Roger E. Ailes,
who shaped the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and
then became a dominant, often-intimidating force in American
conservative politics at the helm of Fox News until he was forced out
last year in a sexual harassment scandal, died on Thursday morning. He
was 77.
The
cause was complications of a subdural hematoma that Mr. Ailes sustained
when he fell and struck his head on May 10 at his home in Palm Beach,
Fla., the local authorities said.
“Fair
and balanced” was Mr. Ailes’s defining phrase for Fox News, along with
another slogan: “We report. You decide.” Though routinely mocked by
liberal critics, who regarded the network as decidedly unfair and
imbalanced, those words amounted to an article of faith for Mr. Ailes,
who created Fox News with Rupert Murdoch’s money and guided it for two
decades.
“If
we look conservative,” he said, “it’s because the other guys are so far
to the left.” In his mordant humor, CNN stood for Clinton News Network
and CBS for Communist Broadcasting System. What Fox News did, he said,
was apply a necessary corrective.
Continue reading the main story
From
its debut on Oct. 7, 1996, the network, under his tutelage, did its
share of straightforward reporting but also unmistakably filtered major
news stories through a conservative lens. Evening programming, which
embodied the Fox News brand, was dominated by right-wing commentators
like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who hurled opinions and vented
resentments with a pugnacity that reflected their boss’s own
combativeness.
Roger Ailes: Polarizing Media Mastermind
Roger Ailes was a dominant force in
American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News for two decades
until he was forced out in a sexual harassment scandal last year. He
died at 77.
By ROBIN STEIN, ELSA BUTLER, CHRIS CIRILLO and MARK
SCHEFFLER on
Publish Date May 18, 2017.
Photo by Ángel Franco/The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
As
the network’s chairman and chief executive, Mr. Ailes was widely
feared, particularly by conservative politicians who sought his favor.
He cultivated a swaggering persona, accentuated by bursts of
obscenity-laced anger. Once, he became so enraged that he punched a hole
in the wall of a control room.
“I don’t ignore anything,” he acknowledged in a 2003 profile in The New Yorker. “Somebody gets in my face, I get in their face.”
Years
earlier, Lee Atwater, whose remorseless approach to politics matched
that of Mr. Ailes when they worked together on George H.W. Bush’s 1988
presidential campaign, described his colleague as having “two speeds:
attack and destroy.”
A Conservative Haven
Both
speeds were evident at the Ailes-run Fox News. For loyal viewers, it
was the network of choice to hear repeatedly about the moral failings of
Bill and Hillary Clinton, questions about Barack Obama’s birthplace,
doubts about the patriotism of American Muslims, grumblings about the
war ostensibly being waged on Christmas, and warnings about “death
panels” that would supposedly flourish under the Affordable Care Act,
known as Obamacare.
After
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Fox News embraced the American
flag as if it were its own, then became an uninhibited booster of the
Iraq War and an unabashed critic of those who opposed it.
The
network also made itself a haven for Republicans who had fallen from
political grace and hoped to restart their careers, among them Newt
Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. Mr.
Hannity’s show was effectively a public-relations vehicle for one
presidential candidate who made it to the top: Donald J. Trump.
Even
more than he embraced political combat, Mr. Ailes keenly understood
television and its reliance on attention-grabbing flourishes. He learned
the medium’s emotional impact in the 1960s as the young producer of
“The Mike Douglas Show,” a syndicated daytime variety program. To hold
people’s interest, “you have to be punchy and graphic in your
conversation,” he wrote in a 1988 book, “You Are the Message.”
He
put that instinct to effective use, and to personal profit, after he
left the Douglas show in 1968 to devote himself to political stagecraft.
Across more than two decades, he devised media strategies for several
dozen political campaigns, including the winning presidential
candidacies of Richard M. Nixon in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Mr.
Bush in 1988. In 2016, he informally advised the triumphant Trump
campaign.
At
Mr. Ailes’s Fox, the news was delivered with eye-catching graphics and
whooshing sound effects. Female broadcasters tended to be attractive
blondes encouraged to show more than a little leg. “Look, there’s a
certain element of the melding with show business or entertainment,” he
told Broadcasting & Cable magazine in 2003. “Entertainment and news
should always be separate, but you should walk right up to the line and
get your toe on it.”
His
methods served the network well. In January 2002, barely five years
after its birth, Fox passed the well-established CNN as the most-watched
cable news network. It stayed No. 1, reinforcing Mr. Ailes’s political
influence. Power made him anxious about his personal safety. Convinced
that enemies like Al Qaeda had him in their cross hairs, he installed
elaborate security measures at work and at home.
