Roger Ailes Funny News Roger Ailes Giraffe
Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes Gave Us Fox. These Shows Try to Make Sense of It All.
"The Loudest Voice," "Ink" and "Succession" map out the influential world the two men created.
Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe) begins narrating his own story, Showtime's "The Loudest Voice," as he lies dead on the floor. I mean, why wouldn't he?
Ailes, who died in 2017, brayed and bullied his way to the center of media and politics. He built a noise machine, Fox News, that amplified conservatism and then devoured it. Even after he was forced out at Fox for sexual harassment, his worldview continued to blare from it.
What, you thought a little thing like dying would shut Roger Ailes up?
Ailes, a onetime campaign operative, programmed our current political environment. Rupert Murdoch, the Fox mogul, bankrolled Ailes's furious vision in America while imposing his own in Britain. Together, they created a smash-mouth version of conservatism that married plutocracy with populism, reactionary politics with showbiz values. They exploited fear, prejudice and, in Ailes's case, women.
Their decades of work paid off in 2016: in Britain with the success of the tabloid-fired Brexit campaign, and in America with the election of Donald Trump, the reality-TV businessman and "Fox & Friends" regular who bragged about grabbing women's genitals (and who defended Ailes, his adviser in the general-election debates, after his sex-abuse disgrace). President Trump relied on a fervent, immovable base that Ailes laid the foundation for, with tools supplied by Murdoch.
We are living in their world, even if Ailes has departed it. Now television and theater are trying to make sense of how that world got built.
American Horror Story
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"The Loudest Voice," the seven-episode series beginning June 30 on Showtime, is direct, damning and about as subtle as, well, Fox News. An ominous soundtrack follows Ailes (Crowe, plumped up and balded down) as if he were a monster from the deep. When Fox goes on air at the end of the first episode, we see an eerily glowing matrix of screens forming a Big Brother-ish American flag. This is less a biopic than a creature feature.
Based on Gabriel Sherman's comprehensive bio-takedown, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," the series skips over Ailes's early years: working on "The Mike Douglas Show," developing Richard Nixon's 1968 TV strategy, becoming a Republican media guru. Instead, we meet him in the mid-90s, pushed out the door as president of CNBC and plotting his comeback.
Ailes is a true believer. He believes in conservatism, believes the rest of the media is its enemy, believes it is his calling to help his side "reclaim the real America."
But he's also a TV guy. (Or a "Television Man," the Talking Heads song that is one of several nudging musical cues here.) He knows that viewers respond to emotion, outrage, flash. And he knows that cable TV is different from TV in the broadcast-network era. You don't try to make things widely palatable to everyone anymore. You need "the loyalty of the passionate few," he says. "In politics, it's called turning out the base."
Fox News would be the continuation of politics by other means. It put a telegenic sheen on a conservative theme Richard Hofstadter identified in 1964, in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics": the belief that "America has largely been taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it."
This is not just a performance for Ailes, who in "Voice" is so paranoid he could be fitted for a tinfoil business suit. Even the solidly right-wing Murdoch (Simon McBurney) is unsettled by his underling's fervor. At one point, Ailes orders an investigation of Murdoch's wife, whom he suspects of being a Chinese agent.
But he gets ratings, and with them, power. He intuits that Sept. 11 will unleash a cry for war (and counsels the Bush administration on leveraging that blood lust toward Iraq). He knows that Barack Hussein Obama — he insists on Fox's using the middle name, three guesses why — will create an existential panic in his viewers. He understands, as Donald Trump eventually will, that his people want enemies and they want total war. Whatever fever burns in Ailes, it's contagious.
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Crowe gives Ailes more East Coast bluster than his actual speaking voice had ; he sounds a little like a more-educated Archie Bunker, looks a little like Peter Griffin in a suit. There's a menace to him, but also the theatricality of a man whose entire career was understanding the power of media performance. Are you not infotained?
Ailes is most plainly monstrous in his harassment and abuse of women, in the office and outside it. "Voice" (in the three episodes I've seen) tells that story mostly through his decades-long victimization of Laurie Luhn (Annabelle Wallis), a former Fox booker whom he blackmails into, essentially, sex slavery. Their scenes — Ailes making Luhn dance, ordering her to her knees, video-recording her as a means of control — are horrifying, bordering on lurid.
What there's surprisingly little of in "Voice" is Fox News itself, as mainlined by viewers. There's ample behind-the-scenes (Ailes implementing the news crawl the morning of 9/11; wishing Sean Hannity would "engage his brain before he talks"; dismissing one Bill O'Reilly harassment accusation after another).
But we're left to imagine what the audience responded to on air — programming that was full of the paranoia and rage that pumped through Ailes's veins but was also charged with excitement. In Sherman's book, Ailes visits his childhood home in Ohio, and the woman living there tells him she watches Fox because its hosts "were having more fun" than other channels'.
She doesn't say that in the version of Ailes's visit we get in the series. But we do see Ailes give a demagoguing speech to the locals, after Obama's election, that demonizes immigrants coming to steal people's jobs and ends with, "Together, we can make America great again!"
The line is so on the nose it could dislocate your septum. But as Ailes might say, it speaks to a larger truth: Fox News was Trump before Trump was. Whatever America we're living in now, Roger Ailes got there years ago.
