Fox News Chief Roger Ailes was Limbaugh's producer:
*From an excerpt on the new book about the rightwing takeover of the media:
"Under the direction of Roger Ailes and the late Lee Atwater, the Bush campaign questioned Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis's patriotism, tarred him as an unfit commander in chief, and portrayed him as soft on crime. Though he claimed he had nothing to do with it, Ailes was burned in a controversy over an advertisement produced by an independent pro-Bush group that featured convicted African American murderer Willie Horton, who had committed rape after escaping from a weekend furlough program while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts. According to Time magazine, Ailes said at the time, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife or without one." Atwater said that Ailes had "two settings: attack and destroy," yet Ailes had the temerity to call Dukakis "the dirtiest campaigner in America."
As a result of the ugly race-baiting campaign, Ailes himself became an infamous figure; his future clients, notably Rudy Giuliani in New York City, suffered a string of defeats. Frozen out of the 1992 Bush campaign, Ailes renounced his political career and announced a return to television.
One evening a few months previous, Ailes had run into Rush Limbaugh at the posh Manhattan restaurant 21. Limbaugh's radio show had established him as a political powerhouse, and Ailes convinced Limbaugh that a syndicated TV show was the obvious progression. Ailes became executive producer of Limbaugh's late-night syndicated talk show. Yet once he left the segmented medium of radio, Limbaugh failed to attract a large broadcast TV audience. Something about Limbaugh did not easily translate to mainstream TV viewers or advertisers, and he eventually quit the show. In the meantime, Ailes -- who had nursed resentments against the press in twenty years of dishonest political warfare -- became a cable network news executive.
"The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy"
By David Brock
Crown Publishers
432 pages
Nonfiction
Buy this book
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Politics aside, Ailes was a talented marketer and had a keen sense of production values. In just two years at CNBC, he helped transform it from a ragtag network into the number one financial news network in the United States. During his tenure, ad sales doubled, ratings tripled, and the asset value of the channel soared from about $400 million to more than $1 billion.
While the core of CNBC was business news, NBC's cable outlets fueled the proliferation of political talk television. Working within the confines of a mainstream cable network, Ailes seemed to resist his blunt right-wing instincts in favor of a broad political mix. Added to the roster of cable hosts that included Tom Snyder, Dick Cavett, and John McLaughlin were former Bush campaign aide Mary Matalin, former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers, Cal Thomas, tabloid showman Geraldo Rivera, liberal actor Charles Grodin, and Ailes himself.
Yet Ailes's attraction to entertainment and partisan opinion -- often uninformed and irresponsible opinion -- over hard news and information had a subtly subversive political impact. In the late 1970s, the only Washington chat shows on the air were the traditional network Sunday morning shows and PBS's sober pair of journalism roundtables, "Agronsky & Company" and "Washington Week in Review." In the 1980s came "The McLaughlin Group," "Crossfire," and "The Capital Gang." Now came a second generation of McLaughlin knockoffs as more cable channels sprung up. As Edith Efron predicted in "The News Twisters," if the spectrum could be expanded to equate professional journalists and Far Right ideological polemicists, if standards of discourse could be altered, if objectivity was no longer prized, if consensus could be destroyed as everything in politics was made into a "he said/she said" standoff, then the right wing would win critical political inroads.
"Confining myself to 'McLaughlin'-like shows and 'Capital Gang'-like shows, every single one of them, if it disappeared tomorrow, journalism would be better off," the writer and editor James Fallows told the American Journalism Review in 1995. Fallows bemoaned the substitution of news for opinion and of solid analysis for pithy sound bites and prognostications: "The world would be better off. Government would be better off. The only people who would be worse off are the actual members of the shows."
While turning CNBC around, Ailes's real interest was creating a new cable channel that he vowed would become the next MTV or ESPN. The new channel was christened America's Talking, and it was designed to reflect Ailes's "homespun woman-by-the-hearth, man-baling-hay Midwestern rugged individualism," according to one former producer. The shows, which Ailes created, included "Bugged!," in which a film crew conducted man-on-the-street interviews to uncover what was "bugging" Americans; "Pork," a call-in show about government waste and fraud; and "Am I Nuts?" on which therapists dispensed advice. None of these corny entries succeeded. The only legacy bequeathed by America's Talking was Chris Matthews, a former Democratic political aide whom Ailes had chosen to coanchor a prime-time political gabfest.
Within NBC, it was not Ailes's politics but, rather, his temperament that rankled. Ailes's bond with Nixon had been instant and deep. As his colleagues described him, Ailes was paranoid and quick to abuse his power to punish perceived enemies, whom he belittled mercilessly. In late 1995, when GE was close to a deal with Microsoft to launch MSNBC, using the subscriber base of the defunct America's Talking channel, a power struggle broke out within the senior ranks of the company. "Let's kill the SOB!" Ailes exhorted his loyalists in discussing their approach toward a corporate competitor.
In a management reshuffling, Ailes in effect lost operational control of CNBC; when MSNBC was unveiled one month later, Ailes was given no role. Within a few weeks, he resigned. A few days after that, Ailes was appointed by Rupert Murdoch to head a new cable channel to compete with both CNN and MSNBC. It would be called the FOX News Channel.
Excerpted with permission from "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy" by David Brock. Published by Crown Books. |
