What Ailes us was Roger; docu warning re Fox News

Hilary Clinton took a lot of heat for calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” especially from the folks at Fox News Channel.
It’s interesting to learn that at least some of the people at Fox News Channel, including the founder and its biggest stars, thought of their viewers in much the same way.
“We used to call it riling up the crazies; that’s what kept them watching,” says former O’Reilly Factor associate producer Joe Muto in the new documentary being released today, March 12, on DVD Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (Magnolia, $24.98), and also available now on Digital HD via iTunes, Prime Video, FandangoNOW, Google Play and additional digital retailers.
“That was the genius of Roger, knowing how to speak the language of America; more blood, more red meat; I gotta get you outraged so you watch more,” says Glenn Beck, once the most popular host at Fox News where he was also one of the most prominent TV and radio personalities in the country.

The genius of Roger also eventually led to his downfall when Fox News Channel hosts Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly and 13 others made claims of sexual harassment against Fox News chairman Ailes, who was investigated, locked out of the headquarters building of the network he created without notice, and died the next year in May 2017 at the age of 77.

The new 1-hour 47-minute documentary from director Alexis Bloom is primarily a profile of the life of Ailes, but serves equally as an indictment and cautionary tale of the people and the culture of Fox News Channel, ending with an ominous feeling that little has changed at the network despite the scandalous departures of the founder and most high-profile personalities.

“Roger absolutely understood from all his time in politics that frightening people, pouring gasoline on that fire; that gets people glued to their television,” says Felycia Sugarman, former producer, Ailes Communications.

Ailes manipulated his way to become the primary producer of the nation’s only daytime talk show in the early 1960s, The Mike Douglas Show. The documentary features terrific archival clips of the show and behind-the-scenes. But even then Ailes was harassing women. He called an aspiring model to come to be on show but told her to wear stockings and a garter belt. When she got there he made her pull skirt up while he took Polaroids photographs, then told her she could be on show if she slept with him and “just a few of his “preferred friends.”

Shortly thereafter Ailes told the aspiring Presidential candidate Richard Nixon that he needed a media advisor (then a new thing that supposedly Ailes made up on the spot), and then created the first controlled/fake “live” TV town hall meetings, leveraged program-hungry local TV stations to get a message to people without having to go through the critical press, and used other manipulative strategies to help Nixon mount an improbable comeback from his defeat against John F. Kennedy to win the election in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey.
Ailes parlayed that success into a persona as a kingmaker, forming political/executive coaching consultancy Ailes Communications and getting the likes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush elected, as well as lawmakers still dominating politics today, including Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; Senator Chuck Grassley who as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman oversaw last fall’s contentious and successful nomination confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; President Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and others.
Ailes is credited/blamed for exploiting the infamous Willie Horton smear campaign ad against Michael Dukakis in his Presidential bid against Bush.
With McConnell, Ailes created a folksy image of Mitch in a fishing boat and even put a fish on the hook for him, after which McConnell is said to have asked, “What do I do now, Roger?”
And all the while he was still using his growing power to try to get women to perform sexual favors for he and others.
Kellie Boyle, a marketing consultant who was about to sign a career-making contract with a national committee, says Ailes called and picked her up in his car. While riding in the back seat, he said he could help her with her career, but that “if you want to play with the big boys you have to lay with the big boys.” It was presented in a very matter-of-fact manner and “very transactional,” she says. When she asked how many others she would have to lay with, he said, “Well, you might have to give a few blow-jobs here and there.”
She refused and the next day was told the contract offer was rescinded because she was now on a “Do Not Hire List.”

The documentary takes viewers through Ailes’ childhood under the domination of a father so strict that Ailes often told a story in which, as a young lad, his father taught him not to trust anyone by telling him to jump off his top bunk bed into his father’s arms, who then stepped away and let him fall to the floor. One problem with this story: Ailes brother says it never happened and the story is a literary trope published multiple times well before Ailes and having nothing to do with him.
Actor Austin Pendleton (“What’s Up, Doc?,” “The Muppet Movie”), a childhood classmate of Ailes in Warren Ohio in a 1954 junior high school civics class, says “We all wanted to be like Roger,” noting Ailes was witty and intelligent, mercilously funny and the handsomest man you can imagine.”

