Looking back on 20 years of FOX News and the impact of Roger Ailes
Twenty years ago this week, FOX News went live. It was an oddity on the cable television landscape: news with a view. MSNBC, which had launched a few months earlier, was modeling itself after CNN, the doggedly nonpartisan network that had pioneered cable news back in 1980. But FOX News was markedly different from these other cable news networks. Rather than copying the objective reporting of the mid-20th century, FOX reached back to the 19th century, and the age of the partisan press.
Party papers made up much of the press in much of the United States in its first 100 years. Often subsidized by local parties, these newspapers were the campaign surrogates of the day. Editors were perplexed by the idea they should be anything else. "A despicable impartiality I disclaim," wrote a Connecticut editor in 1800, explaining: "I have a heart, and a country."
SEE ALSO: FOX News talent
And a party. Long before Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch teamed up to start FOX News, Ailes was a GOP operative. He got his first taste of Republican politics in the Nixon era, consulting first on the 1968 campaign and then on the first few years of the administration. It was there that he started dreaming of some sort of pro-Republican media, a Nixon-friendly outlet to counter a press corps that the administration believed was decidedly unfriendly to the president.
Nothing ever came of it. But Ailes would continue to straddle television and politics. He consulted for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, providing election year advice to both men. He produced Rush Limbaugh's television show in the mid-1990s and helped run "America's Talking," a network that tried to build a television counterpart to talk radio. (It was not particularly successful.)
And then came FOX News. Riding the winds of the Republican revolution, Fox became the televised voice of the GOP. It did not claim its party allegiance overtly – "Fair and Balanced" (wink) – but as Gabe Sherman showed in his 2014 biography of Ailes, from the start FOX's goal was to promote Republican politics. The partisan press had returned.
More on Roger Ailes
Returned, but with one big difference. The partisan press of the 19th century was eventually eclipsed by the penny press, newspapers driven by commercial interests rather than partisan ones. But Ailes did not see profits as a threat to politics: He believed they were compatible, that a conservative channel could rake in serious cash.
And for a while, profits and politics did cohabitate comfortably at FOX News. From 2001 on, it consistently topped its competitors in the ratings as Republicans held power in Washington. In the last few years of the Bush administration, however, Republicanism was losing its shine. That was a problem for the pro-GOP station, which struggled until it was bailed out by Barack Obama.
Obama's election breathed new life into both the GOP and FOX News. As the tea party spread, personalities like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin sent ratings soaring. Viewers loved the tea party pundits (Beck more than Palin), and FOX News found itself fostering an energetic new movement that both buttressed the Republican Party and threatened to destroy it. As wild-card tea-party candidates cost the GOP seat after seat, the conflict between profits and politics started to become clearer. The political newbies were great for ratings, but not, it turned out, for the Republican Party.
Ailes never resolved this tension. His attempt to handpick a president in 2012 fueled a tumultuous primary battle that weakened the party. Worse: It gave voters a taste for reality-television electioneering, something Donald Trump has profited handsomely from. (One of the few things he's profited handsomely from, if his tax records are to be believed.)
So perhaps it is fitting that Ailes was forced to resign during the Summer of Trump. It freed him up to join the Trump campaign, and to actively lay waste to the party he spent a lifetime working to promote.
Happy anniversary.
