Meet the fantastic Mr Fox

20 January 2010

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Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, is presiding over a revival of the Republican party, says Jacob Heilbrunn. He may even join Team Palin in 2012

To his liberal adversaries, however, Ailes is a kind of malevolent Voldemort who must be stopped from terrorising the innocent and credulous American populace. The Obama White House tried to exclude Fox reporters from press pools. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel warned news organisations that they shouldn’t be ‘following’ the lead of Fox, while senior adviser David Axelrod said that Fox wasn’t ‘really a news station’. Similarly, the more liberal elements of the Murdoch family have voiced their disdain: Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud, declared that the Murdoch brood is ‘ashamed and sickened’ by Fox. Ailes responded that Freud should go ‘see a psychiatrist’.

To his admirers, and they are legion, the glabrous Ailes is something else entirely — a valiant freedom-fighter standing up to the perfidious liberal media elite. Ailes himself, according to a recent Los Angeles Times profile, reassured his popular talk-show host Glenn Beck upon hiring him that he could never go too far in attacking liberals: ‘I see this as the Alamo,’ Ailes told Beck. ‘If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we’d be fine.’

The martial imagery is not adventitious. Ailes sees America as engaged in a two-front war against the traitorous and degenerate cultural elite at home, on the one hand, and the terrorists abroad, on the other. Ailes may be rumpled and overweight, but he views himself — and his personal safety — as essential to that struggle. Each day Commander Ailes leaves for his office and returns home surrounded by a modern praetorian guard composed of private-security-owned SUVs. His desk sports a television screen monitoring the activity outside. He bought several properties around his weekend home in Putnam, New York and has hung a sign outside it stating that the area is under video surveillance.

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Christopher Chantrill

January 28th, 2010 8:08pm Report this comment

There's no mystery about Fox News. Back in the 1990s Murdoch thought he'd take a flier on a niche TV news market: the 50 percent of Americans right of center. The rest is history.

But Fox News's 3 million audience is still tiny compared to the 6 million each at the nightly news at ABCNBCCBS. So what's all the fuss?

Christopher Chantrill

January 28th, 2010 11:25pm Report this comment

As for the "empty-headed" Sarah Palin, Spectator readers may want to check her Facebook page and her review of the president's State of the Union speech. She writes exactly what I would want to get from a potential Republican presidential candidate.

Of course, she may still be empty-headed. Only her doctor knows.