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Roger Ailes: Obama is 'trying to get everybody to hate each other'

Fox News president Roger Ailes believes President Obama "likes to divide people into groups."

"He’s too busy getting the middle class to hate rich people, blacks to hate whites. He is busy trying to get everybody to hate each other," Ailes tells The New Republic's Eliza Gray in an interview for this week's issue.

(Watch: Behind the Curtain: GOP, Fox News political purge)

But the interview isn't about Obama. It's about Ailes, and his hopes to market Fox News to Hispanics, a group alienated by right-wing media and the Republican party, but one that -- according to oft-repeated conventional wisdom about Hispanic values -- can be brought back into the fold.

“I happen to think that the Latino audience is an essentially traditional audience and will go to Fox News for traditional American values,” Ailes tells Gray. It's just that "Republicans haven’t used the right language... They keep talking about illegal immigration.”

Of course, Fox News is the principle perpetrator in that regard. Gray cites a recent National Hispanic Media Coalition survey, which found “a consistent pattern whereby Fox News audiences are indeed more likely to hold negative stereotypes about Latinos.”

More to the point, Fox News isn't alone in trying to reach the Hispanic market. Even if Ailes can course-correct his own network's reputation, he'll have to compete with a number of competitors, most notably the new ABC News/Univision joint-venture, which is first 24-hour English-language cable news network targeted toward Hispanics.

That Ailes is trying to fashion Fox News as an inclusive network while accusing Obama of divisiveness is an irony not lost on Gray. (Remember this?)

"It’s an unexpected plea from the Fox News CEO considering his impressive record of provocation," she writes. "But recently, 'getting along' has become an imperative for the conservative movement."