Republican
media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996,
ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as
the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document
buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the
intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by
Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network
news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television
viewers.
The memo—called, simply enough, "A Plan For Putting the
GOP on TV News"— is included in a 318-page cache of documents dhttp://gawker.com/5814150/etailing
Ailes' work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations
that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through
his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served
as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering
detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep
the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.
The
documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and
felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to
be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a
forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political
narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political
spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House
Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for
creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream
media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to
sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on
how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as
war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to
talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as
well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of
present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of
political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on
spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move
that caused his network to shriek about "indoctrination" when Obama did
it more than 30 years later.
All 318 pages are available here. First, some highlights:
The Idea Behind Fox News Channel Originated in the Nixon White House
"A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News" (
read it here)
is an unsigned, undated memo calling for a partisan, pro-GOP news
operation to be potentially paid for and run out of the White House.
Aimed at sidelining the "censorship" of the liberal mainstream media and
delivering prepackaged pro-Nixon news to local television stations, it
reads today like a detailed precis for a Fox News prototype. From
context provided by other memos, it's apparent that the plan was hatched
during the summer of 1970. And though it's not clear who wrote it, the
copy provided by the Nixon Library literally has Ailes' handwriting all
over it—it appears he was routed the memo by Haldeman and wrote back his
enthusiastic endorsement, refinements, and a request to run the project
in the margins.
The 15-page plan begins with an acknowledgment that television had
emerged as the most powerful news source in large part because "people
are lazy" and want their thinking done for them:http://gawker.com/5814150/
Today
television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than
people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form
of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just
sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.
With
that in mind, the anonymous GOP official urged the creation of a
network "to provide pro-Administration, videotape, hard news actualities
to the major cities of the United States." Aware that the national
television networks were the enemy, the writer proposed going around
them by sending packaged, edited news stories and interviews with
politicians directly to local television stations.
This
is a plan that places news of importance to localities (Senators and
representatives are newsmakers of importance to their localities) on
local television news programs while it is still news. It avoids the
censorship, the priorities, and the prejudices of network news selectors
and disseminators.
This was before satellite, so
the idea was that this GOP news outlet would record an interview with a
Republican lawmaker in the morning, rush the tape to National Airport
via truck, where it is edited into a package en route, and flown to the
lawmaker's district in time to make the local news. Local stations, the
writer surmised, would be happy to take the free programming. The plan
is spectacularly detailed—it was no idle pipe dream. The writer
estimated that it would cost $310,000 to launch and slightly less than
that to run each year, sketched out a 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule with
shooting times, editing times, flight times, and arrival times, and
estimated that the editing truck—"Ford, GMC, or IHS chassis; V8 engine; 5
speed transmission; air conditioning; Weight: 22,000GVW"—could be
"build from chassis in 60 days." In other words, they were serious.
According to Ailes' copious margin notes, he thought it was an "excellent idea" that didn't go far enough and
might encounter some "flap about news management."
Basically
a very good idea. It should be expanded to include other members of the
administration such as cabinet involved in activity with regional or
local interest. Also could involve GOP governors when in DC. Who would
purchase equipment and run operation—White House? RNC? Congressional
caucus? Will get some flap about news management.
And Ailes thought he'd be just the guy to run such a project, telling Haldeman he wanted in:
Bob—if
you decide to go ahead we would as a production company like to bid on
packaging the entire project. I know what has to be done and we could
test the feasibility for 90 days without making a commitment beyond that
point.
A November 1970 memo recounting a meeting
between Ailes, Haldeman, and two of Haldeman's aides shows that Ailes
got the gig, and that Haldeman had proposed a name:
With
regard to the news programming effort as proposed last summer, Ailes
feels this is a good idea and that we should be going ahead with it.
Haldeman suggested the name 'Capitol News Service' and Ailes will
probably be doing more work in this area.
The idea
as initially envisioned doesn't appear to have gotten off the ground.
But Ailes obviously did do "more work in this area," first with
something called Television News Incorporated (TVN), a right-wing news
service Ailes worked on in the early 1970s after he got fired by the
White House.
