FAIR AND BALANCED
When Roger Ailes rolled out Fox News, he gave it what he knew would be a provocative motto: “Fair and Balanced.” Nothing he has done since has so inflamed his critics. Fair and balanced is what the mainstream media have always claimed to be. Laying claim to it mocked the pretensions of the establishment. If the slogan had accomplished nothing more, that would have been sufficient for Ailes.
It is an American tradition for media organizations to christen themselves with self-regarding slogans and mission statements. When legendary newsman Adolph Ochs took over the New York Times in 1896, he published a declaration of principles setting forth his goals, including “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” He promised his readers “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The Chicago Tribune vaingloriously dubbed itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” The New York Sun boasted that “It Shines for All.” Not to be outshone, the Baltimore Sun offered “Light for All.” The Los Angeles Times put “Largest Circulation in the West” on its masthead; the Los Angeles Herald Examiner trumped that with “Largest Circulation in the Entire West.” The Longview (Texas) Daily News proclaimed itself “An Independent Democratic Newspaper of the First Class, Unchallenged in Its Field.” In Nevada, the Mason Valley News, with a refreshing sense of proportion, still bills itself “The Only Newspaper in the World That Gives a Damn About Yerington.”
Television network divisions have adopted their own identities. ABC News enables its audience to “See the Whole Picture.” CNN is “The Most Trusted Name in News.” MSNBC “Leans Forward.”
Most subscribers to the Chicago Tribune didn’t actually believe that theirs was the uncontested champion newspaper of the world. CNN, to judge by its ratings, is far from being the most trusted name in news. And not even the most fervent admirers of the New York Times suppose that all the fit news is found in its pages. These are understood to be aspirational statements, not literal fact. They are not ordinarily regarded as scandalous assaults on the truth.
“Fair and balanced” is different. Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the Times, wrote a column about it in May 2012, calling it “a slogan for the suckers” that intentionally masks the fact that Fox News, in its coverage as well as its commentary, is unfair and unbalanced, and outside the norms of conventional journalism. It was not Keller’s first swing at Fox News and its founder. The previous year he told an audience at the National Press Club that “the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general. I think it has contributed to the sense that they are all just, you know, out there with a political agenda, Fox is just more overt about it . . . the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past.” Keller was unaware at the time that the day’s moderator, Marvin Kalb, the founding director of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was a contributor to Fox News. “My problem with Fox News isn’t that it is conservative,” Keller told me in a phone interview in the summer of 2012. “My problem is that it pretends not to be conservative. ‘Trust us, everybody else in the media is liberal’ is the attitude it takes . . . the tenor of Fox News is different.”
Roger Ailes doesn’t disagree that Fox is different from other news organizations. He often illustrates this point with a story about meeting a man at a cocktail party (presumably on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, although the venue changes in retellings) who complains about Fox News coverage. Ailes asks him if he is satisfied with what he sees on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and PBS. The man says he is very satisfied. “Well,” says Ailes, “if they all have the same take and we have a different take, why does that bother you? The last two guys who succeeded in lining up the media on one side were Hitler and Stalin.”
• • •
“The first rule of media bias is selection,” Ailes says. “Most of the media bullshit you about who they are. We don’t. We’re not programming to conservatives, we’re just not eliminating their point of view.”
All news organizations practice editorial selection. “News” is not an objective and empirically measurable outcome, like a baseball score or yesterday’s temperature. As newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann famously noted, the world is full of activity. Editors and gatekeepers operate a searchlight, scanning the globe. When they spot something of interest to them, they pause to illuminate it.
The choice of what to illuminate is not self-evident, but somehow the mainstream media tend to arrive at a consensus about what does and does not constitute a story. This consensus, for national and international stories and cultural issues, has traditionally been set primarily by the New York Times, which is the morning newspaper of almost every network news executive. It is a cardinal principle at Fox to avoid doing this.
“We try to avoid pack journalism and concentrate on what is important to viewers,” says Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news. “A lot of journalists feel that if they all do the same thing in the same way, they are safe. That isn’t the case here. And we are less dependent on the Times.”
