Story highlights Tim Stanley: Roger Ailes mastered for conservatives the media they hated

With Ailes' death, there's a sense that Fox's future is as uncertain as Trump's, he says

Timothy Stanley, a conservative, is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of "Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between LA and DC Revolutionized American Politics." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) Donald Trump wouldn't be President if not for Roger Ailes. The media giant -- who died Thursday at 77 -- revolutionized American politics. First, he rebranded conservatives for the TV age. Then he created a news channel for them to dominate. Love him or loathe him, you inhabit the imagination of Roger Ailes.

Timothy Stanley

Ailes' life reflected a great conservative paradox: The right claims to hate the media, and yet it's often a better master of it than the left. When, as a young producer, Ailes met Richard Nixon backstage at "The Mike Douglas Show" in 1967, Ailes famously told him that if he dismissed TV as a gimmick, then he'd never make it back to the White House. Nixon hired him.

The formula they cooked up was a mix of earthy, small-town values and slick TV advertising: conservatism as a product. Nixon was polished, smothered in makeup and made to deliver tough-minded orations in a soft voice. "If your audience likes you," Ailes explained, "they'll forgive just about everything else you do wrong."

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Ailes and Nixon conquered TV -- and yet the press still got under their skin. Fighting back wasn't enough: Journalists could always, they complained, spin what you said and make you sound like an illiberal thug. So Ailes came to believe that the right had to work around the traditional media by setting up its own operation.

Just as Trump talks about replacing White House press briefings with "written responses for the sake of accuracy," so Ailes once considered providing pro-administration videos for local networks. Later, in 1996, he became the founding CEO of Fox News -- and realized a long-held conservative dream. Now they could provide a right-wing perspective without liberal commentary, what they deemed "fair and balanced."

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