and anger in American politics new and review dangerous forms of expression. It also introduces a new ideological spin, to offset “liberal” influence in mainstream Wingnut commander media: “Fox may or may not be inter- nally balanced,” Chafets writes, “but Roger Ailes, Fox News, and the future of journalism Ailes is right when he says, ‘Sometimes by jim sleeper we are the balance.’ ” Although Fox ratings have dropped since the election, they’ll rebound if fear and anger rise and if Ailes keeps at it. “I don’t see a true liberal answer to Fox on the horizon, although msnbc tries hard,” Mark Danner tells Chafets, and msnbc’s own Rachel Maddow agrees: “Roger took some charisma and great ideas for shows and worked magic. . . . I feel that he has won. If the media were left of center before, they aren’t now.”
to support his claim that fox’s coverage of the election returns was when i published liberal racism “dispassionate and professional,” in 1997 (with a chapter on how The Chafets mentions Megyn Kelly’s elec- New York Times was misrepresenting tion-night, on-camera march over to the racial politics under editorial-page edi- Fox Decision Desk after she’s listened to tor Howell Raines), I was interviewed Rove repeatedly challenge its decision on Fox News, which I’d barely heard of, to call Ohio for Obama. But according by Bill O’Reilly, whom I hadn’t heard to Jonathan Alter in The Center Holds, of at all. The encounter was anodyne, it was Ailes who called from home and but before long I noticed that the net- ordered the march to rescue some cred- work was not. Under its president Roger ibility for Fox News. Chafets spins a Pew Ailes, who had pitched his vision of Fox Center finding that Fox’s coverage of to a receptive Rupert Murdoch only a President Obama was eight times more year before I met O’Reilly, it was rap- negative than positive by explaining that idly becoming what Zev Chafets calls Roger Ailes Off Camera: An Ailes, who once shielded Richard Nixon inside look at the founder “transformational” in American media and head of Fox News from critical interviewers, “understood and political culture. By treating jour- By Zev Chafets perfectly well why [Obama] had pre- nalism as if it’s all about ratings and Sentinel ferred chatting with Whoopi Gold- 258 pages show, Fox actually makes a profoundly Hardcover $26.95 berg . . . to a session with Bill O’Reilly. ” political statement by eviscerating what He adds that “msnbc, Fox’s chief cable democratic politics really stands for. rival, was far more partisan—only 3 per- The price we’re paying shows up cent of its Romney coverage was posi- clearly in Chafets’s hastily added elec- tive, 71 percent negative, a ratio of 23-1.” tion-night epilogue to Roger Ailes Off important question of the night, Fox an- Such schoolyard excuses—“The Camera (the rest of the book reads as chor Megyn Kelly’s exasperated query other guy did it, too!”—pop up often in if the 2012 election is yet to come). He to Rove: “Is this just math that you do this book, as does Ailes’s and Chafets’s shows us Ailes, 71, and Murdoch react- as a Republican to make yourself feel penchant for accusing others pre-emp- ing impassively at Fox headquarters better, or is this real?” tively of whatever Fox is guilty of, so to early indications of the Obama vic- What counts as “real” at Fox News? that the mainstream media will report tory—a humiliating setback for its politi- It can be hard to tell. Upheavals in an equivalence. But this doesn’t explain cal commentators O’Reilly, Karl Rove, American news reporting have been Fox’s lopsidedly negative news coverage Dick Morris, and Sean Hannity, who’ve driven not only by digitization, global- of Obama or msnbc’s retaliatory efforts spent the evening, as they have most of ization, and the concurrent fragmen- to fight Fox’s fire with its own. the campaign, insisting a Republican tation of news-consuming publics and The fire started at Fox when Ailes victory is imminent. their coordinates, but also, and perhaps sensed, as demagogues (and their pro- But Chafets doesn’t mention what even more so, by Ailes’s perverse mar- ducers) throughout history have al- for journalists was arguably the most keting genius, which has given the fear ways done, that anyone with enough
58 july/august 2013 money, cleverness, and showmanship financialization and deregulation that to unleash passions that good politics Ailes is playing caused the economic meltdown—which should channel constructively can ride most voters realized liberal Democrats them to power and profit. That’s what a longer, slower hadn’t caused, even when liberals had Cleon did in Thucydides’s account of game than most gone along with them. the Athenians’ Mytilenian debate; it’s demagogues do. what Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and re- chafets tells us enough about cent Fox contributors Glenn Beck and Ailes’s small-town, Ohio boyhood—as a Sarah Palin have done by carrying le- hemophiliac who was sometimes close gitimate grievances into brilliant per- to death, with a father who nevertheless formances that eventually curdle and Ailes drives it all home with lots of beat him—and about his continuing ill collapse, tragicomically or catastrophi- blame-shifting. Fox pundits and Rush health and unhappy personal life (three cally, on their own ignorance and lies. Limbaugh—who doesn’t work there, but marriages, the third producing Ailes’s “In television, technology changes,” has been mentored by Ailes since 1991 only child when he was 59) to suggest the Ailes insists. “The one constant is con- and was profiled by Chafets inRush Lim- roots of his vision that Chafets doesn’t try tent. There has to be a show. . . . Get- baugh: An Army of One—accuse liberals to untangle and that I won’t here. ting ratings is how you get paid”—and of fomenting the class war that Ailes and He tells us that Ailes spent many a producer tells Chafets that Ailes will Limbaugh themselves promote by hyp- years as a political consultant, advis- “do anything to get ratings.” As Neil ing viewers’ working-class resentments ing Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Cavuto, a Fox anchor and Ailes acolyte, and diverting attention from their real H. W. Bush, among others (Ailes crafted tells Chafets, before Ailes, “Our thought causes toward professors, elite journal- Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ads), was, Is the story important? not who ists, and public regulators. before leaving the business in the early will watch it.” Ailes “forced people to Casting them as the enemy works 1990s. “I hated politics,” Ailes recalls get out of the ivory tower,” as Chafets for a while, but by election night Fox realizing. But his move back to televi- puts it. Cavuto observes that, “You can had become the victim of its own suc- sion—to cnbc before selling Murdoch make a story out of anything,” and that cess at blaming liberals for public di- on the idea of Fox—heralded not his lib- Ailes “has imbued an entire generation sasters—the failures in Iraq, in the eration from politics but his audacious of producers with his vision.” wake of Hurricane Katrina, in the wild politicization of TV news. But the press is the only industry the Constitution exempts from regulation, because its real purpose is to strengthen citizens’ public life by helping them up- hold public virtues—such as the inclina- tion and ability to deliberate rationally to make sound decisions—that, as you may have noticed, neither the liberal state nor the markets have done much lately to nourish or defend. That leaves journalism (and other institutions of civil society, like liberal arts colleges) with a big responsibility. Chafets demonstrates that Ailes twists the news reporting and accountability a republic needs by turning its means of survival into its end, using “flashy graphics, bumper music, constant con- troversies, and nonstop promotion.” But Fox surrenders, or re-targets, journalism not only to entertain but also to stoke and channel rivulets of public anger and fear into torrents of political power. While Chafets touts Ailes, inces- santly, as a P. T. Barnum and apostle of profits, those are only two legs of his tri- pod. The third is his political agenda: more austerity, more pugilism in foreign policy, more rollbacks of public regula- tion and of labor unions.