“I was in key positions determining the news agenda at ABC and CBS,” says Av Westin. As he sees it, the good old days are gone forever, thanks to Ronald Reagan (who ended government regulation of the airwaves), Rupert Murdoch (who brought British tabloid standards to television), and, of course, Roger Ailes. “Ailes arrived in this environment, and it was clear that he would do anything to get ratings,” he told me.
According to Westin, TV was once in the hands of great, disinterested figures like CBS founder Bill Paley, and operated by public-spirited local station managers. This, of course, is preposterous. The networks were always corporations and they often intervened in the activities of the news division when they saw a threat to their corporate interests. For example, ABC altered a 20/20 story on used car dealer–insurance company scams because some affiliates thought it would offend sponsors, Westin says. Westin assured me that he never had a case in which news management imposed its political point of view. But there was no need. “We all batted from the left side of the plate,” he says. Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” exemplified the myth of the neutral and politically disinterested television journalist. In a generally admiring biography of the avuncular Cronkite, published in mid-2012, historian Douglas Brinkley reveals the extent to which the CBS anchor was an active player in Democratic politics. In the wake of the book, NBC’s Chris Matthews—another Democratic player in those days—confirmed the open secret of pervasive bias in the “golden age” in a speech at the National Press Club.
“The big networks for years had establishment liberalism as their basis of true north,” he said. “That’s what they were—Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow—establishment liberals. Everything was liberal, basically, but it was a point of view and they laughed at Goldwater. Cronkite mocked him with the way he pronounced his name . . . [Cronkite] had a point of view and we all knew his point of view. He was a liberal the whole time he was in television.” Matthews thinks that despite this (or, perhaps, because of it) Uncle Walter was an honest reporter. But Matthews is a liberal himself. If Cronkite and the vast majority of television journalists had been conservatives, right-wingers probably would have considered them honest and fair.
Cronkite was venerated by other television journalists inside CBS News and beyond. His politics were not seen by them as an issue because they were shared. Westin told me that in his many decades in television news, he could recall only two senior journalists whose views ran counter to the prevailing ideology—Howard K. Smith, who supported the war in Vietnam, and Brit Hume, who was suspected of having a cozy relationship with President George H. W. Bush.
Matthews informed his audience that the days of reflexive and authoritative “that’s how it is” TV journalism were over. “It’s too complicated. It’s too many points of view,” he said. “Today those points of view are more transparent, they’re more acknowledged.”
Journalists have a very hard time admitting, or even detecting, their own biases. But Ailes, by providing an alternative take, has made those biases obvious. For example, after Fox News scooped the New York Times by a week on the story of apparent malfeasance at ACORN that led to its bipartisan defunding by Congress, the Times found itself in the embarrassing and revealing position of assigning a journalist to monitor what was being reported by Fox News and other conservative news organizations.
Conservatives consistently and angrily denounce the Times as a left-leaning paper—a charge that is usually dismissed by its senior executives and journalists. “The Times isn’t in anyone’s pocket,” Bill Keller told me. “We did a lot of tough reporting and published a lot of critical comment on Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, and other liberal Democrats.” This is a standard defense, but it misses the point. Of course the New York Times sometimes reports negatively on its favorite public figures and issues. So does Fox News. During the 2012 primary campaign, at least three of the losing Republican candidates accused the network of being in the tank for someone else. When President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, anchorman Shep Smith played the clip and said, “The president of the United States, now in the twenty-first century.” A few minutes later, he asked Bret Baier if the Republican Party would do the same or oppose it, “while sitting very firmly, without much question, on the wrong side of history. . . .” And it was Fox that broke the story about George W. Bush’s drunk-driving record a few days before the 2000 election. “Hell, that could have cost him the presidency, but we had it so we reported it,” Ailes told me.
“One of the things that make Fox different is the way Roger frames stories,” says Rick Kaplan. “Take the issue of choice. On the broadcast networks, if they do a story they will probably center it on young girls and how hard it is for them to find an abortion provider. Roger might do the same story and focus it on adoption and how young girls can arrange one. That’s the sort of conservative angle that broadcast news doesn’t usually pick up on.”
