Chapo Trap House - Seeking a Fren Episode 2 Teaser - Roger Ailes Origins

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Felix documents the rise of future Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in this preview clip from episode 2 of his series “Seeking A Fren for the End of The World”. The full episode and rest of the series are available for subscribers at patreon.com/chapotraphouse.

It's a good question. What in the world had The Rite been doing since the Ted Koppels and James Bakers of the world left the scene? What had gone so wrong to get them to this point? The answer is simple. It got what it wanted. A large part of this, as Koppel correctly keyed in on, is Fox News. Although The Rite's journey to becoming what it is today involves far more than just

one infamous network, it provides a good place to start. While Rupert Murdoch wouldn't launch his soon-to-be-juggernot TV network until late 1996, more than a decade and a half after the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, the right-wing elite had been dreaming of a staunchly conservative news network for decades leading up to that point. This had always been less of a strict political necessity than it had been something that they desired to massage their perpetually wounded egos, which means that it could have only originated from one place, the Nixon White House.

Nixon just wasn't satisfied with a press that helped grant him overwhelmingly positive approval ratings until he sent a group of young men with white boozy fades and dreams of being born early enough to defect to the Wehrmacht to try and rig McGovern's turtleneck collection with Semtex. The administration would relentlessly seek ways to put outright pro-Nixon propaganda on TV, laying the foundation for everything modern right-wing media would eventually become. These ideas would start small at first. In June 1970, incensed by a CBS report critical of the administration's failings in the Vietnam

War, the Nixon administration would look into covertly producing a pro-war documentary to get their message out. On this team of budding TV scientists was a strapping young hemophiliac and Haagen-Dazs enthusiast named Roger Ailes, who had found his place in Nixon World as the 1968 campaign's chief evangelist and executive producer for all television activities. Ailes himself had been one of the liberal establishment's public enemies for quite some time. His career has been covered extensively in just about every center left publication on earth.

So here's a brief highlight reel of his life's best moments. Roger's father stood by the bed. Jump, Roger, jump. Catch me, father. You got to remember, boy, never trust anyone. On the campaign trail with Nixon, Roger made some bold comments about Mr. Nixon's running mate Spiro Agnew. How's your book going, Joe?

Not bad. How's the campaign going? Oh, we're doing alright. If we could only get someone to play hide the Greek. What? On the Bush campaign, Roger had a reputation for making some real racial attack ads. But one ad went a little too far. So Roger, what's this new ad called?

Bestiality. Uhhhh... Just watch it. In 1970, Governor Michael Dukakis introduced legislation in Massachusetts to repeal the ban on sodomy and bestiality. What do you think? Roger, we can't air this. People are already on our ass about the Willie Horton thing. These negative ads will ruin us. It's not negative, it's comparative. Later, when Roger moved to Fox News, he had some concerns about his safety. I want bomb-proof glass in my executive suite, you hear me? What? Why? Homosexual activists are going to be down there everyday protesting.

Who knows what they might do? Roger, there's no such thing as bomb-proof glass. One time, Roger got in an argument with his own vice president, Brian Lewis. You demand loyalty from your people, but you never show it. That's when Roger threw a water bottle at Lewis and it went and hit the wall. I missed you on purpose. Roger had some strange thoughts about immigration. This is what he told Richard Shea.

Here's what I would do if I were in charge of the SEALs. I would send them to the border. I would make it a requirement that you have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would make it a requirement that you have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would have to bring home a dead body. But it was in 1989 when Roger and a group of security guards started scrapping with a group of AIDS activists. He took me to a stairwell and dragged me down the steps, slamming my head on every single one. I'm at the point now where I'm suffering from brain issues

from all the concussions I got. I'm slowly losing nerve functions in my hands and legs. Ow! Sorry, I have to head out. I cut my hand, now I might die. Anyway, despite Nixon's personal hatred of television because of how it reminded the public of how gross he was, he decided to let the 28 year old talk show producer onto his team early in the campaign

to find some ways to make him marketable. To do so, Ailes would be forced to bend all the rules, doing away with parochial concepts like debates and setting up stage town halls with pre-screened attendees, coach questions, mandatory applause, and panels with strict racial breakdowns. For Ailes, there wasn't even a pretension that these charades were actually in the public interest. As he once said to a fellow team member, fuck him, it's not a press conference, the audience

is part of the show, and that's the whole point. It's a television show. Our television show. Villainous monologues aside, it's not exactly clear how much these endeavors actually benefited Nixon. While Al's blatantly cynical approach of treating presidential politics like an episode of Gunsmoke would have him pinned by liberals as a mastermind of sleaze before his 30th birthday and caused even Nixon himself to remark that it was a shame that a man had to use gimmicks like this to get elected, there's reason to think that his strategy

of hiding his candidate away hurt Nixon down the stretch. While he began the general election campaign with a very large lead, it would collapse by the end of October, ultimately reducing him to committing treason to narrowly win. But regardless, Nixon was the president. Ailes was in the White House and although his early proposal of state-sponsored propaganda would be shot down, he would never stop dreaming. That same summer in 1970, various Nixon aides would put together a 14-page memo detailing a plan for putting the GOP on TV news.

The memo's author is unnamed, but it contained handwritten notes from Ailes directed towards H.R. Halderman, and it contained a quote that is somehow not from adbusters. For 200 years, the newspaper front page dominated public thinking. In the last 20 years, that picture has changed. Today, television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. People are lazy.

With television, you sit, watch, and listen. The thinking is done for you. This would all come to a head three years later in 1973 with the founding of the creatively named Television News Inc. While there had been a long history of right-wing publishing houses, right-wing radio shows, right-wing paperback books with titles like Hanukkah and the White House, Eisenhower and the Jewing of a Presidency, and even right-wing talk shows, TVN was somehow different. TVN was an attempt to make a conservative news show, one that presented itself as another

CBS or BBC, but was actually as right wing as the Manion Forum or National Review. The program was funded almost entirely by Beers billionaire Joseph Kors, and much like Paul Weyrich's later efforts with NET, the network was besieged by internal strife and a complete lack of profitability or even vision. Weyrich himself was an unofficial advisor for TVN, and he was furious at the attempts at neutrality by their then hosts and journalists. A total internal reshuffling that kicked out experienced newsmen and replaced them with loyalists was, somehow, not enough to turn this fledgling station into a national powerhouse.

Ailes was brought in in 1974 to fix the fledgling station, and his primary solution seemed to be making the workplace culture even more ideologically rigid and backbiting. A lot of TVN's ideas were generally ahead of their time. Presenting as an apolitical news organization without the liberal bias of the mainstream media, it even described itself as fair and balanced, and transmitting news stories over AT&T phone lines instead of the usual film chips. Unfortunately, what in hindsight seems ahead of its time often comes across as stupid and a waste of money in the moment, as the AT&T plan was too expensive

for most local TV stations and all the attempts at supposed neutrality only got them a vicious hit piece in the Columbia Journalism Review. A failed attempt to convert it to the world's first satellite news service only set more money on fire. In October 1975, with nothing to show for their work but tens of millions down the drain and a furious Joe Corz, TVN shut down after only two years on air. Els had already quit days prior and went on to produce a documentary for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It would take two more decades to realize Els's vision. He spent the 80s as one of the most vicious political consultants alive. His track record during the Reagan years was undeniable. In 1984, he simultaneously did work for Ronald Reagan's 49-state winning re-election bid, while also winning Mitch McConnell his first Senate election by masterminding an 11th-hour victory against Walter Huntsman. For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com slash Chapo Trap House. illegal, race-baiting carpet bombing of his inept opponent.