What Roger Ailes Figured Out

This article originally appeared on this site.

Part of the genius of Roger Ailes’s Fox News was that its unabashed pugnacity incited outrage from other, avowedly nonpartisan media outlets, thereby reinforcing the network’s own message.Part of the genius of Roger Ailes’s Fox News was that its unabashed pugnacity incited outrage from other, avowedly nonpartisan media outlets, thereby reinforcing the network’s own message.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY ANGEL FRANCO / NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

Twenty years ago, Roger Ailes launched Fox News with a simple but effective premise: most news outlets were liberal, and most Americans were not. “I think the mainstream media thinks liberalism is the center of the road,” he once said. “I really think that they don’t understand that there are serious people in America who don’t necessarily agree with everything they hear on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.”

Ailes was right about this in 1996, and he was still right about it last summer, when he resigned from the network in disgrace, amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment. The stories about Ailes that emerged, from a number of women of who had worked for him, suggested that he created, at Fox News, a culture of extraordinary sexual cruelty at the same time that he was creating an extraordinarily successful business: last year, Fox News was the most-watched network on basic-cable television.

Ailes died last Thursday, at seventy-seven, after falling and hitting his head. He was known for ruthlessness, so it seems possible that he took some pleasure, in his final months, from the recent travails of his former network. Last month, Fox News split with its biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, who has faced sexual-harassment allegations of his own. And, during the troubled Presidency of Donald Trump, the Fox News machine no longer runs so smoothly; MSNBC, its liberal rival, is surging in the ratings while Fox News is slumping.

In response to the latest news about Trump and the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign, the network’s anchors have been scrambling to formulate a response. Sean Hannity, whose show airs at 10 P.M., has propagated wild theories about the murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer. Tucker Carlson, who inherited O’Reilly’s 8 P.M. slot, and who is typically a sure-footed host, wasn’t very persuasive, last week, when he told viewers, “What you think is happening often really isn’t happening.” Later on the same show, while other networks were discussing the latest James Comey bombshell, he carried on a surreal discussion with a New York City Council member about the condition of the toilets in Penn Station. “Normal people use the men’s rooms in the train station—and yours are disgusting,” Carlson said, extending a reproachful index finger.

In another sense, though, surprisingly little has changed at Fox News since 1996. Part of the genius of the network was that its existence, and its unabashed pugnacity, reliably incited outrage from other, avowedly nonpartisan media outlets, thereby reinforcing the network’s own message. By criticizing the “liberal” media, Fox News set the bait; any outlet that tried to rebut this criticism was, in a twisted way, corroborating it. Laughing at Fox News became a favorite pastime on “The Daily Show,” on Comedy Central—a network that hadn’t previously been considered particularly partisan. It is true that there were plenty of good reasons to ridicule and excoriate Fox News. But, even so, these responses only widened the partisan divide that made Fox News so successful.

In theory, the success of Ailes’s strategy might have inspired his competitors to copy him. And in the early aughts MSNBC did briefly try to rebrand itself as a conservative-leaning outfit, “America’s NewsChannel.” But in the end, of course, MSNBC responded to Fox News by becoming a decidedly liberal news network instead, using the form that Ailes pioneered (anchors with strong opinions) to reject the politics that he championed. After Ailes’s death, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s biggest star, delivered a notably unrancorous assessment. “He was formative, in terms of this whole part of American news,” she said.

In the current era—the Trump era—the “liberal” media seem more liberal than ever. Trump delights in insulting mainstream news outlets, and his division of the media world into supporters and antagonists is often self-fulfilling. After Trump’s election, the Washington Post adopted a new motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which was widely interpreted as a reaffirmation of the paper’s commitment to aggressive reporting (and, maybe, an ominous warning about the nation’s immediate future). The Times launched an advertising campaign called “The Truth,” which was inevitably interpreted as an implicit criticism of the President, who loves to complain about “fake news.” Aggressive reporting is vital, and Trump often says things that are untrue—and yet this situation has made it harder for mainstream reporters to maintain the polite fiction that they have no strong personal feelings about the President.

One recent report from FiveThirtyEight, the data-driven, politics-obsessed Web site, suggested that the success of Fox “led to a polarization of the American TV news audience.” And it’s not just the news audience: as it happens, FiveThirtyEight is part of ESPN, which has lately been pulled into the debate over “liberal” media. Late last year, the network’s public editor wrote about the perception that ESPN had moved “leftward,” and concluded that this perception presented a “challenge” to the network. Some preliminary but suggestive data indicate that, from 2015 to 2016, as ESPN seemed to be moving leftward editorially, its viewership grew more Democratic. The authors concluded that “Republicans are turning off ESPN.”

But where are they going? Even now, during a period of instability, Fox News finds itself with a surprising dearth of competitors. CNN hires Trump supporters as commentators, but not as anchors. A couple of upstart networks aimed at conservatives, One America News and Newsmax, have so far struggled to build momentum. (Both are reportedly talking to O’Reilly about a possible comeback.) And Breitbart, the Trump-friendly outlet that produced Steve Bannon, hasn’t yet executed its plan to become a television network.

Most likely, the anchors at Fox News will figure out a way to cover Trump without having to change the subject. This may require a more aggressive approach: a more intense focus on the leakers in the Administration, for instance, coupled with a claim that the various investigations into Trump constitute a perversion of democracy. (This is a “slow-motion coup d’état,” they might say—an attempt at “insidious regime change.”) That would allow the anchors to feast upon the latest developments without seeming to turn against the President. Plenty of people would find such an approach inflammatory, irresponsible, and indefensible. But, then, plenty of people wouldn’t.

Last week, O’Reilly called into the radio show hosted by Glenn Beck, another former Fox News star, to assess his old network. “They’re still doing Roger Ailes on Fox News,” O’Reilly said. “The personnel has changed, so they’re having a hard time. But they’re still doing what he put into place.” It may be the case, as the social theorist James Poulos recently argued, that with Ailes gone, “cable punditry is tipping into the abyss”; perhaps the Trump era calls for a different sort of programming. But it’s clear that the underfed audience that Ailes identified is as hungry as ever. It’s not hard to imagine that Fox News will find a way to keep feeding it.

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