On the morning Roger Ailes died, I turned to Fox News, the network that he created with Rupert Murdoch’s money and Americans’ political confusion, and found one more reminder of the alternative universe that exists there.
I watched as a female anchor dabbed her eyes with a hankie, ostentatiously declaring to everyone her enduring devotion to a sexual predator who died having paid millions of dollars to his roster of female victims, while another anchor told us, apparently without a trace of sarcasm, “Many people would say he saved this country by starting Fox News.”
Saved this country?
From what? From the sense of civility that once guided American political dialogue? From the notion of objectivity that once governed journalistic coverage of elected officials? From the sense of a vanished political middle ground in America?
“Fair and balanced” – that was the absurd motto Ailes created for Fox. The words were intended as implicit indictment of all other news outlets, which he insisted leaned left and thus could not be trusted.
Yeah, that bad old universal liberal media. Keep that in mind the next time you tune in to Rush Limbaugh’s outrages or tap into Matt Drudge’s latest online baloney or Breitbart’s latest bit of bilge.
The words were outrageous in the same way President Donald Trump’s are outrageous every time he describes an opponent with the very words that fit Trump himself. (Need a reminder? OK, how about Trump calling fired FBI Director James Comey a “showboat” and “a grandstander”? You turn the words on their heads and remove all meaning from them.)
But much like Trump, Ailes tapped into an underlying uneasiness in the American electorate. Some have called it a desire to return to America’s yesterdays, a sentimentalizing of a time – or as Ronald Reagan once put it, “before America knew it had a racial problem.”
Or to put it another way, a time before America knew it had “alternative facts.”
Roger Ailes was the man who looked at America’s political divisions and realized there was money to be made by exploiting them. That’s why Fox gave us years of questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace, years of questioning American Muslims’ patriotism, years of Obamacare “death panel” stories.
It’s why Fox gave us years of the phony “War on Christmas” stories, bemoaning those who would rob the nation of the simple “Merry Christmas” greeting.
Gosh, who would those terrible people be?
It’s why Fox gave us Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, two pugnacious hosts whose take-no-prisoners, accept-no-nuances attitudes perfectly reflected Ailes’ own.
Well, it’s worked quite well for a lot of years – though not that well lately. Fox finished third among viewers 25-to-54 last week; MSNBC and CNN both finished higher.
And the network’s still facing a barrage of lawsuits based on sex and race. All of which are also enduring legacies of the late Roger Ailes.
Top photo: Screenshot from a video tribute to Roger Ailes on Fox News
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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