About Roger Ailes And His Biggest Creation: Fox News
A few nights ago, I watched the documentary entitled Divide And Conquer: The Story Of Roger Ailes on the A and E cable channel. For those who do not know, Roger Ailes is the guy who started the “Fox News” cable network. Prior to that, he started the “America’s Talking” cable channel that eventually became MSNBC, and before that he was a media consultant for Republican politicians such as such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Yes, the late Roger Ailes was about as Conservative as one might imagine.
In addition to giving lots of information about who Roger Ailes was, how he lived his life, and what he achieved, the “Divide and Conquer” biopic also actually explains what powered both the rise of Fox News and Donald Trump. Some of the things that I learned about both Roger Ailes and his largest creation, Fox News, made perfect sense and did not surprise me at all. However, what did surprise me was when I learned that when Fox News was started, their main goal was not just to be a Conservative news network that helped the Republican party. Sure, both Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who funded the starting of the Fox News channel, were hardcore Conservatives, but they both knew that a television channel would not be successful if it did not get ratings, so getting big ratings was their first and main goal.
So, what was the main way that Fox News got good ratings for their television shows? As one former Fox News employee put it in the documentary, it was by “stirring up the crazies”. Fox News found that the more they put outrageous stories on the air that made people angry, the more that those people who had watched those stories would come back to watch the cable channel to see what happened next. Now, the standard target of the ire that Fox News generated was, of course, those people on the political Left, because both Murdoch and Ailes hated them, but the “stirring up the crazies” technique was not done so much to help Republicans as to help ratings. Helping Republicans was just a nice side benefit to people like Ailes and Murdoch.
In taking this approach, Fox News was following in the footsteps of Talk Radio trash talkers like Conservative Rush Limbaugh, who loved finding ways of getting outraged at the Left, and Conservative television host Morton Downey Jr., who loved getting Progressives on his show so that he could berate them. Conservative Talk radio had been successful for a long time at getting ratings because they had learned that what was important was “finding” big stories that warned of the evil plans that Democrats had to ruin America. This usually meant finding something a Democrat said or did, and distorting it all out of proportion. You see, in order to generate outrage on a regular basis, the truth had to be sacrificed.
This is why “Fox News” has no loyalty to the truth whatsoever. It is impossible to both generate outrage over and over again and tell the truth because the truth is generally not as outrageous as the people who run Fox News want it to be. This is why you had Conservatives outraged when Barack Obama wore a tan suit, even though Reagan also wore a tan suit—because organizations like Fox News want its viewers to be outraged. In Conservative media, outrage is the coin of the realm.
Hosts on Fox News lied and said it was not Presidential to wear a tan suit. They deliberately neglected to mention that Reagan had done the same thing. So, across America, the results were that Conservatives became outraged that Obama had worn a tan suit. The Conservatives really got into “Outrage Politics” in 2009 after Barack Obama became President and the “Tea Party" movement was born. One of the things that members of the Tea Party did was attend the meetings that members of Congress had in their own districts and scream and yell about how awful Obamacare was—in other words, they got outraged— and they did it because they were told to get outraged by a "Government takeover” of their health insurance by the rich Conservatives who funded the Conservative Tea Party movement.
OK, But What About Donald Trump?
When Donald Trump ran for President, he watched Fox News all of the time and merely echoed the outrage-inducing programming that Fox had been doing for years. Trump fans were amazed at how well Trump “got” his fans. Well, Fox News had been teaching the rank and file Conservatives what to get angry about for years. When Trump spoke at his rallies and sounded just like the Fox News hosts, he was like George Wallace speaking to a group of white men that had been secretly attending Ku Klux Klan rallies for years and had been hiding those racist beliefs from the public. “At last”, they must have thought, “we can say out loud how much we hate illegal aliens!”. This also explains the big uptick in racist acts since Donald Trump became President. Conservative talk radio had been fanning the flames of racism that lived in Conservative hearts even before September 11, 2001. After 9/11, Conservative media fanned the flames twice as hard, especially about anyone who could be considered “brown”—Muslims, people from the Middle East, Mexicans, and anyone who looked Mexican.
