NewsBeat

October 2018 NewsBeat 9 Rupert Murdoch. The mogul bought into Ailes's theory, and in 1996 they launched Fox News with the slogan "Fair and balanced." From the very beginning, Ailes signaled that Fox News would offer an alternative voice, splitting with the conventions of television journalism. Take the word balanced. It sounded harmless enough. But how does one balance facts? A reporting-driven news organization might promise to be accurate, or honest, or comprehensive, or to report stories for an underserved community. But Ailes wasn't building a reporting-driven news organization. The promise to be "balanced" was a coded pledge to offer alternative explanations, putting commentary ahead of reporting; it was an attack on the integrity of the rest of the media. Fox intended to build its brand the same way Ailes had built the brands of political candidates: by making the public hate the other choice more. Ailes's greatest gift as a political strategist lay not in making his clients more electable, but in making their opponents unelectable. His last formal presidential campaign was in 1988. Then– Vice President George H. W. Bush was on his way to defeat when Ailes helped orchestrate a devastating campaign against Michael Dukakis, exploiting a series of superficial issues that touched many voters' cultural beliefs and fears about everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to furloughs for violent felons. Ailes helped destroy Dukakis by making him seem an other to many Americans. Fox News adopted a similar strategy, rarely showcasing its own reporting or journalism. There are some great journalists at Fox, including Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, and Shep Smith, but it's not an organization that emphasizes journalism. Instead, Ailes created an organization that focuses on attacking the "liberal media" whose "liberal bias" was ruining America. Almost any big story that was potentially devastating to a conservative was "balanced" with some form of whataboutism. The Ailes construction has been so effective that these days, I often get mail from viewers who say: Now that you've focused on all of President Trump's misdeeds, you are biased if you don't dedicate the same amount of time to Hillary Clinton's misdeeds. It seems completely lost on this segment of the population that one person is the leader of the free world, and the other is a retiree living in the suburbs of New York City. Because journalists report on new and controversial ideas all the time, it's not uncommon for us to be accused of championing an idea — think of same- sex marriage — that some members of our audience find objectionable. Letting folks know that a movement is afoot, and documenting its successes and failures, is our job. But Ailes exploited the public's lack of knowledge of journalistic conventions, portraying reports about social change as advocacy for such change. He played up cultural fears, creating the mythology of a biased press. Reporters, I fully acknowledge, bring their own biases to their work. The questions they ask, and the stories they pursue, are shaped by things as simple as geography. I grew up in Miami; I follow Cuban politics more closely than many other Americans did. As a result, when I covered the White House, I was more likely than my colleagues to ask questions about Cuba. A New York–based reporter may approach reporting on guns, or on evangelical Christianity, differently than a reporter in Pensacola, Florida. The charge of media bias can encompass a great many different problems. Critics, for example, may be pointing to the way that certain journalists pay more attention to some issues than to others, or complaining about the unquestioned assumptions reflected in journalists' work. These are real issues, and most journalists labor to correct them. At the other extreme, critics may be accusing journalists of having deliberately and consciously shaped their reporting to serve some political end. That sort of overt bias is far rarer. Ironically, the best example of this kind of bias airs regularly in prime time on Fox News. But this was the genius of Roger Ailes. He didn't sweat the nuance; he exploited it. Errors of omission and commission, inadvertent inattention and willful disregard, unconscious assumptions and deliberate distortions — Ailes collapsed all of it into the single charge of bias. And what did we reporters do in the face of this cable onslaught that would eventually turn into a social-media virus and lead us to the election of the most fact-free presidential candidate in American history? Nothing. We did nothing, because we were trained to say nothing. Good reporters know that they have to let the chips fall where they may, and that criticism comes with the gig. We know that the loudest squealers are usually the ones we've exposed doing something untoward — and that eventually they'll get theirs. "Don't engage" is a phrase I've heard internally at NBC over the decade I've been here. And "Don't engage" was a mantra that I actually believed in. I embraced it. On most days, I still want to believe that eventually, the truth will matter. That eventually, folks will see through the silly name-calling and recognize good reporting. In fact, we not only failed to defend our work in real time from this onslaught; we helped accelerate the campaign to delegitimize the American press corps. From unforced errors by high-profile anchors to the biggest missed news story of the 21st century — the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — we have handed critics some lethal ammunition. There's not a serious journalist alive who hasn't had one of those "gulp" moments when you realize that you really messed up. But serious journalists correct the record, serious journalistic organizations allow themselves to be held to account, own up to mistakes, and learn from them so they can do a better job the next time. I'm fully aware that some entity will try to tarnish this piece simply because I work at a news organization that, yes — gasp — has made mistakes. Here's what comforts me: The record is there for all to see. The same can't be said for the manipulators who aren't playing by any set of serious journalistic rules. The American press corps finds itself on the ropes because it allowed a nearly 50-year campaign of attacks inspired by the chair of Fox News to go unanswered. If you hear something over and over again, you start to believe it, particularly if the charge is unrebutted. The Trump team now keeps pounding this message, compounding the challenge. And the president faces little penalty with his voters, no matter how disparagingly he talks about the press corps; it's precisely what Ailes conditioned them to believe. (Continued on next page)

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