According to Rolling Stone,
TVN was financed by conservative beermonger Joseph Coors, and its
mandate sounds exactly like a privately funded version of Capitol News
Service: "[TVN] was designed to inject a far-right slant into local news
broadcasts by providing news clips that stations could use without
credit—and at a fraction of the true costs of production." Ailes was
"the godfather behind the scenes" of TVN,
Rolling Stone reported, and it was where he first encountered the motto that would make his career: "Fair and balanced."
Ailes at Fox News in 2006 (
Getty)
Though
it died in 1975, TVN was obviously an early trial run for the
powerhouse Fox News would become. The ideas were the same—to route
Republican-friendly stories around the gatekeepers at the network news
divisions. In Nixon's day, the only way to do that was to pump stories
directly to local stations. By 1996, cable television offered a much
more powerful alternative. And the whole project began—on the taxpayer's
dime—in the White House under the direction of a Watergate felon. One
can only imagine how Fox News would report a similar scheme hatched in
the Obama White House.
Dirty Tricks
Some of the
documents hint obliquely at Ailes' involvement in Nixonian black ops,
though none of the ones that ballooned into Watergate. In a 1970 memo to
Haldeman (
read it here),
he wrote "to guard our flank I would like to see us get one of our
people inside the Wallace organization immediately," adding that he
would "discuss this in more detail in person." The "Wallace
organization" was almost certainly a reference to former Alabama Gov.
George Wallace, whose 1968 third-party campaign for president as a
segregationist won five southern states and almost cost Nixon the
election. At the time Ailes was writing, Wallace was preparing a 1972
run; Ailes apparently sought to infiltrate the campaign in order to
gather intelligence or perhaps to sabotage it if it became necessary.
Wallace ran for the Democratic nomination, but an attempted
assassination in May 1972 left him paralyzed and thwarted any later
independent run.
Another apparent dirty trick that never got off the ground involves a
1970 television production Ailes was working on as a response to an
anti-war CBS News special. The idea appears to have been to interview
pro-war Democrats—including Sens. John Stennis and John
McClellan—ostensibly for a news show of some kind (it's not clear from
the memo what format the final product would take). But the program was
in fact being directed by Ailes and financed by the Tell it to Hanoi
Committee, a pro-war Nixon front group. A June 1970 memo (
read it here)
from someone apparently hired by Ailes to put the show together
explained that he was pulling the plug because "the fact that this
presentation is White House directed, unbeknownst to the Democrats on
the show, presents the possibility of a leak that could severely
embarrass the White House and damage significantly its already
precarious relationship with the Congress. Should two powerful factors
like Stennis and McClellan discover they are dupes for the
administration the scandal could damage the White House for a long time
to come."
Regulating Campaigns
Given the enthusiasm in right-wing circles—
including on Fox News—for
the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which dealt an enormous
blow to the federal government's prerogative to regulate the role of
money in political campaigns, Ailes used to hold some rather contrary
views on political campaigns. In a June 1971 speech called "CANDIDATE +
MONEY + MEDIA = VOTES" (
read it here),
Ailes argued forcefully for the role of television in political
campaigns while lamenting the rise of the canned political ad:
I
am in favor of limiting the number of commercials shown shown on TV
during a campaign, and in fact would favor a clause requiring no less
than 35% of broadcast monies available to a candidate be spent on buying
program time instead of commercial time.
That's a
radically intrusive proposal, and I'm not aware of anyone serious on
either side of the political spectrum who advocates it today. Ailes even
goes so far as to endorse the British model of banning political ads
except during the three weeks preceding an election:
Three
weeks is much too short for this country but, on the other hand, the
fatiguing situation we have now with seven semi-announced candidates a
year and a half away from the election running around the country Monday
morning quarterbacking is also going too far. In my opinion, if the
news media would quit trying to create false excitement by covering all
potential presidential candidates in terms of a popularity poll, which
is meaningless at this stage, they would be taking a giant step forward
in journalistic responsibility.
We're about a
year-and-a-half away from the 2012 presidential election right now.
