1970s, Roger Ailes’ Gives Richard Nixon a Plan to Put GOP On TV News
It all starts with the 1960 Richard Nixon and John Kennedy Presidential race. One of their debates was the first televised Presidential debate ever. Lacking TV broadcasting savvy, Richard Nixon was viewed by many as having performed poorly — not so much by content, but by appearance. He had recently been in the hospital; he was gaunt and sweating profusely under the hot lights. The whole negative persona was exaggerated by Nixon’s five o’clock shadow and Nixon’s own decision to refuse to wear stage makeup. Kennedy appeared to be far more telegenic than Nixon. Author Joe McGinniss wrote all about it in his 1968 book, The Selling of the President.
In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon hired Roger Ailes as his Executive Producer for television to help develop his overall TV strategy and improve his televised persona. It worked. Nixon became much more comfortable and telegenic in TV appearances. Nixon won the next two elections. Ailes continued on as Nixon’s media guru throughout his Presidency.
While working for Nixon, Roger Ailes had a plan in progress to create Republican TV propaganda according to recently released Richard Nixon Library documents. There is a memo to Nixon in the archives titled "A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News" with Roger Ailes handwritten comments.
“...according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers...”
— Gawker.com
Gawker has a link to 388 pages of documents in its archive released by the Nixon Library, of which the memo is one of them. Watergate brought those plans to a screeching halt of course.
1980s-1990s, Roger Ailes Develops And Refines His “Orchestra Pit Theory” of Yellow Journalism
In the 1980s, Roger Ailes worked for the Reagan campaign and then later in the 1990s for the George H. W. Bush campaign. Not only was Ailes helping them get elected, he was also refining his own TV propaganda techniques in the process. It was while he was working with Reagan that Ailes came up with his Orchestra Pit Theory of yellow journalism to embellish straight journalism with hyperbolic sensationalism. Directly from Roger's mouth:
Roger Ailes: Let's face it, there are three things that the media are interested in: pictures, mistakes and attacks. That's the one sure way of getting coverage. You try to avoid as many mistakes as you can. You try to give them as many pictures as you can. And if you need coverage, you attack, and you will get coverage.
It's my orchestra pit theory of politics. You have two guys on stage and one guy says, “I have a solution to the Middle East problem," and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?
One thing you don't want to do is get your head up too far on some new vision for America because then the next thing that happens is the media runs over to the Republican side and says, "Tell me why you think this is an idiotic idea."
Judy Woodruff: So you're saying the notion of the candidate saying, "I want to run for President because I want to do something for this country," is crazy?
Roger Ailes: Suicide.
20 Years After “Plan For Putting GOP On TV News”,
Rupert Murdoch Granted Roger Ailes His Wish And Fox News Was Born
For two decades after Roger Ailes hatched his idea for putting the GOP on News TV, Roger Ailes continued to refine his plan. He saw success with developing strategic catch phrases such as Reagan’s famous "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience." and strategic propaganda such as associating Dukakis with murderer Willie Horton in the Bush/Dukakis race. In 1996, it was a perfect storm, conducive to launching a GOP propaganda TV network.
- Cable TV was growing exponentially.
- The Equal-Time and Fairness Doctrine regulations were being shredded and becoming unenforceable.
- Antagonistic GOP personalities were becoming popular.
- Roger Ailes was enjoying success with political strategy.
Ailes made a point of filling the stable with antagonistic personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.
The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned Fox News Into a Propaganda Machine
In the Fox Effect, authors David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt explain how Fox began adding hyperbole and outright falsehoods to embellish reporting on current events. One example they use is an anecdote involving Bill Sammon, Managing Editor of Fox News D.C. Bureau. He explains his deceptive involvement in kick starting the “Obama is a Socialist” propaganda campaign:
You know, speaking of mischief last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and fist let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to, quote, "spread the wealth around". At that time I have to admit that I went on TV, on Fox News, and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found to be rather far-fetched.
— Bill Sammon, Managing Editor of Fox News D.C. Bureau
They’ve been running that socialist lie for eight years now. I wonder if Fox News will ever admit that calling Obama a socialist was"mischievous speculation" and "far-fetched"? Fat chance.
From Money Making Machine to Kingmaker
Roger Ailes became discontent with the financial success of Fox News as his sole achievement. During the 2008 and 2012 elections, Ailes developed a higher ambition — to become a kingmaker. As Gabe Sherman recounts in The Loudest Voice in the Room, Ailes told Fox executives:
We’re making a lot of money — that’s fine. But I want to elect the next president.
To accomplish that objective Ailes first started building a stable of Republican Presidential wannabes. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin were all on the Fox News payroll and all were 2012 Presidential hopefuls — Palin was the only one who didn’t follow through on becoming a registered candidate. How many Presidential hopefuls were on the payrolls of all other cable and broadcast news stations combined? Exactly zero.
The 2016 election is also clear evidence of the Fox News active efforts to elect a Republican President. Initially, they favored other Republican candidates, at times criticizing Trump’s bungling manner. When it became apparent that Trump would win the Republican nomination, Fox News jumped on the Trump bandwagon with enthusiasm. They dropped all of their criticism of Trump’s lack of experience, his political bumbling and his outright lies. And, they latched onto Fake News stories seeded by Russian intelligence and publicized by Alt-Right websites to support their fair haired boy — not one recantation when such stories were proven to be blatantly false.
How did we allow one man running one cable TV News Network to have so much undue influence over our political systems? I doubt our founding fathers would have approved. There have been many recent articles that tell us that Rupert’s sons want to overhaul the Fox News network, — make it less biased and more truthful, more like CNN. For the sake of all Americans, let’s hope that is true and let’s hope they are wildly successful.