Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News Channel, is a very smart man. And he knows how to count, a skill that has apparently eluded many of his fellow conservatives.
Moreover, he runs a business and wants to make a profit. He reports to a boss, Rupert Murdoch, who did not become the 106th-richest person in the world by ignoring the bottom line. Neither Ailes nor Murdoch can afford to substitute ideology for reality.
This helps explain the “course correction,” in Ailes’ words, that’s been taking place at Fox News in recent months. The cable channel has jettisoned some of its most incendiary personalities — Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Dick Morris — while reaching out to a rising tide of Hispanic voters and potential customers. “The contributions being made by Latinos are extraordinary,” Ailes recently told Eliza Gray of The New Republic, “and we need to talk to them.”
Just as Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana warned fellow Republicans not to be the “stupid party,” Ailes doesn’t want Fox to be the stupid network. Stupid doesn’t sell.
When Murdoch hired Ailes to start Fox News in 1996, they were building on the work of another brilliant media strategist, Newt Gingrich. We can debate endlessly whether the mainstream media — the big papers and big networks — are endemically liberal. But there’s no doubt that conservatives believe they are, and that gave Gingrich his opening.
While he was still a backbencher in the 1980s, representing a congressional district in Georgia, Gingrich carved out new channels of communication that could be used to reach and recruit conservative cadres. Utilizing the technology of that pre-Internet era, Gingrich would make cassette tapes, expounding the gospel according to Newt, and send them to like-minded activists.
He’d gather those same activists in Holiday Inn conference rooms on Saturday mornings and address them by satellite hookup. And he and his young allies would make speeches on the House floor after the regular sessions had concluded. No one was there, but that didn’t matter. The speeches were carried on C-SPAN, and any audience was better than none.