We've got a bunch of "semi-announced" candidates in the running. I
wonder if Fox News is trying to
generate any excitement around them by covering them in terms of a popularity poll?
Lighting the Christmas Tree
Ailes' December 1970 memo (
read it here)
outlining Nixon's role in lighting the White House Christmas tree is a
masterwork in political pageantry. Rather than simply throwing a switch,
Ailes recommended
that "at the end, instead of bringing a child up to the president to
light the tree, he walk down to the children seated in front, pick up a
small boy, stand him on his chair and ask him to light the tree" because
"this simple gesture will do much to humanize him with all the
parents."
Ailes' memo scripts the entire event—Nixon is to pick
the boy in the "sixth seat of the front row on the right side" and "the
president should face camera (2) and keep his arm around the boy"—and
recommends that applause be banned since most of the audience will be
wearing mittens or gloves and it will therefore "sound like a herd of
elephants." Hilariously, the memo includes this bit of megalomaniacal
wisdom from Nixon press secretary Ron Zeigler:
Ziegler
indicated to me that it is important the president ask the child to
help him light the tree and both throw the switch together. Otherwise,
the press will play up the boy's name as lighting the Christmas tree.
Don't let the six-year-old steal the spotlight!
Eliminating Poverty and Pollution by 1980
In a 1969 memo (
read it here),
Ailes argued that the major issue facing the American people was
"quality of life," and urged Nixon to devote the rest of his
administration to easing it. His solution? Declare the end of poverty
and pollution:
He should make a major address on
this and state publicly that poverty, air and water pollution will be
eliminated in America totally by 1980. This is similar to Kennedy's
challenge for the moon. It isn't met in this administration but when
it's reached he gets the credit.
When poverty is
finally defeated decades or centuries from now, Americans will no doubt
look back on the Nixon White House with pride and admiration.
Ailes
can be forgiven for inaccurately predicting the end of pollution—his
job was just to come up with useful things for Nixon to say. What's less
forgivable is his galactically wrong assessment of Nixon's prospects in
his 1972 re-election effort. For someone whose job it was to understand
public sentiment, Ailes' advice was exactly wrong: "Unless a single
major event captures the headlines close to that election we will not
see a landslide of any kind.... It will probably be a very close
contest." In 1972,
Nixon won 60% of the popular vote and carried every state save Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
Nixon's Address to High School Students
When
Barack Obama announced early in his administration that he would
conduct a live nationwide address to high school and students, Fox News
hyperventilated and described it as an attempt to "
indoctrinate children to support him politically."
When Richard Nixon decided to address high school and college students
in 1970, as this memo to Haldeman from deputy assistant to the president
Dwight L. Chapin makes clear (
read it here), Roger Ailes produced the event:
Roger
Ailes is developing a plan which he is going to phone in to me tomorrow
morning.... Ailes likes the idea of having the president originate live
from one of the schools and then shift to the other schools to answer
questions.
"I will look into the president's ties."
Among Ailes' chief duties, according to this 1970 memo he wrote to Haldeman (
read it here), was selecting Nixon's ties:
I
will view the videotape of the HEW Veto to see if there were any
shimmers from the design on the tie. My preliminary investigation,
however, shows that there were none and whoever reported it may have a
set that is not scanning properly. I will look into the president's ties
and select those that can definitely be used.
Firing Roger
Ailes
stopped his consulting for the White House some time in 1971—he was
essentially fired by Nixon after he was quoted disparaging the president
in Joe McGinniss'
The Selling of the President 1968. But he
was a feared figure, known back then for the cut-throat brand of
corporate politics that has served him so well at News Corp. While he
was being eased out and replaced with two new Hollywood men, Bill
Carruthers and Mark Goode, Chapin warned Haldeman in a memo (
read it here) that Ailes could go rogue if he wasn't handled properly:
I
have a gut feeling we are bordering on disaster if we do not get Roger
Ailes in and squared away soon. If we can handle Roger in a proper way
and quickly, I think we can avoid any bad feelings. If Roger finds out
that Carruthers and Mark Goode are coming on his own, he just may launch
a small offensive which I doubt that we need very much at this time.
