always on at my local McDonald’s.
As a result, a significant minority of our fellow citizens are now absolutely sure of things that are simply not so. Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Climate change is a hoax. The president is a Muslim. “Illegal immigrants” commit more than their share of crimes. Etc., etc.
Ailes helped give us a world in which people are entitled not just to their own opinion, but to their own facts. And it’s hard to see how we will ever recover from that.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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