There was something almost quaint about America in 1993. The Internet was barely out of the cot; the Cold War was over; Kurt Cobain was alive; and Bill Clinton was still viewed as a faithful husband. Even the Israel-Palestine conflict looked fixable.
But in Washington, the seeds of today’s political discontent were already being sown. Two years after Clinton had swept to power, the Republicans took both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Never again, battle-hardened Republicans promised to themselves, would they stay locked out of power for that long.
In its place spawned a new grassroots conservatism that was angry and uncompromising, finding its voice in a conservative “under-media”, as Andrew Breitbart termed it, that included Drudge Report (1995), Fox (1996) and Newsmax (1997). But it was Fox, which first aired 25 years ago today, that dominated, providing an outlet to a white Middle America that felt neglected and ignored by Washington and the established media.
Politics was indeed becoming angrier, but a deeper, spiritual malaise had also been spreading beneath the surface. The cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil price crisis chipped away at the post-war building blocks of American society, particularly in the heartlands where wages were stagnating and jobs were moving offshore. By 1994, trust in the Government sunk to its lowest point ever.
This was the environment into which Fox was born. Its benefactor, Rupert Murdoch, was so desperate to seize it that he offered to air Fox for free — and even paid cable companies $20 a subscriber.
But to fully understand how Fox became the news empire that it is today, you need to understand the man central to the entire operation. His name was not Rupert Murdoch, but Roger Ailes. The Chairman, as he became known, was a grotesque figure whose jowls would expand like a toad’s vocal sac when he was irate (an employee once put a frame around a hole in the wall and wrote: “Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.”).
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