On my first visit to
That wasn't his reputation in-house at
Over the course of the meeting it became clear that Ailes was sizing me up for a project he thought I might be right for. (I wasn't.) His language was alternately ribald and cerebral. I realized that there was a brilliance behind the bawdiness; it helped him take the measure of people. I've often joked that Ailes was an odd mix of Boss Hogg and Aristotle.
But Aristotle is probably the wrong comparison. Aristophenes -- the Greek playwright -- is a better fit.
Ailes was proud of the fact that he got his start in theater. He told me that he brought that sensibility to television. TV is an entertainment medium, one that appeals to the rational parts of our brains but also to the emotional parts. This was not an insight unique to Ailes, but he understood better than most that if the emotional part wasn't working (what people see), people wouldn't pay attention to the rational parts (what people said).
That's why Ailes famously watched the news on mute when he was assessing talent. "If there was nothing happening on screen in the way the host looked or moved that made me interested enough to stand up and turn the sound up, then I knew that the host was not a great television performer," Ailes wrote in his book, "You Are the Message."
Of course, he took his understanding of human nature and drama to politics as well. Discovered by
When Ailes started
Most of the people who decry
As a broad generalization, the elite media saw itself as a kind of transatlantic guild, with at best loose attachments to this country, and a dim and cynical view toward anything that smacked of not just conservatism, but patriotism and traditionalism.
For example, in 1987,
Ailes not only had contempt for this kind of thing, he understood that many decent Americans shared it. "My first qualification" for running
Dramaturgically, Ailes' vision for
Fox's populism was an easy fit with American conservatism for two decades because populist indictments of liberal elites and conservative ones overlap a great deal. In the era of
Ailes, a man of demons and angels, brilliance and bawdiness, shaped his times more than almost anyone. It would have been fascinating to hear his ultimate answer to that challenge.
Comment by clicking here.
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.