NewsBeat

8 NewsBeat October 2018 It's Time for the Press to Stop Complaining — And to Start Fighting Back I I've devoted much of my professional life to the istudy of political campaigns, not as a historian or an academic but as a reporter and an analyst. I thought I'd seen it all, from the bizarre upset that handed a professional wrestler the governorship of Minnesota to the California recall that gave us the Governator to candidates who die but stay on the ballot and win. But there's a new kind of campaign underway, one that most of my colleagues and I have never publicly reported on, never fully analyzed, and never fully acknowledged: the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of the American news media. Bashing the media for political gain isn't new, and neither is manipulating the media to support or oppose a cause. These practices are at least as old as the Gutenberg press. But antipathy toward the media right now has risen to a level I've never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and '60s. Then, as now, that hatred was artificially stoked by people who found that it could deliver them some combination of fame, wealth, and power. Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people. They are thriving financially by exploiting the very same free-press umbrella they seem determined to undermine. Much of the current hand-wringing about this rise in press bashing and delegitimization has been focused on the president, who — as every reporter in America sadly knows — has declared the press the "enemy of the people." But, like much else in the Trump era, Donald Trump didn't start this fire; he's only spread it to a potentially more dangerous place. The modern campaign against the American press corps has its roots in the Nixon era. President Richard Nixon's angry foot soldiers continued his fight against the media even after he left office. Roger Ailes, who went on to help found Fox News, was the most important of those figures. His sustained assault on the press created the conditions that would allow a president to surround himself with aides who argue for "alternative facts," and announce that "truth isn't truth." Without Ailes, a man of Trump's background and character could never have won. Roger Ailes was the godfather of the Trump presidency. Nixon's acolytes blamed the press for drumming a good man out of office. From their perspective, his crimes were no different from the misdeeds of the Kennedys or Lyndon B. Johnson — but only Nixon was held to account. Did they blame this on Nixon? On the voters? No, they blamed the stars of the Watergate drama, the heroes of All the President's Men. They blamed the media. Enter Roger Ailes. He first made his name by taking credit for Nixon's rise in Joe McGinniss's campaign book, The Selling of the President 1968. Ailes was a media genius who understood better than most how to use television to move people. There's a fine line between motivating people through TV messages and simply manipulating them. Ailes's gift, and the secret to his success, was his comfort in plunging across that line and embracing the role of TV manipulator. He made his name as a political TV-ad man, one of the pioneers of the field, but he couldn't help dabbling in news and talk. As a network programmer, Ailes excelled at matching a mood with an audience. From Mike Douglas to Limbaugh to, later, Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, Ailes had a gift for promoting engaging, smart, man-of-the-people talkers. In the early '90s, while he was president of CNBC, Ailes had a hunch that an evening lineup catering to a culturally conservative audience would thrive. He wanted to give his theory a chance, but he was passed over for the leadership of the network's new channel, MSNBC. Enter By CHUCK TODD — Contributing editor at "The Atlantic" and moderator of "Meet the Press" A nearly 50-year campaign of vilification, inspired by Fox News's Roger Ailes, has left many Americans distrustful of media outlets. Now, journalists need to speak up for their work. FRED PROUSER / REUTERS

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