A new book from Media Matters is
being released this week that chronicles the history of Fox News,
explaining how a small group of wealthy, politically connected partisans
conspired to build a pseudo-news network with the intent of advancing
the right-wing agenda of the Republican Party.
The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine,
was written by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt (and others) of Media
Matters. It begins by looking back at the early career of Fox News CEO
Roger Ailes and his role as a media consultant for Republican
politicians, including former president Richard Nixon. From the start,
Ailes was a brash, creative proponent of the power of television to
influence a mass audience. He guided the media-challenged Nixon through a
treacherous new era of news and political PR, and his experiences
formed the basis for what would become his life’s grand achievement:
a “news” network devoted to a political party, its candidates, and its
platform.
When Ailes partnered
with international newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch a new
24-hour cable news channel, he was given an unprecedented measure of
control to shape the network’s business and ideology. The Fox Effect
examines the underpinnings of the philosophy that Ailes brought to the
venture. His earliest observations exhibit an appreciation for the
tabloid-style sensationalism that would become a hallmark of Fox’s
reporting. Ailes summed it up in an interview in 1988 as something he
called his “orchestra pit theory” of politics:
“If
you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the
Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit,
who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
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