In the spring of 2012, the case against the Times’s liberal bias got an unexpected witness—Arthur Brisbane, the paper’s own public editor. In a column he wrote that spring, Brisbane charged the Times with failing to cover the Obama administration with sufficient tenacity or skepticism (he noted that the newspaper’s senior editors had even written a highly sympathetic biography of the incoming president). And in his valedictory column, at the end of August, Brisbane sharpened his indictment. He wrote:
I . . . noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that the Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz–like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds—a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.
When the Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism—for lack of a better term—that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of the Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in the Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.
Brisbane concluded with praise for what he called Times Nation—loyal readers of the paper online as well as in print, all across the world. But he added a cautionary note. “A just-released Pew Research Center survey found that the Times’s ‘believability rating’ had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’ rating. Can that be good?”
To Roger Ailes, it can be very good indeed.
• • •
A few weeks after Bill Keller publicly assailed “fair and balanced” as “a slogan for the suckers,” Ailes retaliated.
In a speech at Ohio University, he called the Times a “cesspool of bias,” and its reporters “lying scum.” He was reacting to a Times story written more than a year earlier by Russ Buettner about allegations that a senior News Corp executive had encouraged Judith Regan, the mistress of disgraced New York police chief Bernard Kerik, to lie to federal investigators about Kerik, who was being considered for the post of secretary of Homeland Security at the time. Kerik’s patron (and Ailes’s friend) Rudy Giuliani had presidential aspirations. Regan charged in a lawsuit that Ailes advised her to mislead investigators to protect Giuliani. Ailes recalls it differently, and his recollection is backed up by a letter from Regan affirming that he did not try to influence her to lie about Kerik. Ailes thought the article on the matter, which the Times ran prominently, was unfair, and he used the speech in Ohio to settle a score. He later let it be known, via a Fox spokesman, that he regretted the remarks, although he never apologized publicly. He told me that he likes and admires Jill Abramson, the Times’s current editor in chief, whom he has known since she was a reporter covering the 1988 presidential campaign. Abramson wasn’t the editor at the time of the offending article; Bill Keller was.
The Times, for all its flaws, is a great newspaper, self-critical enough to employ aggressive ombudsmen like Brisbane and willing to acknowledge specific mistakes. It is also open to occasional stories that depart from the general tone of the paper. I know this from personal experience. Several years ago I wrote a cover story in the New York Times Magazine on Rush Limbaugh; its lack of venom occasioned howls of protest from Times Nation, but Keller defended it as fair-minded (which it was, if I do say so myself). I never had any doubt that it would be published the way I wrote it. I agree with Keller that the Times has a certain kind of journalistic integrity “embedded in its DNA.” As he put it, “Good reporters see it as part of their job to second-guess assumptions, including their own.”
I heard Ailes say the same thing to a group of journalism students at the University of North Carolina. Of course, he was talking about different assumptions. “It is fine to question your country,” he said. “But if you want to be a good reporter, you have to question the questioning, too.” This sort of jujitsu is what infuriates liberal critics, because Ailes adroitly turns the clichés of their profession against them. Is the press skeptical? Then where is the skepticism about President Obama and his policies? Does it speak truth to power? Who, exactly, do liberals have to fear except the IRS and one another? “The entertainment industry, elite news media, and permanent bureaucracy all have an interest in large government,” says Mark Danner. “This is the basis of Ailes’s point that Fox is moderate and middle-of-the-road. He says the rest of the media are liberal, and there’s a lot of truth to that.”
One of the hallowed clichés of journalism is that the press’s role is to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” The phrase is often misattributed to H. L. Mencken, the most impious and least comforting of American journalists; it was actually coined more than a hundred years ago by the Chicago satirist Finley Peter Dunne, who put it in the mocking mouth of his fictional Irish character, Mr. Dooley:
“Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”
Setting aside Dunne’s fin de siècle snark about newspapers, standing up for the afflicted is a good aspiration—when it is clear who is on the side of the angels, as it was during the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. But very few conflicts in the contemporary world are so morally unambiguous. There are afflicted people on both sides of most political issues. Comfortable ones, too.