Seeking a bigger spotlight for himself beyond his political consulting, Ailes created the America’s Talking cable network for NBC during the explosion of cable channels, on which he hosted his own program and hired many people he would later take to Fox News, such as Steve Doocy, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly (then host of Inside Edition but would fill-in for Ailes).
Reverting to his base instincts and dove-tailing them with ratings strategies that he would exploit further on Fox News, Ailes ordered provocative shots of sexy women on camera – mandating that female hosts had to wear short skirts, and put lights under see-through desks to show their legs to viewers.
But when that channel wasn’t super successful and Microsoft’s Bill Gates proposed a partnership with NBC, Ailes’ AT network was replaced with MSNBC.
This sent Ailes on a mission of revenge for which he aligned with the Australian king of lowest-common-denominator journalism Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News Channel in 1996.

At Fox News, Ailes brought together all the slimiest tactics and culture he had cultivated in his career, including the hiring of pretty women and telling them how to dress; looking for the most salacious stories and ramping up false outrage, and his behind-the-scenes sexual harassment that led to a culture of that behavior among his staff.
As the documentary shows provocative images of FNC’s female on-air talent posted online, including bare legs and shots showing under the desk between legs, journalist Sarah Ellison says Ailes encouraged the network to be sexualized with lots of web sites showing sexy women on the network and focused on body parts. They were “using the women of the network for a very specific purpose for the viewers, and we learned later for the people in the building,” she says.
Meanwhile, the timing of the Monica Lewinsky scandal for President Clinton could not have been better for the fledgling FNC – it was played to the hilt and spiked the network’s ratings.
“It wasn’t about journalism; it was about drawing the biggest audience possible,” former O’Reilly Factor associate producer Muto says, adding that President Trump was a perfect President for Ailes. “Trump” is such a Fox-ian character that if he hadn’t been real then Roger Ailes would have created him in a lab.”

All the while, Ailes’ insatiable appetite for power was increasing in unexpected and inexplicable ways.
In 2008 he bought the tiny Putnam County News and Recorder newspaper (3,000 subscribers) in Cold Spring New York and started attending local City Council meetings, using the newspaper to try to control local government and supporting people with no experience but who were loyal to Roger in order to “change the town from blue to red.” Cold Spring politicians and residents describe how he started hacking computers of locals who opposed him to intimidate them and influence local elections.
Beck recalls his meeting with Ailes when Beck was submitting his resignation in 2011. He asked Ailes why he was continuing to do all this at his age and position.
“I still have a President to pick,” Ailes told Beck.

And Ailes was still behaving badly in his personal and professional life and enabling the same of others.
He suppressed sexual assault allegations against Bill O’Reilly and hired people to go after his accusers.
Lidia Curanaj, former correspondent at New York TV station WNYW, says she met Ailes in his office expecting to discuss a job and was told her she needed to stand and twirl for Ailes so he could see all of her. She refused and a week later was told she wouldn’t be hired. “Apparently I failed the test.”
Alisyn Camerota, former Fox News Host and now an anchor at CNN, said Ailes told her that if she wanted to be anchor at Fox News she’d have to let him “train” her in private sessions at a hotel.

Ailes imagined his importance and significance was of such global significance that he had an excess of security and bullet-proof glass and several walls around his office.
Amerota recalls President Obama graciously greeting Ailes at a party and photo-with-the-President session, saying, “there’s the most powerful man in the media.” The next day Ailes was telling everyone at Fox that Obama called Ailes the most powerful man in the world.

Even in his final chapter, after Gretchen Carlson started the avalanche of claims of sexual harassment, Ailes was huddled at home amongst a throng of staff and supporters. Crisis management consultants recall how Ailes’ wife Beth told them that day, “You need to understand that Roger is more important than America.”

Viewers of this unsettling documentary need to understand that Ailes is not a solitary figure who behaves this way, and that he was only a symptom of our culture’s disquieting and dangerous disease.

— By Scott Hettrick