Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch in 1996, at a press conference announcing the creation of Fox News. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, file)
Fox News chief Roger Ailes is a quote factory, a golden interviewee for any media journalist. “I don’t give a rat’s a[–] what the world thinks,” he said in an early April interview with the Hollywood Reporter.
This cavalier attitude enables Ailes, one of TV’s inestimable talents, to say stuff that makes no sense. Like this: “[I]t looks like Hillary is going to do whatever she wants and the press is going to vote for her.”
Problem No. 1: Ailes, as head of cable TV’s dominant news channel, can’t refer to “the press” as some kind of Otherworld. Fox News is the press, too. As the Hollywood Reporter piece notes, Fox News will generate $2.18 billion in revenues this year. That kind of money can fund all kinds of journalism on Hillary Clinton, and surely it will.
Problem No. 2: Has Ailes been following the news? Did he miss the March 2 New York Times story on Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account during her tenure as secretary of state? And the utter and overwhelming media pile-on that followed? Around the time that the interview came out, the Times also reported that three media outlets — the Times itself, the Washington Post and Fox News — had reached arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to rifle through early copies of his book “Clinton Cash” to vet his claims that “foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return,” as the Times summed up the book.
Which is to say, the “press” is actually scrambling to hold Hillary Clinton to account.
Though Ailes may be guilty of some imprecision on the Clinton front, he distinguishes himself in diagnosing the shortcomings of the competition. Of cratering MSNBC, Ailes told the Hollywood Reporter, “They have to decide what they are. I don’t think they even view it as television. They view it as a place to express their views, which happen to be all the same view. And so you’ve got one topic and 12 people [with the same opinion], and it’s just boring.” Yes, must-agree TV.
