There is an art to persuading people these days. In a time when technology is advancing with each passing hour, only one man has been able to reach into millions of homes and turn fiction into fact with the same ease as he freezes water into ice: Roger Ailes.
While most know him as the creator and "Chairman" of Fox News, Ailes has a disturbing history of right-wing extremism and paranoia. He was always drawn to television, even as a little boy, and rose quickly to the rank of executive producer on The Mike Douglas Show by the age of 25. His big break came in 1967 when he met former Vice-President Richard Nixon backstage of the show, telling Nixon that "the camera doesn't like you." Nixon responded, "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected." Ailes was passionate about TV, and shot back, "Television is not a gimmick. And if you think it is, you'll lose again." It was at that moment that Roger Ailes became Nixon's executive producer of television, in charge of recreating the man's image in order to appeal to voters.
During Nixon's campaign, Ailes began to blur the line between journalism and politics. Ailes knew that Nixon was a disaster on television. He also believed that the media was anti-Republican. So, he decided to go for the throat, as it were, and circumvent the press - go straight to the people. By forcing reporters to watch the events of, say, a "town hall meeting" backstage, Ailes had found a way to subtly reduce the freedom of the press to a mere privilege. Nixon was able to answer to voters with staged questions instead of on-the-fly "gotcha" questions from the media.
