Roger Ailes: The Man Who Mined a Divided America -
The Fox News creator whose death was just announced made a fortune creating a cultural safe space for Americans pining for the way things were.
Empowered by a boss intent upon upending the traditional news media – Rupert Murdoch — and attuned to the anxieties and resentments of a slice of (mostly) white America
that saw its country moving on without it, Roger Ailes played a singular role in changing the political media landscape of the United States.
He created the Fox News Channel, the top cable news network for 15 years running
and a major profit center for Mr. Murdoch’s media conglomerate, 21st Century Fox.
As Mr. Ailes saw it, his network was the only place in the news sphere for an audience
that the mainstream media failed to appreciate and daily disrespected.
In what must have seemed like the final indignity, the big news in television ratings at the time of his death was
that his longtime rivals MSNBC and CNN had managed to edge out Fox News this week in the advertising category important to advertisers, a rarity.
Fox News also occasionally fought back against shifting gender roles —
and shifts in views of gender itself — in a on-set environment where men wore suits and women wore skirts and showed their legs.
