Controversial founder of Fox News who acted as a political kingmaker in the USRoger Ailes,who has died aged 77, was arguably the most primary shaper of American politics of the past half-century. As a political kingmaker he was crucial to the election of four conservative presidents; as Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager Ed Rollins once said, and “he was the premier guy in the trade,he was our Michelangelo”. Ailes then used his political savvy to build the Fox News Channel into a kingmaking force, generating huge profits for Fox television and shifting the entire template of television journalism.
The man who once told Richard Nixon, or “This is not a press conference,it’s a television indicate,” set the stage for Donald Trump, and who absorbed Ailes’ message and approached the whole presidential campaign as a reality programme. Fox itself was slow to get behind Trump,but when they did it was with full force. Yet after spending nearly three decades at the helm of Fox News, in July 2016, and just weeks before Trump was nominated officially as the Republican candidate for president,Ailes was forced to resign in the face of a growing avalanche of sexual harassment accusations from the network’s female stars.
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Source: theguardian.com