An undated memo (
read it here) laying out talking points for Haldeman in a meeting with Ailes shows the White House trying to let him down gently:
We
have not been able to build the relationship between you and the
president which we had hoped to see. It is no one's fault. We face this
sort of thing everyday. There are different directions that we can go
which I think you can explore and which will continue to reap you
rewards. The president wants to try a new direction and feels we should
not only have a new approach, but new people.
The
consolation prizes offered by Haldeman included a consulting gig with
the Republican National Committee; a talk show featuring Martha
Mitchell, the wife of Attorney General John Mitchell; or the
"development of a TV series with a pro-administration plot."
A Megatonnage Dose of Media Hammering
Ailes with George H.W. Bush in 1998. (
White House Press Office)
Most
of the records in the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library detailing
Ailes' work for the first Bush administration have not been released
yet. But the documents that the library did provide in response to our
request show Ailes helping Bush navigate a perilous political
environment that should be familiar to Obama: A lingering recession, a
crisis in the Middle East, and a persistent sense fed by a hostile news
outlets that the president is out of touch.
So in August of 1990, days after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, Ailes wrote a memo (
read it here)
to Bush's chief of staff John Sununu warning that the press was
preparing to paint Bush as disengaged and shrewdly laying out a plan to
combat the perception:
I have had at least half a
dozen calls very recently from the press trying to lead me into
discussions like, 'fiddling while Rome burns,' 'golfing while Americans
are being taken hostage,' etc. The only reason this is of concern to me
is that I notice the networks beginning to show more and more footage of
the president in the golf cart. It is very clear that they have a point
of view which does not represent a fair picture of how the president is
handling the crisis... It is my judgment that the American people
simply don't believe this about George Bush, and therefore there will
not be a major repercussion. On the other hand, I know first hand what a
megatonnage dose of media hammering the same message can do.... Do a
little more fishing and less golfing.
Ailes at the launch of Fox News in 1996 alongside his boss, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch (
AP)
Ailes,
of course, knows from using golf to paint a president as remote and out
of touch. Here are some recent Fox News headlines: "
Obama Finds Time for NCAA Bracket, Golf Amid Global Turmoil," "
Obama Chooses Golf Over Funeral," and "
Barack Obama Plays Golf More Times than George W. Bush."
In a November 1990 memo to Sununu (
read it here),
Ailes lays out Bush's wardrobe in detail—"it is my judgment that he
should not wear helmets or hats"—and recommends using military resources
to concoct a fake briefing between Bush and his commanders in order to
"heighten the drama for the news media."
For
ceremonial functions, the president should dress in suit and tie and be
the president of the United States. In the field he should where khaki
slacks, open shirts, long sleeves with the sleeves rolled up. It is my
judgment that he should not wear helmets or hats. A fatigue jacket would
be fine in the field with soldiers on Thanksgiving Day.
[snip]
I
am sure he will schedule a briefing session with a commander in the
field. If the session is scheduled for one hour, and lasted for five
hours, it will heighten the drama for the news media and intensify the
pressure on Hussein.
All
in all, the documents show Ailes to be an engaged, brilliant, and often
catty adviser with an obsessive, almost evangelical focus on the power
of television to manipulate people for political purposes. It's almost
as though, frustrated by the failure of candidates and presidents to hew
closely enough to his political instructions, Ailes founded a network
to demonstrate their practical application—
see, this is how you use golf to undermine a president.
And they show a sustained effort across two White House administrations
to undermine and control the press—an effort that, were it revealed to
be taking place inside the Obama White House, would send Ailes and his
televised outrage machine into epic fits of apoplexy.
Ailes did not respond to a request for comment.
Related:
Handwriting Expert: Roger Ailes' Downstrokes Are Huge
Previously:
Roger Ailes Caught Spying on the Reporters at His Small-Town Newspaper
‘I Locked My Keys In My Car' And Other Reasons Roger Ailes Calls the Cops
Roger Ailes Continues to Ruin His Adopted Home
Fox News Chief Roger Ailes Can't Stop Calling the Cops
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