wear makeup and campaigning for hours beforehand, Richard Nixon appeared weary, sick, and sloppy next to the well-rested and confident John Kennedy. Seventy million people tuned into the first televised presidential debate, and after it was over, John Kennedy moved into the lead and never looked back.
Having learned his lesson, when he ran for president again in 1968, Nixon hired a 28-year-old local television producer from Cleveland to be the media advisor to his campaign. His name was Roger Ailes, and he’d take Richard Nixon from the sickly sideliner to the polished, professional candidate who made it to the White House.
We have to put this into context a bit: there weren’t two generations of people in America who grew up with televisions in the household like there are today. Television for many was as magical and mysterious as the Internet is now. It was a new frontier, and like the social media consultant’s relationship with Washington today, there was a rising class of consultants preaching the gospel of the new medium to candidates and politicians eager to get in on the action.
After the success of Nixon’s ’68 campaign, Ailes quickly rose to power inside and outside the White House. He launched Roger Ailes Associates to help right-of-center candidates get elected, and advised the president on media and political strategy. For Nixon, he did everything from directing the television broadcast of the White House Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony to suggesting that the administration infiltrate the George Wallace campaign in order to “guard their flank.”[26]
It was during the Nixon administration that Ailes had the idea for a “pro-administration news system,” recognizing that Washington was close to three major airports (Dulles, National, and Baltimore) and that video footage could get to any major media market in the country. Ailes believed that the media had become dominated by negativity and said that the failure of business leaders to translate their agenda into something that ordinary Americans could understand was responsible for a cancer that was killing America. It was the blueprint for what eventually became Fox News.
Today, if you ask the Democratic party establishment in Washington whom they hate the most, you’ll likely find Roger Ailes near the top of the list. In 1996, he was tapped by the News Corp chairman to launch and manage Fox News, now the number one cable news channel in the country. According to the
In under a decade, Ailes quickly toppled the other news broadcasts with less money, fewer reporters, and far less infrastructure than anyone else. So how’d he do it?
Ailes knew two things that nobody else did: first, that cable news was different than broadcast news. Because there were more channels available on cable than broadcast, and because of the nature of the medium, you didn’t have to try to please all your viewers; you could pick and grow a niche audience. Second, like many other conservatives today, Ailes felt the media was eliminating his point of view; Ailes knew that cable could provide an alternative news source.
He couldn’t compete with CNN on news. He had to compete with them by providing a different choice altogether. Ailes built himself a media network that, in his mind, didn’t eliminate the conservative point of view, and he found that much of America wanted it. Ailes found himself in a perfect spot: building a super-profitable business that aligned itself with his values. For News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch, it was even better. Ailes figured out how to build a hugely profitable cable news outlet without having to pay for the infrastructure of a CNN. Giving people what they want is far more profitable than giving them the facts. In his own words:
“I can’t look hip, but I don’t want to be hip. And yet, you talk about programming a channel—I could out-program these thirty-year-olds in terms of what needs to be on there, how to get to the audience, how to get to younger people. I speak at colleges. Whatever it is, I always tell them, look, I can out-program you. I’ll challenge them all the time.”[28]
Now, presiding over the Fox News empire, Ailes doesn’t want to make news—that’s not what he’s good at. What he wants to do is give people what they want: entertainment and affirmation.
The Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism[29] estimates that Fox News spends 72% of its budget on program expenses (expenses tied to specific programs, like host salaries) and 27.8% of its expenses on administrative expenses (things like newsrooms). CNN, on the other hand, spends 56% of its expenses in the administrative category, and 43.9% on program expenses. CNN has a total staff of 4,000 people working in its studios and 47 bureaus. Fox News has 1,272 members of staff in just 17 bureaus.
The strategy is simple: it’s cheaper to pay one media personality a two million dollar salary than it is to pay 100 journalists and analysts $40,000 a year. What’s better, people like hearing their beliefs confirmed more than they like hearing the facts. For Murdoch and Ailes, it must have been like discovering the McDonald’s business model. People like french fries more
Ailes hasn’t just made Fox News a media empire; he’s changed the news industry. In order to stay competitive, the other cable networks and news services have had to change their strategies. In 2005, MSNBC started to see the dollar signs and began investing in programming costs over newsroom costs. In 2005, it spent 58% of its costs on programming expenses, but by 2010 that number sat at 88%. It brought in personalities like Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow. The results are astounding: MSNBC surpassed CNN’s viewership in 2010 with a staff of just 600 people in 4 bureaus.[30] Ailes’ experiment didn’t just succeed for Fox News. It has been proven correct for MSNBC too.
CNN, on the other hand, took a different path. Watching the other two networks go their right- and left- of-center ways, CNN figured there must be some room left for the facts.
Over the same period of time, CNN canceled much of their hard personality-driven shows—like “Crossfire,” starring Democratic party media consultants Paul Begala and James Carville versus right-leaning pundits Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak—and replaced them with less overtly opinionated anchors like John King, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf Blitzer.
While the network still leverages its vast bureaus to achieve high ratings in times of international conflict, like 2010’s Arab Spring, the result was an astounding plummet in the ratings. In prime time, CNN is now a third- place network—it’s beaten by MSNBC and Fox’s personality-driven journalism night after night. Fox News is in first place on the right, and MSNBC is second on the left. CNN sits at the bottom in the middle, providing real news that nobody wants to hear.[31]
Although CurrentTV has been around for years now, it too has recently jumped on the bandwagon. After MSNBC and anchor Keith Olbermann had a fairly public dispute, Current snapped up the partisan media personality, and has seen an increase in market share, and an increase in profit.
Our news networks have turned into affirmation distributors.
Gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow—of journalists seeking to deliver truth to their audiences. Instead, the advertisers and their salesforces have taken over. The sales teams want to sell you the delicious stuff that you keep coming back for more, even if it’s at the expense of the truth.
Like our food companies, our media companies—the companies that produce and deliver much of the information that we consume—have been consolidated down to a handful: Time Warner, AOL, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, CBS Corporation, and Comcast. Together, these companies represent many of the movies we watch, newspapers we read, magazines we subscribe to, books we buy, and Internet services we use.
These companies are all publicly traded corporations—ones with responsibilities to their shareholders to do their best to maximize profits. It’s called
Food companies want to provide you with the most profitable food possible that will keep you eating it— and the result is our supermarket aisles filled with unimaginable ways to construct and consume corn. Media companies want to provide you with the most profitable information possible that will keep you tuned in, and the result is airwaves filled with fear and affirmation. Those are the things that keep the institutional shareholders that own these firms happy.
