Colby Hall, writing for the very buzzy Mediaite, "Roger Ailes is the Most Powerful Political Figure in America." As Hall puts it:
In discussing the power and influence of Ailes, one has to start with the ratings – as we reported this Monday, FNC is consistently beating all other networks combined. Prime time has long been the province of Fox’s dominance, but now that Glenn Beck is getting O’Reilly like numbers at 5pm, it’s safe to say that they are just getting started.
But then Hall goes further:
But the power of Fox News goes beyond total eyeballs — their influence is actually shaping policy and taking down federal officials in an unprecedented manner. First, there is the Health Care debate – no outlet has had more influence than Fox, who went so far as to claim that the Obama Administration was attacking FNC.
OK, fair enough. Hall makes his case well; read the whole post here.
And in fact, The Cable Gamer has been thinking similar thoughts for some time: It's not just Ailes; cable news has, to a great extent, supplanted politics--that's a big reason I started this blog! On the left, or on the right, or in between, figures such as Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, or Bill O'Reilly are simply bigger presences in people's lives, and stronger shapers of the debate, than ordinary politicians. Let's face it: a news-consuming American will see a lot more of Keith, or Sean, or Bill--or Glenn, or Larry, or Chris, or Shepard, than they will of any politician.
But OK, back to Roger Ailes. Ask yourself: Assuming that Colby Hall is correct in saying that Ailes is not only the most powerful person in cable, but the most powerful person in politics, how did that happen? It didn't happen because Ailes just put on some hot personalities, although certainly helped.
But hot personalities are all over the place; one can't build a radio channel, to say nothing of a TV channel, on the basis just of hot personalities. There's no Rush Limbaugh Channel, no Mark Levin Channel, and so on. Those two, and others, are compelling media presences, but they are themselves, they are not part of a team, not part of a brand.
Fox, by contrast is a brand. It is much bigger than the sum of its Talent. That is, if O'Reilly , or Hannity, or Beck, or anyone else were to quit Fox, they would be sorely missed, but the channel would go on. Since 1996, Ailes has put together a whole operation, literally, a network. And for 13 years, he has steered it past the the rocks and icebergs and pitfalls (to mix a few metaphors there) that have befallen other networks.
Remember CNN's hideously flawed 1998 reporton Operation Tailwind? Or MSNBC's brief hire of Michael Savage? Or MSNBC's equally brief hires of Alan Keyes and Phil Donahue? Or CNN's recent fiasco, "reporting" on non-existent shooting in the Potomac River on 9-11? Fox has had none of those kinds of problems--and if it ever had, the MSM would have crucified Fox, and quite possibly driven Fox off the air.
Meanwhile, the workaday Talent at Fox--Jon Scott, Eric Shawn, Martha McCallum, Jane Skinner, Rick Leventhal, Harris Faulkner, among scores--cover the news, fair and balanced and unafraid, and they never have had to make a retraction. Which is not to say that there haven't been mistakes, and even clarifications, as when Fox distanced itself from Glenn Beck's assertion, on "Fox & Friends," that President Obama was "a racist." The words might have made Beck hotter than ever, but Fox was right to make it clear that Beck was speaking only for himself on that one. Indeed, that whole episode serves to remind that Fox is more than the sum of its parts--there are behind-the-scenes people, from executives to producers to technicians, who are making the whole place work.
But the major weight falls on Ailes. He's the one who has to deal with the cable carriers, the city of New York, and the FCC down in Washington --and oh yes, Congressional committees and presidential administrations who might not like him or Fox or Rupert Murdoch too much.
It's Ailes' ability to put together all of Fox, and to keep it meshing, that makes FNC so powerful. And so, in turn, that's what makes Ailes so powerful.
Because let's face it: If it weren't for Fox, we'd have no real way of knowing, or knowing about Ailes.
Here's a question to all your Cable Gamers: Have you ever even seen Roger Ailes? Oh, sure, he does interviews every so often, but he is never on TV. (He did an interview show for awhile when he ran CNBC, but that was 15 years ago; he wrote a book, You Are The Message, but that was almost 20 years ago.) He has been the subject of more than a few profiles and even book biographies, many of them critical, but so far as I can tell, he never cooperated with any of those profiles, so we still know very little about who he really is.
Obviously Ailes has chosen to sublimate his personality into Fox News. And that's why it really should be called the Ailes News Channel. It won't ever be called that, of course, but whoever it was that said that an institution is just the lengthened shadow of a man had it exactly right.
