Roger Ailes turned news into a lifestyle choice
Ailes conceived Fox News, which launched in 1996, to compete with CNN and the three broadcast networks by targeting a large underserved audience of conservative middle Americans who didn't like the way the world was rapidly moving away from the one they knew in the 1950s.
I don't mind that Fox News is a conservative channel any more than I mind that the newer MSNBC tilts left, as long as they clearly separate straight news from opinion. Unfortunately, that separation occasionally gets blurred.
Some Fox News anchors gave more credibility than was deserved to Trump's unfounded claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Same with Sarah Palin's false talking point that Obama's health care plan would include "death panels."
Fox has largely avoided much reporting on Trump's Russia scandal, choosing instead to spend airtime on an alleged link between email leaks to WikiLeaks and the 2016 slaying of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, a suspicion that authorities say is unfounded.
No, I don't mind a conservative channel. I do mind misleading the public.
Yet pressing Fox News to stick to facts misses a significant side of the network's interaction with politics in the age of Trump. "Viewers don't want to be informed," Chet Collier, one of the founders of Fox News, is quoted as saying in Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the network's chief. "Viewers want to feel informed."
Indeed, Fox is the most-watched cable news network, yet some surveys suggest that people who rely on Fox as their primary information source know less about current events than people who watch no news at all. Fox disputes those findings in much the same way that Trump denounces inconvenient stories as "fake news."
In both Fox's viewership and Trump core supporters, belief in what Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway called "alternative facts" is just one more social bonding agent that defines the political right's information tribe.
Thanks largely to Ailes, TV news has become more than news. It's a lifestyle choice.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
