Roger Ailes, the creator and chief of the Fox News Channel, is being forced out of his position atop the conservative media hierarchy in the wake of a series of sexual harassment allegations begun by former Fox personality Gretchen Carlson. While this might seem like just an inside-the-media story, it's much, much more than that.
In fact, Ailes' downfall is one of the most consequential events in years when it comes to the evolution of the conservative movement and even the fate of the Republican Party. This is the end of an era – and we might even look back and say that it was the best thing that's happened to the GOP in a long time.
When Carlson filed suit against Ailes, a bunch of other women came forward as well with similar stories of Ailes trying to force them to have sex with him, often in exchange for career favors, most notably including network star Megyn Kelly. Fox's parent company was recently taken over by longtime owner Rupert Murdoch's two sons, who don't share their father's affection for Ailes, so they seem to have taken this opportunity to force him out.
So why is this so important? It's because Fox News is the epicenter of the conservative media universe, and it in turn shapes the way every Republican from the loftiest elected official to the loneliest viewer sees the political world.
Ailes, who had been both a TV producer and a Republican media consultant before Murdoch tapped him to create the channel two decades ago, was an undeniably brilliant executive, fashioning a network that perfectly balanced two goals: making gobs of money, and serving the interests of the Republican Party as he saw them. There is almost no one who has been more influential in the last two decades in shaping how Republicans see themselves, Democrats and the world.
But during the Obama era, some people have begun to question whether Fox's undeniable power is really serving the movement in the way they thought it was. For many years, Fox was seen as a source of nothing but benefit for the right: It offered a megaphone to disseminate conservative arguments and talking points, a forum for Republican politicians to get exposure, a means of uniting the right around common ideas (instructing everyone on what to be angry about and what to celebrate), and a way of pressuring the mainstream media into adopting a more conservative-friendly outlook.
That last part, however, contained the seeds of the GOP's current dilemma. One of the foundational tenets of the Fox News belief system is not just that the mainstream media are liberally biased, but that their bias is so poisonous and so complete that nothing that you hear on ABC News or read in the New York Times can be trusted. From the moment they began broadcasting right up to today, one Fox News program after another hammers this message into its viewers' heads, again and again and again (as do other conservative media outlets, particularly those on talk radio): Don't believe what you see anywhere else, because the truth can only be found here, where we'll validate everything you already believe and tell you exactly what you want to hear.
As a strategy for audience retention, it's brilliant. The problem is that it creates a bubble through which the world becomes distorted (Julian Sanchez famously applied the philosophical term "epistemic closure" to this phenomenon). Liberals have the same impulses that conservatives have toward seeking and believing information that reinforces their beliefs, but the difference is that conservatives have been taught for 20 years to reject anything that challenges them as by definition a pack of lies.
We saw the consequences in the 2012 election. While polls consistently showed Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney, conservatives could not bring themselves to believe that the public would do anything but reject Obama. Some took to "unskewing" the polls to explain why they were all wrong and Romney was really ahead. On election day, even Romney himself, supposedly a hard-headed empiricist who succeeded in business by trusting what the spreadsheets told him, was shocked by the fact that he lost.
The most dramatic bursting of the conservative bubble came on Fox itself. After the Fox News decision desk (along with the other networks) finally called the election for Obama, Karl Rove insisted on air, his voice growing increasingly desperate, that the election wasn't over because Romney could still win Ohio. A camera then followed Megyn Kelly through the halls at Fox to where their data nerds were crunching numbers, so they could explain to the audience that it really was over. Rove refused to believe it, even as the words "Barack Obama re-elected president" remained on the screen.
But somehow, neither Fox nor conservatives more generally seemed to learn their lesson. It isn't that there's never a dissenting voice on the network, because there is. But even as they struggled to figure out how to deal with the rise of Donald Trump, who obviously threatened the well-being of the Republican Party, they couldn't admit the degree to which they helped create the Trump phenomenon.
Trump's voters are Fox's target demographic, after all. Fox has the oldest audience in cable news, with a median age of 68. Some of their shows skew even older; the median viewer of Bill O'Reilly's show is 72. So the average Fox viewer is an old white guy somewhere in middle America, who sits down every night to shake his fist at the screen while O'Reilly and Hannity tell him that Barack Obama hates America, immigrants are destroying our way of life, Muslims are coming to kill us, and the white man can't catch a break. And then you wonder why Trump rampaged through the primaries, after Republican voters have been marinating in this toxic stew of resentment and anger for so long?
Ailes' departure marks the end of an era, a period when conservative talk radio exploded, cable news came into its own, and the GOP was transformed from a governing party to one that can win in areas where conservatives dominate, whether in Congress or at the state and local level, but can't assemble a national majority to take the White House. The Republican Party, like Fox News, has its ardent fans but can't expand past its base. And even conservatives are beginning to realize it – at least those "establishment" ones the party's voters despise so furiously.
So now there's a chance to remake not only Fox but the entire conservative media. As lucrative as the current model has been as a business proposition, it's showing strain (Rush Limbaugh has been dropped recently from some of his biggest stations and is having trouble finding major advertisers). I don't know much about the Murdoch sons' feelings about politics, but it's unlikely that whoever they choose to be Ailes' replacement will bring the same ideological fervor to his or her job. So it's conceivable that Fox could begin to open up, to try to find some way to keep its viewers while helping them broaden their views of the world.
If they could manage it, that would help their whole party, and might even make it possible for them to elect a president one day. The end of the Ailes era, along with a bracing defeat in the 2016 election, could be just what the party needs to make a new start.
Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect. Distributed by the Washington Post.
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Video: Fox News chairman and chief executive Roger Ailes is in negotiations about exiting the popular news network amid a sexual harassment suit brought forward by former host Gretchen Carlson. (By Erin Patrick O'Connor / The Washington Post):