This is why Donald Trump achieved great success by being outrageous at his political rallies, especially with regard to race, religion, and national origin, because Fox News, and Conservative Media in general, has been outrageous for decades, and Fox News and others have been teaching its viewers to adore Outrage Media. Not only did Fox News and other Conservative outlets teach Republicans to tolerate Outrage Media, but they also taught Republicans to crave it, and then demand it. If you think that racism has actually gotten worse among a lot of Conservatives the past few years, you would be correct. If you think misogyny has gotten worse the last few years among many Conservatives, you would be correct. If you think that the attitude that only Americans matter in the world has grown among Conservatives, you would be right about that too.
This is where the massive amount of racism, misogyny, and nationalism has come from in the Republican Party. It has come from Outrage Media, like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and Breitbart.com. In their world, the Liberals are always ready to take away all of their guns, to lock Conservatives up in FEMA re-education camps, to take over their Health Care, and to run sex rings out of the basements of Pizza shops. In this world, the truth never matters. The only thing that matters is that one feeds the base more things to get angry about.
This is why insane conspiracy theorist movements like Q-Anon have been so successful among so many Conservatives—because Conservatives no longer care that much if something is true—just that it is outrageous and feeds their desire for Outrage media. Many Conservatives are addicted to Outrage Media, and places like Fox News are only too willing to give them all their next fix.
OK, But Does Your Article Talk About Nazis?
There are some scary parallels between how Conservative Media, which can now also be called Outrage Media, has demonized various groups, such as Progressives and Illegal Immigrants, and what happened in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. To me, Outrage Media most closely resembles the propaganda machine that Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, invoked on the German People from 1932 to 1945. The only reason that the Outrage Media of Fox News does not seem even more like Nazi propaganda is that Trump has decided to mostly leave the Jewish people out of his personal wave of outrage against people who are not straight, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Apparently, he does this primarily because both his daughter and her husband are Jewish.
However, the white supremacist/white nationalist/Nazis that Trump refuses to disavow do not make that distinction. Trump may not come out himself and say anything negative about the Jewish people, but his fans are more than willing to make up the difference. Many Trump fans are ready to worship him while at the same time plan violence against the Jewish people. Make no mistake about it, just because Donald Trump likes to throw an occasional bone to Israel and the Jewish people does not mean that those who both love Trump and hate the Jewish people have lessened their anti-Semitism one iota. In fact, since businesses like Fox News have spent decades teaching Republicans to invoke their political outrage reflex on cue, I suspect anti-Semitism among Republicans may only have gone dormant among a few, while still remaining quite active among many others.
According to his ex-wife, Donald Trump used to keep a book of Hitler's speeches on his nightstand. Likewise, Roger Ailes used movies of Hitler's rallies to create a Nixon Presidential Campaign media event. Donald Trump may claim that "Democrats hate the Jewish People" as he did recently; however, it seems that whenever one scratches the surface enough of many Republicans, one often finds the same thing: an admiration of both the beliefs commonly held by the Nazis and the of the Nazi technique of propaganda and outrage.
The Democrats currently have thirty-eight Jewish people in Congress, while the Republicans only have two. The Democrats ran the only Jewish candidate ever on a U.S. Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket in 2000 with Joe Lieberman in the Vice President slot. When it comes to supporting the Jewish people, actions speak a hell of a lot louder than words, and the Democratic party has done far more to advanced oppressed groups, including Jews, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQIA+ people, African Americans, and Latinos than the Republicans ever have.
However, the truth was never the point of Donald Trump saying that Democrats hate the Jewish people. It was, once again, all about the outrage. I am sure that Roger Ailes would have gladly thanked Donald Trump for the ratings boost that his fake outrage provided Fox News if Ailes were still here.