columbia journalism review 59 Chafets’s vignettes of Ailes’s friend- and Ailes because he likes “people who ships and charitable gestures don’t per- change the culture or go against the suade me that Ailes sees humanity as grain, and people who are contrar- anything but customers at a circus and ians at least within their own profes- fodder for political rampages. Ailes sion,” surely the fact that Fox is “be- knows that people also yearn for dig- hind [Israel] all the way,” as Ailes puts nity, or at least for escapes from indig- it, with Limbaugh not far behind, also nity. But when you’re as good as he is at explains Chafets’s eagerness to justify using “news” to grope and goose view- each of them at book length. I think he’s ers whom your sponsors are ensnaring also trying to take out some insurance in coils of corporate fine print and de- against anti-Semitism as Ailes’s “vision” graded messaging, a lot of them will fall gets scarier. Chafets finesses the story for Fox’s characteristic blame-shifting by noting that Ailes has eased Beck out to Obama the socialist and to the liberal of Fox; he also notes that cnn founder mega-financier George Soros, whom Ted Turner and others liken Murdoch to Glenn Beck called “The Puppet Mas- Hitler—“which would make Roger Ailes ter” in a three-part Fox series whose a reincarnation of Goebbels,” Chafets chillingly close parallels to anti-Semitic adds cheekily. But does that reductio ad conspiracy mongering stunned viewers absurdum really end this story? with a sense of history. Chafets seems to think so, making Arianna Huffington confronted Ailes much of Ailes’s “friendships” with elite about Beck’s Soros story when he ac- liberals whom he also happens to em- cepted an invitation from Barbara Wal- ploy, including sons of Robert Kennedy ters to appear on abc. (He seldom goes and Mario Cuomo and the daughter of on TV, but “a friend is a friend,” Chafets Jesse Jackson. (Cuomo’s son, Chris, left explains.) “It’s not about the word po- Fox for cnn this year.) He seems to hire lice,” Huffington admonished, “It’s about them not only for protective coloration something deeper . . . the paranoid style but to have them complicit in turning [used by Beck] is dangerous when there’s news into a game of money, power, and SUBSCRIBE real pain out there.” Ailes promptly ac- public relations. Ailes is playing a longer, cused Huffington of doing the same slower game than most demagogues do. thing by citing a little known, unpaid That leaves high and dry any “ivory Huffington Post blogger who’d written tower” liberals who remain thoughtful that Ailes looks like J. Edgar Hoover and enough to pose serious questions and has a face like a fist. find answers that could work if dem- But Huffington came as close any- agoguery didn’t eviscerate their legiti- one has to warning Ailes before a large macy and funding. The more that that audience that he’s playing with fire: savaging sells, the more that journalists When you’ve run out of socialists and who don’t emulate it are left high and terrorists to blame, one of your opera- dry, too. As Cleon’s ancient interlocutor tives will always find a few real capital- Diodotus lamented, even those with the ists—perhaps Jewish ones, like Soros— public interest at heart must appeal to to split off from the rest, who remain fear and rage to be heard. to order: protected. Mephistopheles always comes on Chafets understands this danger, with a smile, a wink, and promises of by phone: perhaps a little too well: After growing shining victories. Ailes and his apolo- 1-888-4-CJR-SUB up as William Chafets in Pontiac, MI, gists, like Chafets, have employed and (1-888-425-7782) and at the University of Michigan at enjoyed these, but they’re in for un- Ann Arbor, he moved to Israel, served happy surprises, and they’ve got more in its army, and was Prime Minister than a few of us with them on the same online: Menachem Begin’s press officer. Back slippery slope. cjr www.cjr.org/subscribe in the U.S. after 2000, he wrote New York Daily News columns with titles jim sleeper, a lecturer in political science like “How the Israelis Are Helping US at Yale, teaches a seminar there on “Journal- Fight Terror War” and “Arafat’s ‘Womb ism, Liberalism, and Democracy.” He was an Bomb’ Just Another Delusion.” editorial writer for New York Newsday and a columnist for the New York Daily News. He is Although he recently told wnyc’s the author of The Closest of Strangers (1990) Brian Lehrer that he profiled Limbaugh and Liberal Racism (1997).
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