Worst American Birthdays, vol. 49

Roger Eugene Ailes, president at the odious Fox News Network, was born 69 years ago today in Warren, Ohio. (In a remarkable convergence of douchebaggery, Warren would also host the unfortunate birth of Hugh Hewitt, who was coughed into the world sixteen years later.)

A broadcasting major at Ohio University, Alies moved into a career as a television producer during the 1960s, ultimately landing a position with The Mike Douglas Show, which he helped turn into a national success. After striking up a conversation with Richard Nixon — who appeared on the show in 1967 along with a boa constrictor-wielding belly dancer named Little Egypt — Alies was offered a job with Nixon’s presidential campaign. He accepted the position, divorced his wife, and turned to the task of marketing Nixon (as Joe McGinness famously described it) “like a can of peas” to a nation that has never quite recovered from the sale. Working with other young conservatives like Pat Buchanan to remake the GOP into a juggernaut of spite, Ailes helped refine the campaign’s cynical, two-pronged strategy of expressing open contempt for (vaguely-defined) “elites” and somewhat more coded loathing for poor black urban denizens.

At the same time, Ailes achieved what nearly every mortal assumed to be an impossible goal: making Dick Nixon seem genial. His specialty was producing campaign events that employed what he called the “arena concept” — a forerunner of the now-ubiquitous town hall format — that simulated regional campaign events, bringing Nixon together with loyal audiences and panels of voters who served the candidate with questions that were predictably unchallenging. Difficult questions, if they were posed, usually came from reporters or professors, two groups that Nixon and his advisers were, in any event, eager to portray as liberal elites who were unpatriotic and insensitive to mainstream American values — and thus, by extension, to Nixon himself.

While Ailes did not invent so much as mediate this novel right-wing formula, he did so for a succession of political clients including Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, the latter of whom benefited from the historically grotesque management of Lee Atwater. And when Ailes dragged his jowly carcass back to television during the 1990s, he brought his Nixonian paranoia and anti-liberal contempt with him. From CNBC, Ailes moved to the short-lived and idiotic “America’s Talking” network before agreeing to head up a new cable news channel that would eventually distinguish itself as the viewing destination of choice for Americans who preferred to be misinformed about nearly everything. From its inception in 1996, Fox News and Roger Ailes rode with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the 2000 Florida recount, the War on Terror and the candidacy and election of Barack Obama — to the pinnacle of the cable news market, demonstrating along the way the possibilities for success in a profession one actually loathes.