The British Invasion
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But he didn't get there alone. His origin story has gotten its own origin story on Broadway in the form of James Graham's "Ink," a play about Rupert Murdoch (Bertie Carvel, who recently won a Tony for the role) and his opening sally into Fleet Street by buying The Sun in 1969.
Where "Loudest Voice" gives us Ailes as a huffing, predatory elder, "Ink" finds Murdoch — to quote the un-Foxian "Hamilton" — young, scrappy and hungry. Carvel plays him like a spiteful elf, an angry, deviously witty Aussie interloper who arrives with a bag of tricks and another one of cash, buying the decrepit tabloid and hiring a frustrated journalist, Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), to edit it.
Murdoch wants success and money, but above all he wants revenge. Like Ailes, and like the American president the two of them would help create, he's powered by resentment of the elites who scorned him, writing him off as a "sheep farmer."
And like those other men, Murdoch turned his personal vendetta into a sales pitch — the same kind of resentment you can still hear every night in the prep-school rabble-rousing of Tucker Carlson. They think they're better than you. They want to improve you, feed you your vegetables. Not me: I like you just the way you are. I think your appetites are good and correct and I will set the table for you to gorge, and if they don't like that, the hell with them.
So The Sun, under Lamb, gets a jaunty, sleazy makeover. Gossip! Scandal! Contests! (Also, a pinch of xenophobia.) And above all, its trademark "Page 3 Girls," the models whose bikinis got smaller and smaller and finally vanished, along with the lead of The Sun's competitors.
The nucleus of Murdoch's conservative empire, we see, started in part by co-opting the counterculture spirit of rebellion and free love. (Or if not free love, at least sex for 5 pence .)
"Ink" is not mostly, overtly, about politics other than the cultural kind. But that too is foreshadowing. In American television, the creature that Murdoch built has two legs. Fox News thrives, in part, on animosity toward a liberal and libertine secular culture, to which the company's Hollywood properties — Fox network among them — have been major contributors. It's a perpetual-motion machine of outrage.
Just so, in "Ink" the cheeky mass-appeal formula of The Sun assembled an audience that then provided a power base for Murdoch's turn into a conservative political influencer.
Late in the play, Lamb and Murdoch, now lords of the British newsstand, are discussing the future. The boss says he's interested in cultivating the Conservative leadership, including an up-and-comer named Margaret Thatcher. Lamb is skeptical; The Sun's working-class readership is not exactly a natural fit for the Tories.
Murdoch — whose entire enterprise was rationalized with "Give the people what they want," a truism Ailes repeats in "Voice" — answers that actually, people don't really know what they want. You coax them along. You give them the sugar they crave. And once they're hooked, you can steer them somewhere else, as long as you do it with the same pizazz you used to sell topless models and horse-racing scandals.
Anyway, Murdoch says, that's just one idea. He also has his eye on America. A newspaper. Maybe TV.
A Fox by Another Name
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Smash cut to New York City, half a century later, where, in HBO's black comedy "Succession," the oligarchic Roy family has achieved a version of young Murdoch's dream: an empire — spanning cruise ships to right-wing media — built by its patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox).
The show's makers have said that many media dynasties, not only the Murdochs, were an inspiration. Squint at the thrice-married Logan and his thirsty heirs and you might see the first family as well. But Rupert is clearly first among equals here, both in the holdings of the Waystar Royco company and in the children and in-laws jockeying to some day take it over.
If "Ink" is the past and "The Loudest Voice" brings us to the present, "Succession" is a sketch of the near future. It's a media world "Game of Thrones" in which no one has survived but the Lannisters. The war is over, money won. In the ensuing mop-up operation, your choices are among characters with repulsive principles, shaky principles or no principles.
The corrupt heart of the show may be Tom ( Matthew Macfadyen ), the fiancé of Logan's daughter. Being rich, Tom says, is "like being a superhero, only better."
"You get to do what you want," he goes on, "the authorities can't really touch you, you get to wear a costume, but it's designed by Armani."
He says all this over a dinner that includes ortolan, a songbird crunched up, bones, head and all, under the veil of a towel, to hide the act from God. (There was an ortolan feast in "Billions" too — it's the national bird of late capitalism.) It's a meal whose savor is its transgressiveness, whose consumption involves a ritual of shame — albeit a vestigial one, since in this world, if you can feel the shame, you can't afford the dinner.
Beyond the vicious humor and cruelty signaling, it's the generational dynamics of "Succession" that feel most current. It's the story of an aging, reactionary ruler refusing to let go even as his body and mental faculties nudge him, as if he were juiced up with cultural Viagra.
Over the first season, Logan's practical-minded son, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), led a failed coup against him. In the season finale, Kendall, having killed his passenger in a reckless car accident, crawls back to Logan, who takes him back, cooing, "You're my boy, you're my No. 1 boy."
It's a chilling reverse-Oedipal moment; you can practically see Logan draw strength vampirically from his son's diminution. Kendall is his boy, and he remains the man — his voice, his values, his way of seeing the world will not yield.
Does that make the Roys, and Waystar Royco, a stand-in for Fox? Maybe. Or maybe "fox" is the wrong zoological metaphor. Men like Logan Roy — like Roger Ailes, like Rupert Murdoch — see themselves as lions. And a lion will roar, in his youth, in his dotage and long after he is buried.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/arts/television/rupert-murdoch-roger-ailes-fox.html