Roger Ailes “is the most successful executive in television by a wide margin, and he has been so for more than a decade. He is also, in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power in the national media in favor of the Republicans. ‘Because of his political work’—Ailes was a media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush—‘he understood there was an audience,’ Ed Rollins, the veteran GOP consultant, [said in 2011]. [Ailes] knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them.’ For most of his tenure, the roles of network chief and GOP kingmaker have been in perfect synergy. Ailes’s network has dominated the cable news race for most of the past decade, and for much of that time, Fox News attracted more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. Throughout the George W. Bush years, the network’s patriotic cheerleading helped to marginalize the Democrats. . . . The problem wasn’t that ratings had been slipping that much— [Glenn] Beck’s show declined by 30 percent from record highs, but the ratings were still nearly double those from before he joined the network. It was that, with an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates’ poll numbers remain dismally low (Sarah Palin is polling 12 percent; Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively). Ailes’s candidates-in-waiting were coming up small. And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative—he wanted to elect a president.”[1] The last sentence of the quoted passage is particularly revealing: “(H)e wanted to elect a president.” With Beck’s 30% drop in ratings still leaving him with a profitable rating, Ailes’ motive was not commercial, neither was it to improve the network’s journalism. Typically, news networks are criticized for sacrificing good journalism for commercial interests. Here, journalistic integrity and profit played second fiddle to partisan objectives.
To be sure, this case can be used to illustrate a point regarding stockholder (property) rights. Were Ailes’ political strategy that of his network's stockholders, this case could be used to point out that the default that profit enjoys in corporate governance can be nudged aside as another use of the wealth is given preference. A corporation’s owners can legally and ethically decide that their collective corporate wealth can be used in the service of political or social objectives. The owners of Ben & Jerry’s, for example, made selling ice cream not just about profits. Theoretically, a company could limit profit to that which is necessary for the company to continue—with the remaining profits to be spend on whatever aims the stockholders choose. Even "sustenance" profits could be held in abeyance as non-economic objectives are pressed--for example, at Fox News during a U.S. presidential election season.
In terms of journalistic ethics, however, Ailes' claim to "fair and balanced reporting" even as the editor wants to use the news network to elect a president is internally inconsistent. To the extent that the American media became partisan (e.g., MSNBC as liberal and Fox as conservative), the mission of journalism to report the news in an unbiased way so views and readers can make up their own minds has been compromised in the United States. This can be seen by contrasting American news coverage with its European counterparts in the E.U.
The trajectory in the American case since Ailes' comments in 2011 had admittedly been so gradual and without the perspective of a Walter Cronkite or Harry Reasoner that Americans could be left with taking the new normal as journalism itself rather than as containing a subtle decadence. Put another way, if a viable republic must have a virtuous and informed/educated citizenry of the self-governed to be viable over the long term as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed, then the onslaught of ideological demigods in journalistic seats ostensibly informing the public can be regarded as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. "Bad air!", Nietzsche would say of the feckless, self-serving instinctual urges running rampantly under the subterfuge of objectivity.
1, Gabriel Sherman, “The Elephant in the Green Room,” New York Magazine, May 22, 2011.
