Audio Interview: Zev Chafets on Roger Ailes: Off Camera
Veteran author and columnist
Zev Chafets drops by to discuss his latest book,
Roger Ailes:
Off Camera, which as its title implies, is a biography of the
Fox News impresario, and a history of how dramatically the media and political landscape has changed since Ailes cut his teeth producing the venerable
Mike Douglas syndicated talk show in the mid-1960s. His chance meeting with
Richard Nixon while producing
Douglas set in motion a series of career events, including advising the campaigns of multiple
Republican presidents. From the late
1980s through the mid-'90s, Ailes launched
CNBC, produced
Rush Limbaugh's syndicated
TV series, and created the immediate predecessor to
MSNBC. All of which were the prelude to Ailes being tapped by
Rupert Murdoch in
1996 to build Fox News and give it an iconoclastic worldview.
As
John Podhoretz recently noted, after the
2012 election, conservatives spoke frequently about finding some way of changing the media landscape; in the mid-1990s, Ailes did just that. The result was a godsend for conservatives who longed for a
TV channel whose tone matched theirs. Concurrently the channel would cause many self-described liberals to jettison their platitudes about free speech, tolerance and diversity, as they descended into apoplexy every time they got near channel #
360 on their DirecTV dial.
During our interview, Chafets will explore:
● How did Ailes become an advisor to the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon,
Ronald Reagan, and
George H.W. Bush?
● How does Ailes compare to previous Chafets biography subject Rush Limbaugh, whose TV series Ailes produced in the early
1990s?
● How Ailes crafted Fox's signature slogans, "
We Report, You Decide," and "
Fair and Balanced" to be counterweights to the pretensions of the
MSM on the opposite side of the aisle.
● How do
Rush and Ailes cope with being such demonized figures by the left? (
QED: this
2011 Esquire headline: "Why
Does Roger Ailes
Hate America?")
● How Ailes' past careers have allowed to find and recruit new talent, and how crossing Ailes is frequently a quick trip to television
Siberia for Fox hosts.
● What does Ailes think of new media impresarios such as the late
Andrew Breitbart, and former Fox hosts
Matt Drudge and
Glenn Beck?
● What will happen to Fox News when the 72-year old Ailes one day departs the organization?
And much more.
Click on the above to listen; and visit
http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll for many more podcasts, videos, and blog posts.