After Right-wing talk radio the next big thing in Right-wing politics in the US was television. In particular Fox News.
As Jeff Cohen said, “One of the biggest steps “forward” in handing our whole media system over to a handful of corporations was the Telecommunications “Reform” Act of 1996. Before then it was completely bi-partisan…Consumer rights advocates were calling it the Time-Warner Enrichment Act…The few fat media companies got even fatter.” Cohen called this “bi-partisan corruption that explains why we have the media companies we now have.” And he suggested strongly that media companies had bought Clinton and the Republican Speaker of the House with large political donations in order to get this done. They bought both Democrats and Republicans.
This set the stage for something even bigger—the launching of Fox News by Rupert Murdoch. Fox quickly became the major cable news service in the US and the effect on other news organizations’ was “profound”, according to Jen Senko. He owned a lot of media organizations in TV, newspapers, magazines and books and as a result had a huge influence on news in the US
Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News but Roger Ailes built it. It was his brainchild. Without him Fox News would be much different.
Gabriel Sherman wrote an influential book that explained the mind of Roger Ailes. The book was called, The Loudest voice in the Room: How the Brilliant Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and Divided a Country. His control over Fox News was pretty absolute. Bombast was the key. American conservatives loved loud opinions. In 1988 Bill Clinton had an infamous affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Fox News covered it with what Sherman called “wall-to-wall” coverage.
In 2000 Fox News milked another issue for a good part of the year. That was the Bush Gore election and the Supreme Court. Fox did not cover it as a dubious case that went to the Supreme Court for resolution. Fox, under Ailes direction, covered it as showing how the Democrats were sore losers and undemocratically tried to win in the Supreme Court when they had lost the election. Fox really treated it as Democrats trying to steal the election. They barely mentioned that the court’s decision was based on party lines in the court. This was not entirely different than the republicans in 2020 after Trump’s narrow defeat by Biden and the legal melee as a result of 61 law suits launched by the Trump campaign, all of which they lost except for one minor case that hardly had any bearing on the result at all.
In 2001 Ailes and Fox treated the disaster of 9/11 as a holy war of the US against the Muslim radicals in the Middle East with George W. Bush the heroic John Wayne figure who would lead America to victory in the desert.
Fox News became Ailes megaphone and it became the biggest megaphone in the world. All of these incidents helped Fox to explode in the ratings and become the biggest voice in news on the cable networks and that voice distinctly spoke with a strong right-wing accent. It was the voice of Roger Ailes who selected spokesmen and women who mirrored his right-wing views.
Ailes realized that what Fox needed to do was make the news simple and black and white. Subtlety and nuance were irrelevant. Banished for good. Good vs bad was always the issue. And America was good and its foes were either bad or frequently even evil. Its anchors or hosts wore American flags on their lapels and preached the exceptionalism of America that was beset by traitorous lefties and lily-livered liberals.
Ailes really made not just Fox News, but America go much further right-wing. And he did it smoothly with cunning. He convinced the audience that they were fair and balanced, as their motto asserted, but actually he was moving his audience and the country much further to the right. Ailes was very good at what he did. And he helped make the Murdochs immensely rich in the process. And, in time, he helped give birth to Donald Trump.
Trump was the child of Fox News.