{"id":44340,"date":"2017-05-18T15:56:20","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T15:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=44340"},"modified":"2018-05-20T07:08:53","modified_gmt":"2018-05-20T07:08:53","slug":"tramp-the-dirt-down-roger-ailes-started-by-giving-us-nixon-and-ended-by-giving-us-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/tramp-the-dirt-down-roger-ailes-started-by-giving-us-nixon-and-ended-by-giving-us-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Tramp the Dirt Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/tsotp2.jpg\" alt=\"tsotp2\" width=\"213\" height=\"239\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-44344\" \/><br \/>\nRoger Ailes made his public debut in the early pages of Joe McGinniss\u2019 landmark book <i>The Selling of the President 1968<\/i>, a brilliant first-hand study of how filmmaking and advertising techniques permanently altered the political landscape during Nixon\u2019s landslide election that year. McGinniss argues that the postwar, television-era thinking of Marshall McLuhan and other pioneers of media study (whose work is so quaint by modern, post-MTV, post-Twitter standards that mentioning McLuhan even in a historical context has gone permanently out of fashion) did such damage to the fabric of American political discourse that recovery is (to McGinniss\u2019 Watergate-era thinking) probably impossible. And Ailes is right in the middle of it, a television producer coming off of talk television:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Roger Ailes, the executive producer of the Mike Douglas Show, was hired to produce the one-hour programs [the famous Nixon question-and-answer series of neo-Town Halls, now made available on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UC-aB7UkyJBcAhbAWUNFUAaQ\">YouTube<\/a> by the Nixon Foundation]. Ailes was 28 years old. He had started as a prop boy on the Douglas show in 1965 and was running it within three years. [\u2026] Richard Nixon had been a guest on the show in the fall of 1967. While waiting to go on, he fell into conversation with Roger Ailes.<br \/>\n\u201cIt\u2019s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,\u201d Nixon said.<br \/>\n\u201cTelevision is not a gimmick,\u201d Ailes said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>McGinniss\u2019 eyewitness account elaborates in detail on how Nixon\u2019s victory was achieved through the strategic replacement of dry statistics and policy positions with painstakingly crafted short film pieces and interview segments, all designed to convey Nixon\u2019s \u201cqualities\u201d through the blatant application of cutting-edge advertising techniques. (Remember that Don Draper\u2019s fictional firm worked on the unsuccessful 1960 Nixon campaign during the early seasons of <i>Mad Men<\/i>.) At the end of McGinniss\u2019 narrative (as Nixon triumphs), old-school journalists Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton are \u201chaving a sad drink together,\u201d having completed their obituaries for Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey: \u201cWe are two nations of equal size,\u201d Kempton wrote; \u201cRichard Nixon\u2019s is white, Protestant, breathes clean air and advances towards middle age. Hubert Humphrey\u2019s nation is everything else, whatever is black, most of which breathes polluted air, pretty much what is young [\u2026] There seems no place larger than Peoria from which [Nixon] has not been beaten back; he is the President of every place in this country that does not have a bookstore\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Almost fifty years later, as bookstores, too, are fading into the past, the continued legacy of that first television-based campaign Ailes masterminded is, needless to say, not just still with us but dominant and triumphant. As Leni Riefenstahl did with movie cameras and Joseph Goebbels did with radio, so Ailes did with television\u2014a lost-wax technique whereby delicate political meanings are melted away and the remaining hollow mold of \u201cTV news\u201d filled with the immutable bronze of emotions and impressions. The chain of causality that leads from Nixon to Reagan (and the force of Peggy Noonan\u2019s rhetoric) to George W. Bush to Donald Trump is assembled from links like Cokie Roberts\u2019 assertion that Hillary Clinton\u2019s transgressions, though imaginary, were \u201cout there\u201d (meaning, being discussed by the public) and therefore warranted further journalistic scrutiny; by Karl Rove\u2019s infamous declaration that \u201can empire\u201d like the United States \u201cmakes its own reality;\u201d by Frank Bruni and others insisting that Bush won the debates with Gore by \u201cappearing Presidential\u201d (rather than sighing \u201carrogantly\u201d as did Gore); and finally back to Ailes himself, in his curtain call as Trump\u2019s most vital supporter throughout 2016 (and, of course, as fellow serial abuser of women).<\/p>\n<p>A subtext of <i>Citizen Kane<\/i> was the replacement of the Hearst empire (newspapers)\u2014represented by Kane\u2014with the Luce empire (newsreels; the \u201cpicture magazine\u201d etc.)\u2014represented by Thompson, the reporter whom we follow through the movie. Neither of them are particularly good at getting to the truth, but both are influential in a sub-rational way (\u201cYou supply the prose poems; I\u2019ll supply the war,\u201d as Kane tells his reporter covering the nonexistent Cuban war, repeating Hearst\u2019s alleged words) and the newsreel that we see provides a near-operatic context for the events of the day that supplants the prose-poetry of the \u201cyellow\u201d newspapers. In the post-Nixon era, we have seen something similar: the elemental force of opinion-based TV totally supplanting the politics of newspapers and conventional \u201cevening news\u201d programs. Trump is the ultimate result of this trend, not just because he, himself, is so obviously immune to any kind of printed matter but because the movement he created has been trained to disregard journalism\u2014and, by extension, truth itself\u2014entirely.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s fitting that Ailes exits the stage at a moment so similar to when he entered, a crossroads of activism, turmoil, corruption and unrest that will almost certainly alter the political and social landscape of the decades to come. Let\u2019s hope that Trump is Ailes\u2019 requiem; that the cynical and corrosive manipulation of image and feeling to the detriment of reason and meaning is buried along with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Roger Ailes made his public debut in the early pages of Joe McGinniss\u2019 landmark book The Selling of the President 1968, a brilliant first-hand study of how filmmaking and advertising techniques permanently altered the political landscape during Nixon\u2019s landslide election that year. McGinniss argues that the postwar, television-era thinking of Marshall McLuhan and other pioneers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44340"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44340"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44551,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44340\/revisions\/44551"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}