Chessum/Supervision. Photo courtesy of Magnolia.
Roger Ailes made a career stoking racism on Fox News and as Nixon’s communications adviser.
Director Alexis Bloom’s Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes is a gripping documentary about what’s ailing America’s news media. It’s essential viewing for anyone intrigued by how the media manipulating minds via fear mongering.
Bloom previously produced We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, made in 2013 before Julian Assange was accused of helping the Russians steal the election for Trump. She also co-helmed the 2017 showbiz biopic Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.
Ailes, the jowly, portly former hatchet man for Nixon, the GOP, and Fox News, physically resembled Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, at one point, the theme music for the “Master of Suspense’s” TV series is played to underscore how Ailes likewise milked fear to manipulate a mass audience. But Bloom’s film cites another cinematic inspiration for Ailes’s life work: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi agitprop film Triumph of the Will. (“Deutschland, Deutschland uber Ailes”?)
Divide and Conquer reveals that the Ohio-born Ailes, who died in 2017, was a hemophiliac, which thwarted his military aspirations but did nothing to blunt his ambition.
Ailes went from producing The Mike Douglas Show, then America’s only network afternoon talk show, to convincing Richard Nixon when he appeared as a guest on the program to hire him as a “media adviser” for his 1968 presidential campaign. As Joe McGinniss wrote in The Selling of the President, this media makeover repackaged and rebranded Nixon, peddling him like a product and largely securing his successful candidacy. (The film doesn’t mention the role Tricky Dick’s sabotaging of LBJ’s proposed Vietnam peace talks played in Nixon’s beating Democrat Hubert Humphrey.)
In 1968, Ailes originated the idea of a pro-Republican television network, twenty-five years before it came to fruition. In the meantime, riding the Nixon victory wave, Ailes became a hired gun consultant for GOP politicians running for office, such as Ronald Reagan and Rudolph Giuliani.
But perhaps the starkest example of Ailes’ style, recalled in a film fortuitously released just days after the death of George H.W. Bush, is the infamous Willie Horton TV ad. This fear-mongering commercial charged that Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, allowed a black man convicted of murder out of prison on weekends, enabling him to assault and rape whites. Although Ailes did not directly create this infamous spot, Joe Conason recently reported that Ailes Communications associates were involved in the Horton ad. And other racist appeals created by Ailes helped Bush overcome frontrunner Dukakis’s lead and defeat him in the 1988 presidential election.
In keeping with the channel’s obsession with sex, it was the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal, and Fox’s lurid, sensationalistic coverage of it, that put Fox News on the map.
Ailes finally got the opportunity to launch his pro-GOP cable channel in 1993 when America's Talking hit the airwaves. Ironically, with Bill Gates’ involvement, the channel morphed into what is now liberal MSNBC. In 1996, Australian rightwing media mogul Rupert Murdoch created the Fox “News” Channel, with Ailes at its helm.
Through copious clips from Fox and other outlets of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Shepard Smith and others, Bloom’s one hour, forty-seven-minute documentary does a deep dive into Fox News, as well as Ailes’ private world. The film is the best exposé on Fox since Robert Greenwald’s 2004 Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. It describes the cable network’s sexualized culture, featuring female anchors and correspondents who’d prove to be the abusive Ailes’ undoing.
In keeping with the channel’s obsession with sex, it was the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal, and Fox’s lurid, sensationalistic coverage of it, that put Fox News on the map—and eventually at the top of cable news ratings. Clinton’s DNA on his ex-intern’s blue dress became Fox’s “money shot.” As commentators observe in the doc: “We were kicking the networks’ asses” and “We were there to rile up the crazies.”
Among Divide and Conquer’s talking heads are former Fox personalities like Glenn Beck, who opens the documentary and recurs throughout it, and journalists Alisyn Camerota and David Shuster.
The documentary dubs Ailes a “kingmaker,” chronicling his crowning of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. But unlike his political consultant stints for these and other GOP candidates, Ailes worked his black magic for the current White House occupant not as a spinmeister or media adviser but as CEO and chairman of the top rated cable “news” channel.
Former Fox employee Joe Muto declares: “Trump is such a ‘Fox-y’ character that if he didn’t exist, Fox would have had to invent him.” Muto, an ex-associate producer for The O’Reilly Factor, added that with his anti-Obama birther-ism and other outrageous accusations, Trump was such a familiar presence on Fox that it made the businessman and reality TV star “palatable to Republicans.”
Well into his seventies, when Ailes was at the top of his game, he was reportedly asked what still made him run and the puppetmaster replied he still had a President to pick. In Divide and Conquer, reporter Sarah Ellison says it’s “impossible to think that Trump would have been nominated” were it not for the role of Fox News” during the 2016 presidential primary. Commentators today sarcastically call Fox “Trump TV.”
The film describes Ailes as “a profoundly paranoid person.” Fearing Osama bin Laden plotted to assassinate him, Ailes had bulletproof glass and a steel reinforced door installed in his office at Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas, where he kept a handgun in his desk. (Ailes was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm in the 1970s.) However, it wasn’t an Al Qaeda terrorist who brought Roger Ailes down. It was a former Miss America.
Divide and Conquer chronicles the downfall of the House of Ailes due to a series of sexual harassment scandals by Ailes and company that, according to the film, have cost Fox an astounding $163 million since 2004. Roger operated as the raj of his media Xanadu, exacting sexual favors from aspiring on air anchors and various corporate underlings.
All that ended when beauty pageant winner-turned-newswoman Gretchen Carlson blew the whistle on her abusive boss, eventually receiving a $20 million settlement from the network. At least fourteen other “Foxy” females, including Megyn Kelly and Tamara Holder—who calls Ailes a “predator”—received settlements. Bill O’Reilly’s alleged harassment, which alone cost $32 million to settle, is also depicted.
Less than a year after being ousted in July 2016 from Fox due to his serial harassing, it was Roger-and-out for Ailes. Deprived of his own throne, the disgraced onetime kingmaker faded out at Palm Beach days after he turned seventy-seven.
Although Divide and Conquer covers much ground, it overlooks that Ailes’s replacement at Fox, Bill Shine, was himself forced out for allegedly abetting sexual harassment—only to be snapped up by Trump’s White House, thus demonstrating another Fox-Trump link. The documentary also doesn’t depict the #MeToo movement which has spearheaded resistance to the type of abuse that ran rampant at Fox and toppled many powerful harassers, especially in media.
Perhaps coyly, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, who similarly fell from grace, are glimpsed in clips.
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, from A&E IndieFilms and Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, is being released by Magnolia Pictures in theaters, on Demand, on iTunes and on Amazon Prime Video December 7.