Roger Ailes, Fox TV & America: He Changed the Way Presidents Get Elected
'What Roger Ailes Did To America. He Changed the Way Presidents Get Elected.' Vox, May 19, *2017. Excerpts/Ed. ~ Ailes d. May 18, 2017.
At age 28, long before he launched the cable channel that would command the conservative movement, Roger Ailes was a consultant for Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign. A famously anti-telegenic presence, Nixon had assembled a group of media experts to help him master the visual language of television. Together, the team choreographed his talk show appearances, smoothed out his speaking tics, and staged TV town halls where the candidate could show off a warmer, less queasy public persona. Ailes- whose background lay in TV, not politics- contributed countless visual nips and tucks. “This is it,” Ailes told journalist Joe McGinniss shortly before Nixon’s November victory. “This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore. The next guys up will have to be performers.”
To Ailes, the power of TV was its shallowness: In his early years as a media consultant to presidents Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, Ailes learned to embrace television’s limitations. “Television rarely, if ever, tells the whole story,” Ailes said in a 1971 a speech he titled “Candidate + Money + Media = Votes.” “It is imperative that we begin to understand what TV can and cannot do.”
Ailes recognized that primetime television was not a thinking medium; its constraints would not permit ideas to fully unfurl. Many saw this as a shortcoming, but with Fox News, Ailes showed how shallowness could be a strength: On television, it becomes hard to distinguish arguments that genuinely lack depth from those compressed to fit the format. Ailes rejected the idea that the TV could lie, but conceded that it could magnify and distort. By his reckoning, though, the liberal media was already distorting reality, so when the opportunity came for him to launch his own channel in 1996, he set out to be the nation’s corrective lens.
Fox News was where Ailes fully came into his powers as the architect of the television age in politics. He had a strong conservative viewpoint, but retained his eye for drama, honed by his years of experience as a TV producer. His channel excelled at mining scandals for ratings, starting with the Monica Lewinsky affair..Ailes’s news judgment was indistinguishable from his instinct for spectacle. He accepted that the news was whatever people wanted to watch, even if his audience craved conspiracy theories and thinly sourced rumors.
- Conservatism in the United States
This idea of merging entertainment and news was not exclusive to the right. On the left, programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report occupied a similar space — only Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert called themselves comedians, not journalists or activists. For the audience of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck took on that trinity of roles, and they quickly attracted rivals on the left like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
By the Obama era, the cable news landscape was more polarized than even Ailes had at first intended. It turns out many Americans on both sides crave bold opinions expressed loudly. The potent Fox News formula: Much has been made of Fox News’s winking slogan “Fair & Balanced,” but what it noticeably avoids is any mention of accuracy.
To Ailes, Fox News was above all a project in perspective. One of his key insights was that most Americans have little interest in the news, which is too abstract, too distant from their everyday lives. Fox News excelled at wrangling facts — and sometimes fictions — into familiar points of view. It transposed the bewildering world of current events onto simple storylines: us versus them, regular folks versus elites, the righteous versus the unjust. This formula won huge ratings, enviable revenues, and a loyal base of fans. By adapting the rhythms of talk radio to cable news, Ailes had discovered the perfect medium for making propaganda profitable. In the depthless, two-dimensional realm of the TV screen, appearances and emotions do most of the work. A confident delivery can make outrageous ideas sound self-evident in the moment..
One of the central convictions Ailes brought to Fox News was a sense that conservatives were under siege, politically and culturally: The mainstream media was a liberal conspiracy; coastal elites were sneering at the honest folk of the heartland (Ailes was born in Ohio); “real” America was crumbling and liberals were dancing on its grave. These Nixonian anxieties, amplified onscreen, sustained an ecosystem of indignant zeal, from the Tea Party to the Benghazi witch hunt to the birther movement...https://www.vox.com/2017/5/19/15660888/roger-ailes-america-trump-television-fox-news
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes
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>NEW, *OAN (ONE AMERICA NEWS NETWORK) Launched July 4, 2013. https://www.oann.com/
One America News Network (OANN), also referred to as One America News (OAN), is an American right-wing pay television news channel launched on July 4, 2013, owned by Herring Networks, Inc. The network is headquartered in San Diego, California, and operates a news bureau in Washington, D.C. and New York City.
Originally launched with the intention of targeting a conservative and center-right audience, OAN states a goal of delivering credible national and international news coverage throughout the day while its prime time political talk shows illustrate a conservative perspective. The channel is pro-Trump. Both Vanity Fair and The Independent in London have said that the channel promotes falsehoods and conspiracy theories....https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_America_News_Network
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sh*t show we're watching and living in now...