At
the end of his tenure, the network had an average daily viewership of 2
million, more than CNN and the left-leaning MSNBC combined. Its
audience skewed white, male and old, the median age approaching 70. But
they were passionate viewers. Their fidelity produced billion-dollar
profits and made Fox News an indispensable component of the Murdoch
empire, 21st Century Fox.
In
a statement on Thursday morning, Mr. Murdoch said Mr. Ailes “will be
remembered by the many people on both sides of the camera that he
discovered, nurtured and promoted.”
“Roger
and I shared a big idea, which he executed in a way no one else could
have,” he added. “In addition, Roger was a great patriot who never
ceased fighting for his beliefs.”
Sudden Ouster
Although
an Ailes admirer, Mr. Murdoch reluctantly concluded in the summer of
2016 that his news chief had to go after a former network anchor,
Gretchen Carlson, brought a lawsuit charging Mr. Ailes with sexual harassment.
Her action set in motion a cascade of allegations from women, who
reported unwanted groping and demands for sex by him. Some of them
described an overall culture of misogyny at Fox News. The scandal
enveloped the network’s top star, Bill O’Reilly, whose employment was abruptly ended last month.
How Politicians and Members of the News Media Responded
In the hours after Mr. Ailes’s death was announced, there was an outpouring of reaction online.
Mr.
O’Reilly denied the charges of sexual impropriety, as did Mr. Ailes.
But Mr. Ailes was finished at Fox, and walked away with a payout
reportedly worth $40 million.
Those
were not the first accusations of their kind. They went back at least
to the early 1990s, when Mr. Ailes returned to television full time,
producing a show for the conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh
and a separate late-night talk show on NBC.
As
recounted in “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” Gabriel Sherman’s 2014
biography of Mr. Ailes, a female producer looking to work for him at NBC
said he had offered her an extra $100 a week “if you agree to have sex
with me whenever I want.”
In
1993, Mr. Ailes took charge of the CNBC business news network and a
second NBC cable channel, America’s Talking (which gave way in 1996 to
MSNBC). As he would later do at Fox, he turned the struggling CNBC into a
financial success and won the loyalty of employees, who had at first
viewed him warily.
But
after a falling out with NBC chieftains over programming control, he
quit in 1995. Almost immediately he called on Mr. Murdoch, who longed
for a news network of his own and shared Mr. Ailes’s belief that
existing news organizations were far too liberal. They created Fox News
in fairly short order. Eventually, dozens of seasoned NBC employees
joined them. With characteristic bite, Mr. Ailes described their
defection as “a jailbreak.”
Roger
Eugene Ailes was born on May 15, 1940, in Warren, Ohio, a blue-collar
town near Youngstown. His father, Robert, was a foreman at the Packard
Electric Company, and his mother, Donna, a housewife who brought in
extra money by embroidering handkerchiefs for sale. Theirs was a rocky
marriage. His father was known for abusiveness.
Found
to have hemophilia as a child, Roger more than once nearly bled to
death, as when he fell and bit his tongue at age 2. (Mr. Ailes had also
been bleeding heavily when paramedics found him on a bathroom floor at
his home on May 10, the police said. The Palm Beach County Medical
Examiner’s office said his hemophilia had contributed to his death.)
Assorted
maladies plagued Mr. Ailes through life. He dealt with blood-pooling
around the joints and, in time, developed arthritis and severe weight
problems.
Despite
the ailments, or perhaps because of them, he did not shy from physical
contact, whether digging ditches as a teenager or getting into
occasional fistfights. Even after politics and television had made him a
rich man, he reveled in portraying himself as a working-class tough
guy. That sensibility, and a disdain for most journalists, infused his
network’s news coverage.
“I’ve
had a broad life experience that doesn’t translate into going to the
Columbia Journalism School,” he said. “That makes me a lot better
journalist than some guys who had to listen to some pathetic professor
who has been on the public dole all his life and really doesn’t like
this country much.”
Grooming Future Presidents
Mr.
Ailes’s interest in broadcasting was ignited at Ohio University, in
Athens, where he worked on the college radio station before graduating
in 1962.
There,
he met Marjorie White, the first of his three wives. Their 17-year
marriage ended in 1977. His second wife was Norma Ferrer, a television
producer, but that union ended, too, in 1995, after 14 years. His third
wife, Elizabeth Tilson, was a program director at CNBC. They were
married in 1998 at New York’s City Hall in a ceremony presided over by
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former Ailes political client.
In
2000, with the birth of a son, Zachary, Mr. Ailes became a first-time
father at nearly 60. His survivors include his wife and son as well as
an older brother, Dr. Robert J. Ailes.