Ailes, of course, knows this. “Roger laughs at his critics and he mocks them,” says Chris Cuomo, one of the hosts of ABC’s 20/20, who went to work for Ailes at Fox News in 1996. “The idea that the rest of the media are straight down the line is hypocritical and silly. Does Fox have a different perspective than CNN? Sure. We all pick who and what we feature. But Roger makes sure that both sides get told. When he came out with ‘We report, you decide’ [another foundational Ailes slogan], I loved it. He came right at the criticism. Roger played the media for fools when he was a political consultant. He knows how they work. He doesn’t pander to them and he isn’t afraid of them.”
From the outset, Ailes wanted to accomplish two things: He wanted a network that would appeal to conservatives and that had plausible deniability to the charge that it was a conservative organ. Given the state of American television journalism at the time, it wasn’t hard to do, at least in comparison to the industry standard. In 1996, you could count the number of conservative talking heads and news commentators on one hand. PBS had William Buckley; CNN used Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan (who did double duty on the McLaughlin Group syndicated talk fest); ABC empaneled George Will on its Sunday morning interview program. A few conservative commentators did guest spots (Ailes did some himself on NBC), but they were almost never on without a rebuttal by a liberal (and often more than one).
This imbalance presented Ailes with two golden opportunities. First, he was able to scoop up most of the really good conservative talent—Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Brit Hume, and Bill O’Reilly. At the same time, he hired lots of mainstream journalists and liberal commentators, whom he put under exclusive contract, including Susan Estrich, Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, David Corn, and others. They took hits from their colleagues for consorting with the enemy, but Fox actually paid its contributors well—an attraction to talking heads of any ideological persuasion—and they argued that they were, by going on Fox, changing conservative minds. Some left-wing critics charged that Ailes hired weak progressives and threw them to the right-wing wolves; Al Franken dismissed Colmes as “loofah-ing Roger Ailes in his personal steam room.” Ailes took the stance that he hired bona fide liberals; if they couldn’t make their points effectively, that wasn’t his fault.
One offshoot of Fox’s success is that it has paved the way for right-wing commentators on other networks. They are still in the minority—“there are more liberals on Fox than all the networks combined have conservatives,” says Brit Hume—but it is now considered necessary to have somebody articulating conservative viewpoints. In an interesting turnabout, hard-core right-wingers now dismiss David Brooks (New York Times, PBS, National Public Radio), Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker (who had a short-lived debate show with Eliot Spitzer on CNN), and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough as fainthearted faux conservatives.
Fox, in the meantime, has continued to stockpile liberals, twenty-four at last count. Among them are former Clinton adviser Kirsten Powers, who often appears on Special Report’s “Fox All-Star” panel; former Democratic senator Evan Bayh of Indiana; and Joe Trippi, the political consultant who managed Howard Dean’s presidential run. Of course, the game is rigged. Powers is outnumbered two to one by conservative fellow panelists. For every Joe Trippi there is a Dick Morris and a Karl Rove. Bayh is an eloquent centrist, but he lacks the star power of Sarah Palin. But Ailes didn’t invent these rules; he simply turns them against his competition and in doing so he has given conservatives what they never had on any network: a home court advantage.
It’s not that Ailes has achieved (or wants to achieve) real ideological or partisan parity. His liberals are there by and large for the same reason conservatives are at the other networks, as foils and tokens. It may be true, too, as Rick Kaplan says, that the conservatives on other networks are better than Fox’s liberals. That’s a matter of taste, and not the point. Ailes has made it disreputable to exclude right-wing analysts and commentators, or to frame the news too much. “Roger widened the agenda,” says Dick Wald. “It would not be better if the three networks and Bill Moyers were the only choices. Journalism is better for having opposing points of view.”
Fox may or may not be internally balanced. But Ailes is right when he says, “Sometimes we are the balance.”
• • •
“I don’t think Rupert Murdoch ever told Roger what to do,” says Av Westin. “He wouldn’t have hired Roger if he didn’t know that Roger was on the same page.” Westin is absolutely right. “Roger has strong views and vice versa,” Rupert Murdoch told me the first time we spoke. “He is longer and wiser in politics than I, but we broadly share the same views. There was nothing we had to agree on before I took him on board.” This is a very concise formulation of the normal proprietor-editor relationship.
It also describes the relationship between Roger Ailes and the six thousand or so people who report to him. Time and again, Fox journalists assured me that Roger Ailes has never told them what to say on the air or how to report a story. This is something you hear not only at Fox, but from self-respecting journalists throughout the media. And it is true, up to a point.
