Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [24]
Roger Ailes, however, is someone you can always rely on to stick to his conservative Republican guns. There is absolutely no question about this guy. He is a rock-ribbed, dyed-in-the-wool Republican through and through. Want a guy who will bash the Democrats with everything he’s got? You want Roger Ailes.
That’s why when Rupert Murdoch needed help starting a conservative cable news channel, he knew the right man for the job. The man who had been the GOP’s preeminent political consultant. The man who had helped elect Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. The man who’s been called the Dark Prince of right-wing attack politics. It was Ailes, along with his Dark co-Prince, Lee Atwater, who directed the Willie Horton attack against Michael Dukakis (and it was Ailes who said “the only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it”). It was Ailes who produced Rush Limbaugh’s ill-fated TV show. And so it was Roger Ailes who was the right choice for Murdoch’s right-wing channel. Ailes would run the network, set its right-wing tone, guide its right-wing programming, choose its right-wing stars.
And, most importantly, pick its slogan: “fair and balanced.”
And its tag line: “We report, you decide.”
Tucker Carlson, the conservative co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, has explained that the reason the Fox News Channel calls itself “fair and balanced” is “to drive liberals crazy.” There are others who suggest that Ailes really believes that FNC is fair and balanced, but only looks right wing because the rest of the media is so far to the left.
This would be a plausible argument . . . if the rest of the media actually had a liberal bias. Or if Fox wasn’t so obviously slanted to the right. Or if Ailes weren’t a cynical Republican ideologue with no regard for fairness or balance. Any of those things would add a lot to that argument.
When Murdoch installed him at Fox, one of Ailes’s first acts of “balance” was to clean house. Joe Peyronnin, then president of Fox News, told me the story.
“I had about forty people working for me,” Joe told me, “and he asked some of them if they were liberal or not. There was a litmus test. He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.”
Did Joe think this was appropriate? “I told him I didn’t think it was appropriate.”
Did Joe stay at his job? “I resigned.”
So disgusted was Joe that he left English-language journalism altogether and is now executive vice president of news and information programming at Telemundo. Adios, Joe. Adios, fairness. ¡Hola, Señor Ailes!
House clean, Ailes went to work hiring his team. For managing editor, he chose veteran journalist Brit Hume, a contributor to the ultraconservative Weekly Standard and the ultra-ultraconservative American Spectator. For Washington bureau chief, Ailes chose Brit’s wife Kim, who was determined to change the tone of television journalism. Mainstream stories, she complained in 1997, are “all mushy, like AIDS, or all silly like Head Start.”
Hubby also anchors the nightly news show, Special Report with Brit Hume, which concludes with Brit moderating a three-person panel of pundits. The most frequent panelist is prominent conservative Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard. Most often with Barnes are Mort Kondracke, centrist editor of Roll Call (a fiercely nonpartisan newspaper that reports on Capitol Hill), and Mara Liasson, a reporter for National Public Radio, who has been both a registered Democrat and registered Republican. In case you’re counting, that’s two hard-core conservatives and two centrists.