After
college, Mr. Ailes started out as a production assistant on “The Mike
Douglas Show,” which was then based in Cleveland. He rose swiftly,
becoming executive producer at 28. A turning point for him came in early
1968, when Nixon went on the show as his presidential campaign took
form. Wary of television — convinced that he had lost the 1960 election
to John F. Kennedy on the basis of appearances — Nixon dismissed it in a
conversation with Mr. Ailes as a “gimmick.”
“Television is not a gimmick,” Mr. Ailes said boldly, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”
Nixon
took those words to heart, and took the young man onto his campaign as a
media adviser. Mr. Ailes strove to make Nixon more likable — no simple
task — giving him a makeover that included town hall-style sessions with
carefully screened audiences that asked easy questions and allowed the
candidate to seem assured.
In
the 1970s, Mr. Ailes set up shop in New York, where he solidified his
growing reputation as a master of bare-knuckled politics.
Even
then, he had visions of a right-of-center network, and played an
important role in developing Television News Inc., or TVN, a news
service financed by the ardently conservative Joseph Coors, of the
beer-making family. Its slogan was one that would ring loudly years
later: “fair and balanced.” TVN distributed news clips with a
conservative slant to television networks and local stations. But it did
not truly get off the ground, and collapsed in 1975 after two years.
In
that era Mr. Ailes also flirted with the theater world, producing a few
Off Broadway shows. An initial effort, an ecologically themed musical
called “Mother Earth,” flopped. But he enjoyed critical acclaim and
commercial success with “The Hot l Baltimore,” a Lanford Wilson play
about down-and-outers.
As
a campaign strategist, Mr. Ailes helped elect powerful Republican
senators like Mitch McConnell, Phil Gramm and Alfonse M. D’Amato. But
his most notable work was at the presidential level.
When
Mr. Reagan floundered for a while in his 1984 re-election campaign, Mr.
Ailes coached him in ways to appear sharper in a televised debate and
to display his innate affability. Four years later, the aggressive Ailes
approach kicked into high gear in the presidential campaign of the
elder George Bush. He coaxed Mr. Bush into sounding tough, to dispel a
so-called wimp factor that hung over the candidate like a dark cloud.
Previous Times Coverage of Roger Ailes
- Jan. 2010: Roger Ailes’s success in turning Fox News into a profit engine put him at the pinnacle of power in business, media and politics.
- Jan. 2014: Mr. Ailes’s permanent pushback campaign.
- July 2016: Mr. Ailes fused TV with politics, changing both.
- July 2016: Mr. Ailes was removed as chairman and chief executive of Fox News.
- July 2016: This is how Gretchen Carlson took on Mr. Ailes.
- Jan. 2017: Megyn Kelly, a rising star at Fox, left the network after releasing a book in which she described being sexually harassed by Mr. Ailes.
That
was the campaign of the notorious Willie Horton commercial. It focused
on a black man who had raped a woman and assaulted her husband while
free on a prison-furlough program in Massachusetts that was supported by
the Democratic candidate, Michael S. Dukakis. The ad was widely
attacked as blatantly racist, but it appeared to work as a vote magnet
for Mr. Bush.
Mr.
Ailes claimed he had nothing to do with the commercial. Nonetheless, he
told Time magazine in 1988 that “the only question is whether we depict
Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” He later said he
was joking.
Reflecting on his career as a political operative, he insisted that he had not been motivated by a right-wing agenda.
“People
think I stayed in politics because I wanted conservatives to run the
world,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1995. “Actually, it was
the money.”
Yet
he clung to conservative politics even in the quiet setting of
Garrison, N.Y., where he and his wife bought property in 2001, across
the Hudson River from the United States Military Academy. In 2008 the
couple purchased a sleepy community newspaper, The Putnam County News
and Recorder, and, with Ms. Ailes as publisher, turned it into a blunt
instrument of conservative thought. They sold the paper toward the end
of 2016. They bought their Palm Beach home last fall for a reported $36
million.
Mr.
Ailes relished his reputation as a battler. Take the time he punched
that hole in the wall. “It was just a drywall, and luckily I didn’t hit
any beams,” he told Zev Chafets, author of the biography “Roger Ailes:
Off Camera.”
“But somebody,” he said, “put a frame around the hole and wrote, ‘Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.’ ”
Correction: May 19, 2017
An earlier version of a capsule summary for this obituary misstated the given name of Mr. Ailes. As the obituary correctly notes, he was Roger, not Robert.
An earlier version of a capsule summary for this obituary misstated the given name of Mr. Ailes. As the obituary correctly notes, he was Roger, not Robert.
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