News organizations work like every other kind of hierarchic bureaucracy. “Let’s face it,” says Westin, “we all get our jobs through peer group selection. The people who were in charge of promotions moved me along. I pitched the right stories. And who will you pick [for a promotion]? Someone out of the same mold.” In other words, if you hire and promote people who share the general views and ethos of their workplace and are keen enough to see where the lines are, there is no need to tell them what to say or, in this case, report.
Unlike most other news organizations, Ailes has not had the luxury of choosing his personnel from a large pool of like-minded candidates. Polls taken over the last forty years consistently show that the great majority of journalists identify as liberals and vote for Democrats in national elections. Fox hires conservative Republicans, but there are not enough of them to stock a network. “Most of our producers are liberals,” says Michael Clemente, the vice president in charge of news. He was the executive producer of ABC’s World News Tonight during Peter Jennings’s tenure as anchorman and, before that, a senior Washington producer for CNN. His pedigree is strictly establishment—he worked with David Brinkley and Barbara Walters, and describes himself as nonpolitical. The reason why Fox has so many liberal producers isn’t ideological or political; it is a matter of necessity. “We’re in New York, after all,” he says. Fox also has a fair number of reporters who lean to the left in their personal views. It is fair to say that Fox News is more to the right than its staff, but it turns out that it is also closer to the left than Roger Ailes.
• • •
Tim Groseclose is a professor of political science and economics at UCLA. He is an Okie with the country twang and conservative views to prove it, and he also happens to be one of the best-trained and most highly regarded social scientists in the country. Groseclose, working with Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame and James Snyder of Harvard, devised a method for measuring the political quotient (PQ) of politicians. The general idea is to take congressional members and place them on a liberal-conservative continuum based on the ratings of the Americans for Democratic Action, a Democratic-leaning organization. For example, Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint are near zero—the most conservative. Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank are close to 100. President Obama, according to his estimates, is about 88. Not surprisingly, the average voter is close to 50.
Next, Groseclose computes the slant quotients of news outlets. To do that, you take the on-the-record speeches of congressmen and senators and examine which think-tank sources and other authorities they quote approvingly. Then you compare these with the think-tank sources and other authorities quoted approvingly in news stories. This gives you a slant quotient (SQ) for the aggregate news stories in each media organization. The average Fox show had, in 2004, an SQ of about 40, which places the network about 10 points right of center. All the other television news programs Groseclose examined were left of center (i.e., had an SQ greater than 50). PBS NewsHour was the most moderate, with an SQ of 55. The nightly news shows on the broadcast networks all hover around 65. This makes intuitive sense: Mainstream network news shows differ mainly in the personality of the anchors.
Groseclose then attempts to compare the leanings of mainstream journalists to the content of their reporting. Surveys consistently show that the great majority of mainstream reporters vote for the Democratic candidate in national elections. This was very likely the case in 2008, a supposition President Obama acknowledged at his first White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he laughingly told the audience that “most of you covered me, all of you voted for me. Apologies to the Fox table.”
Professor Groseclose puts the PQ of the average political reporter for a mainstream organization at 95, very close to the president’s, but the slant quotient of their news organizations, he finds, was closer to 65. In other words, the conventions of journalism meant their reporting was roughly 30 points nearer to the center than their own views.
Groseclose’s analysis relies on data that predate the second Bush term and the Obama administration. I asked him if he has detected a change. “Based on my casual observation, the slant of Fox between 2004 and 2008 was no different than its slant before 2004,” he says. “In 2009, however, it seemed to have moved slightly to the right. The biggest change was that the Hannity & Colmes show became the Hannity show. I’d say the change represented something like 25–35 points on my slant quotient scale. Otherwise, I don’t think there has been much of a change at Fox. Greta Van Susteren’s show, again based on my casual observation, changed from being slightly left-leaning centrist toward being slightly right-leaning centrist. Shep Smith’s show seems to have moved the opposite—from slightly right-leaning centrist to slightly left-leaning centrist. Special Report—whether hosted by Brit Hume or Bret Baier—remained right-leaning centrist. If anything, Baier seems to have moved the show slightly closer to the center [i.e., leftward] than it was with Hume.”
