Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint For Fox News Revealed
John Cook - Contributor,
Gawker
Jun 30, 2011, 3:41 PM
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 detailing Ailes' work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries.
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...
Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint For Fox News Revealed