![]() The attacks again showed the strength of CNN, with its deep bench of reporters used to the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle. And then, as they did, the whole world was witness to the biggest and most horrific breaking-news story in history. For a while, until technicians rigged back-up systems, news producers were unable to get live feeds on the air. More than 100 communications antennae atop that tower, including those used by the television networks, were taken out. the first hijacked jet hit One World Trade Center, the north tower. Ailes needed something far more ground-shifting to exploit in order to find a critical mass of those who felt left out of the national conversation-just like the pro-Vietnam War “silent majority” that Nixon had once claimed for himself, even though it was neither silent nor a majority. That scandal spiked ratings but it was ephemeral. I became a whore, a bimbo, a slut and worse.” And, perceptively, she said that experience became “the first draft of a new information culture that gave birth to cyber-bullying and trolls.” Truth and fiction mixed at random in the service of higher ratings. ![]() Of course, every news channel knew the power of this story, but Fox went all-in with a tabloid relish that recognized that it wasn’t just a political debacle for Clinton but, in its essentials, a salacious narrative with a sleazy cast that could also be genuinely felt as a moral outrage.īut Ailes’s dream story turned out to be a nightmare for Monica Lewinsky, as she recalled in a 2017 op-ed: “My character, my looks and my life were picked apart mercilessly. You could imagine Ailes and O’Reilly as a couple of locker room jocks happily choosing their nightly victims (a cultural bond that was to end both of their careers with charges of sexual harassment). Now it was as though Ailes tapped and released the inner O’Reilly, a permanently aggrieved blowhard who could turn the news into an agenda of pet targets-just like Limbaugh. O’Reilly had a mercurial television career, never finding his niche. In finding O’Reilly, Ailes demonstrated his consummate ability to groom talent. But Ailes didn’t care, he had found the man to become his prototypical prime-time host, Bill O’Reilly. ![]() Certainly, the networks and CNN treated it with lofty disregard. At first, it was regarded as an under-resourced and scrappy outlier with a nakedly tabloid tone. Limbaugh’s unbridled assault on progressives and liberals-a barroom alpha male ranting about the “feminazis”- opened Ailes’ eyes to what was now permissible.įox News was launched in October 1996. Limbaugh had seized the moment when, in 1987, under pressure from Ronald Reagan, the FCC ended the so-called “fairness doctrine” that insisted that political commentary should always be balanced-one view should be countered by its opposite. About 50 of them followed Ailes to his new project.įor Ailes, one person stood out in the media as the pilot fish leading to where he wanted to go: Rush Limbaugh, the loudest mouth on talk radio. (America’s Talking eventually morphed into MSNBC.) Other NBC staff felt the same way. Murdoch had built a tabloid newspaper empire on the same instinct, and Ailes felt that America’s Talking had been tapping into the same potential but NBC wasn’t listening. They shared a gut instinct that there was a mindset embedded in the network bosses that had lost contact with significant segments of their audience. Thus began the most consequential pairing of minds in cable television, building a business that is now worth around $20 billion. He had found a man who shared his ideas about the future of television-Rupert Murdoch. Then an internal investigation was launched into a charge that Ailes had called NBC executive David Zaslav “a little fucking Jew prick.” Without that being resolved, Ailes quit. There were worries that Ailes was pushing for a tone of vulgar populism. The programming ranged over things that network news divisions had not much bothered with: celebrity gossip, true crime, marriage and sex problems, health, diets, pets, and religion. ![]() That was apparent when, after hard-driving CNBC to success, Ailes launched a new channel, America’s Talking. More important, he could manipulate that mood into a movement, and the movement could become a political force and a market. There was something feral in Ailes’ instincts: he could pick up the scent of a change in public mood so quickly that nobody else could capture it before he did. ![]()
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