In his book, Left Turn, Groseclose provides a ten-question test that enables anyone to arrive at a personal political quotient. I tried it myself and came up with a score of 55, which puts me somewhere between Republican moderate Chris Shays of Connecticut and Blue Dog Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. I invited Roger Ailes to take the test as well. He hesitated—his political views are too nuanced, he said, to show up correctly on a test—but eventually he agreed. His score was 25—fifteen points to the right of the news coverage on Fox, somewhere between Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. Ailes didn’t disagree. “I am more conservative than the network,” he said. “That’s true. And I do influence things here. But I don’t dictate.”
• • •
Ailes often complains that his views are misrepresented by journalists who haven’t spoken to him. “In forty years, no reporter has ever actually asked me what my position is on any issue,” he says. So I asked what Ailes would do if he were president. “I could never be elected,” he said. “I couldn’t follow my own advice. Duck, weave, that’s what a candidate needs to do. That’s not me. I’d probably start calling people jerks. So, I wouldn’t be a viable candidate.”
He also admitted that he wouldn’t be suited to holding a political office. As a teenager he was chosen to represent Warren G. Harding High School at the Buckeye Boys State, an annual assembly. “I was elected president pro tem of the senate, and I found it very boring,” he said. “In a negotiation I can always sit and outwait the other guy, but I have a very short attention span for things that irritate me.”
So the White House is out of the question. But, as a hypothetical, what would an Ailes administration look like? “I’d start by repealing some of the laws we have that are unnecessary or worse,” he said. “The country doesn’t need more laws and regulation, it needs less.”
“Social Security and Medicare are more or less grandfathered in,” he says, but he would get rid of the Affordable Care Act and slash new federal entitlement budgets. “Teaching people dependency is a sin,” he told me. There is only one entitlement Americans need—the opportunity to live in this country.
Under President Ailes, taxes would fall and budgets would be slashed. “You can’t get anywhere bargaining over spending programs with the Democrats,” he says. “Whatever you offer, it isn’t enough. Say three billion and they demand nine. When you say no, we don’t have the money, they portray themselves as generous and us as stingy. That’s a trap we shouldn’t fall into.”
Unions, which Ailes considers job killers, would not have a friend in the White House. Neither would what he calls “extreme” environmentalists. “I want clean water and clean air and conservation,” he says, “but that’s not what extreme environmentalists are all about. For them it is a religion. They believe in trees and animals, not God.”
When it comes to foreign policy, Ailes is a hawk who believes in supporting friends all the way and spending whatever is needed to preserve American military supremacy. “Strength breeds peace,” he says. “Nobody walks into a bar and picks a fight with the toughest-looking guy in the place,” he told me. At the same time, he thinks his party has a tendency to underestimate the value of diplomacy. “There are deals that can be made, and should. It was a mistake to use the phrase ‘for us or against us.’ Of course, you maintain your core policy principles. But within each one of these is a broad range of practical conservative solutions. I’d hesitate to say this at a conservative gathering, but I think conservatives are sometimes too rigid.”
As an example of an exercise in mutual self-interest, he offers Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to help the United States bring down the Assad regime in Syria. “Putin is angry. He thinks the United States doesn’t take him seriously or treat Russia as a major player. Okay, fine, that’s how he feels. If I were president, I’d get in a room with him and say, ‘Look at the slaughter going on in Syria. You can stop it. Do it, and I’ll see to it that you get all the credit. I’ll tell the world it was you who saved the innocent children of Syria from slaughter. You’ll be an international hero. You’ll go down in history.’ Hell, Putin would go to bed thinking, ‘That’s not a bad offer.’ There will still be plenty of other issues I’d have with Russia. But instead of looking for one huge deal that settles everything, you take a piece of the problem and solve it. Give an incentive for good behavior. Show the other guy his self-interest. Everybody has an ego. Everybody needs dignity. And what does it cost? You get what you want and you give up nothing.”
Give-and-take is a principle Ailes lives by, a politician’s way of looking at the world. There is no chance that he will ever put it into practice in the White House. But it is an insight into how he conducts his business in the only house that really matters to him, the House of Ailes.