The Roger Ailes Road To Shame And Infamy, Twenty-Five Years In The Making

February 22nd, 2023 by Tom Lynch

In 1996, trying to replicate the success that made him a billionaire in Britain, Rupert Murdoch hit the US airwaves with Fox News Channel. The news and political commentary network operated under the umbrella of the Fox Entertainment Group, the film and television division of Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox (formerly News Corporation). Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to run the new  network as CEO. Ailes had been a senior Republican consultant and strategist during the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, a campaign in which he and Lee Atwater came up with the Willy Horton ad that doomed the candidacy of Mike Dukakis.

When he was dying of inoperable brain cancer, Atwater apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Horton ad; Ailes never did.

Ailes lasted at Fox for 20 years, until in 2016 Murdoch forced him to resign in disgrace after several female Fox employees, including on-air hosts Gretchen CarlsonMegyn Kelly, and Andrea Tantaros, accused him of sexual harassment. Murdoch and Ailes’s accusers eventually settled all the cases for about $45 million. Ailes, himself, walked away with a severance package of $45 million. Crime pays.

Ten months after leaving Fox, Ailes, a hemophiliac, died from injuries he suffered in a fall at his home.

During his 20 years as CEO, it was Roger Ailes who set Fox News on the highly successful road of right wing, conservative “opinion reporting” by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, et al. Ailes and Fox attracted a base of fiercely loyal viewers for whom Fox became the one and only place to hear their truth, regardless of what the real truth was. Fox’s news division reported actual news with a conservative slant, but it was the prime time opinion shows with their hyperventilated hyperbole and outright lies that propelled Fox’s ratings.

A television network makes money in a number of ways, but the two primary ones are through licensing fees cable operators pay to carry the channel and through advertising. Licensing fees are based on multi-year contracts, but advertising rates are determined by viewership, the market where the ads will appear, the time of day they’ll run, and how often, with viewership being the most important. What an advertiser pays will be based on how many thousands of people will see the ad. It’s called Cost Per Mille, or CPM. Viewership determines ratings, and ratings determine what a network can charge for an ad. For 20 consecutive years, under Roger Ailes’s leadership, Fox News Channel outscored all its rivals in viewership, which led to huge profits for the Murdoch family and big paydays for its on-air personalities.

All of that became threatened with the presidential election of 2020, the election Donald Trump lost by more than seven million votes.

Four years following the Ailes departure, the road he built led to a single moment a whisker after midnight on election night when all the fecal matter in the Fox television universe thwacked into the giant whirring instrument sitting in the middle of the company’s New York City headquarters. For that was the moment Chris Stirewalt, Fox News’s digital politics editor, polling chief Dana Blanton and analyst Arnon Mishkin called Arizona, and its 11 electoral votes, for Joe Biden. That was the moment everyone in Trump-world began to think something might be very wrong.

Stirewalt later testified before the House Special Committee Investigating the January 6th Insurrection. In his testimony he took great pride in calling Arizona for Biden. “We were able to beat the competition,” he said with a broad smile.

For beating the competition, Fox fired Stirewalt in what it labeled “a company-wide restructuring.” Bill Sammon, a longtime Fox News executive who was also involved in the Arizona call was forced to resign as the network cleaned house.

At that singular moment when Stirewalt and the Fox Digital Election Team gave Biden Arizona, the Fox election desk team came to a fork in the Roger Ailes Road. On one side, a trail led to announcing the unfortunate result, bemoaning how terrible they thought it was that their favorite had lost in Arizona, and then moving on. The other trail, the one that bore to the right, the far right, led to disputing the results in all the states Trump eventually lost, fabricating conspiracies to account for the losses, hosting whack-a-doodle theorists in prime time to vividly detail the fake conspiracies, thoroughly and publicly agreeing with all the nuttiness, while privately calling it “insane” and “crazy”—and blaming everything on Dominion Voting Systems, a company that provided voting technology machines to 28 states during the 2020 election, including swing states Wisconsin and Georgia. The conspiracy accusations, made with almost biblical certainty by Trump election advisors Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell claimed the Dominion machines had been “rigged” to falsify votes so Biden could win.

Remarkably, that was the road Fox took. Three months later, on 26 March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems Corporation sued Fox News Network, LLC, for $1.6 billion. This, after another voting technology company, Smartmatic, which provided its technology to one county in America, Los Angeles County, had already sued Fox, Powell, Giuliani, and others for $2.7 billion.

Last week, after significant Discovery, Dominion filed its Brief in Support of its Motion for Summary Judgment. It’s damning in how it shows Fox’s political commentators saying one thing on-air and the opposite privately to each other.

Before he resigned in the “company-wide restructuring” that purged Stirewalt, Managing Editor of the Washington , D.C. Bureau Bill Sammon said, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

When Stirewalt and his independent crew called the Arizona race, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity were angry and concerned, texting each other, as well as Fox executives, that the network was in danger of losing those fiercely loyal viewers who would feel betrayed by the Arizona call. Losing those viewers would lead to diminished ratings, which would impact profits, which would jeopardize big paydays for them.

They were right. After the Arizona call, viewers immediately began to pound Fox on social media for betraying President Trump. They headed for the Fox door and the Fox far-right competition, Newsmax and OAN. By January, 2021, Fox viewership had dropped 20% and CNN’s had soared. But by the following June, the viewers had returned to the nest as Fox fed them what they wanted to hear. From April to June, Fox averaged 1.2 million viewers per day, far ahead of MSNBC (847,000) and CNN (654,000). In primetime, it was even further ahead (2.2 million viewers to MSNBC’s 1.5 million and CNN’s 914,000).

In hindsight, Fox executives and on-air talent believed that, while Arizona had been truly lost to Trump, most of the danger would have been avoided had Fox waited until other networks called it and then gotten in line at the rear. As it happened, Biden won Arizona by 11,000 votes, but other networks did not make their own calls until eight days had passed. Eight days of terror for Fox. It was during those eight days that the conspiracy nutjobs took their seats of honor at the Fox dinner table.

Three days after the election, Maria Bartiromo interviewed Sydney Powell on Fox Business. Powell claimed Dominion created a secret “algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip. And they used the computers to flip those votes from Biden to—I mean, from Trump to Biden.” Bartiromo agreed with her. And it was Powell who told Lou Dobbs on his show that Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems conspired with Venezuela’s communist leadership, ditto with Cuba, and “likely” China to create software to fix the election for Joe Biden against Donald Trump.

Night after night, for nearly two months, the hosts on the opinion side of Fox News fed the conspiracy dragon. Not one of them ever said publicly the conspiracy theories were “crazy” or “insane,” but that is exactly what some of them said to each other, as the Dominion Brief makes crystal clear.

Pirro, Bartiromo and especially Lou Dobbs, who had been with Fox since Day 1, repeatedly repeated the lies. Dobbs was the highest-rated host on Fox Business. He often doubled his lead-in’s ratings. But 24 hours after he and Fox were named in the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, Murdoch fired him. Fox News’s official reason for canceling Dobbs’ show —”a post-election programing adjustment”—is a nice way of saying they had to throw some high-rated somebody over the side.

The Dominion Brief says the company tried an eye-popping 3,600 times without success to get Fox to retract the nonsense.

The Fox defense is the same one Sydney Powell made when Dominion sued her individually: No reasonable person would be expected to believe this stuff.

Except people did, reasonable or not, and the Roger Ailes road, the one he started building 25 years earlier, ended with five dead and 140 injured at the January 6th Insurrection, a day of national shame and infamy, unrivaled since the Civil War.

 

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