Roger Ailes, a former US presidential adviser who started the Fox News Channel to promote a Republican agenda and built it into the most-watched US cable news network before resigning amid sexual harassment allegations, has died. He was 77.
Ailes started Fox News in 1996 at the behest of News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch as an alternative to what they saw as a media landscape dominated by liberals. Although marketed as “fair and balanced”, critics of the channel accused it of acting as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.
“It’s an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it’s broadcast as ‘the news’,” said Robert Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University and author of The Age of Reagan, according to a 2011 Rolling Stone article. “That’s why Ailes is a genius. He’s combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way – one that blurs the distinction between the two.”
Fox grew in popularity, eclipsing rivals CNN and MSNBC. Fox New’s 2014 prime-time audience of 1.7 million households was more than the combined number of viewers of the other two, according to Pew Research Centre.
In July 2016, Ailes was ousted as head of Fox News after a sexual harassment lawsuit was filed by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson, who claimed she was fired for refusing his sexual advances. Ailes said Carlson’s allegations were false and her lawsuit was in retaliation for the network’s decision not to renew her contract.