Roger Ailes, who shaped the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and then became a dominant, often-intimidating force in American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News, which he created with Rupert Murdoch’s money and guided for two decades until he was forced out in a sexual predation scandal, died on Thursday. He was 77.
No cause of death was given in an announcement by Mr. Ailes’s wife, Elizabeth, but he was a hemophiliac long plagued by obesity and arthritis.
“I am profoundly sad and heartbroken to report that my husband, Roger Ailes, passed away this morning,” Ms. Ailes wrote in the statement. “Roger was a loving husband to me, to his son Zachary, and a loyal friend to many.”
“Fair and balanced” was Mr. Ailes’s defining phrase for Fox News, along with another slogan: “We report. You decide.” Though routinely mocked by liberal critics, who regarded the network as decidedly unfair and imbalanced, those words amounted to an article of faith for Mr. Ailes. “If we look conservative,” he said, “it’s because the other guys are so far to the left.” In his mordant humor, CNN stood for Clinton News Network and CBS for Communist Broadcasting System. What Fox News did, he said, was apply a necessary corrective.
From its debut on Oct. 7, 1996, the network under his tutelage did its share of straightforward reporting but also unmistakably filtered major news stories through a conservative lens. Evening programming, which embodied the Fox News brand, was dominated by right-wing commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who hurled opinions and vented resentments with a pugnacity that reflected their boss’s own combative manner.
As the network’s chairman and chief executive, Mr. Ailes was widely feared, particularly by conservative politicians who sought his favor. He cultivated a swaggering persona, accentuated by bursts of obscenity-laced anger. Once, he became so enraged that he punched a hole in the wall of a control room.
“I don’t ignore anything,” he acknowledged in a 2003 New Yorker profile. “Somebody gets in my face, I get in their face.” Years earlier, Lee Atwater, whose take-no-prisoners approach to politics matched that of Mr. Ailes when they worked together on George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, described his colleague as having “two speeds: attack and destroy.”
Both speeds were evident at the Ailes-run Fox News. For loyal viewers, it was the go-to network to hear repeatedly about the moral failings of Bill and Hillary Clinton, questions about Barack Obama’s birthplace, doubts about the patriotism of American Muslims, grumblings about the war ostensibly being waged on Christmas and warnings about “death panels” that would supposedly flourish under the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Fox News embraced the American flag as if it were its own, and was then an uninhibited booster of the Iraq War and an unabashed critic of those who opposed it.
The network also made itself a haven for Republicans who had fallen from political grace and hoped to restart their careers, among them Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. On Mr. Hannity’s show, it was effectively a public-relations vehicle for one presidential candidate who made it to the top: Donald J. Trump.
Even more than he embraced political combat, Mr. Ailes keenly understood television and its reliance on attention-grabbing flourishes. He learned the medium’s emotional impact in the 1960s as the young producer of “The Mike Douglas Show,” a syndicated daytime variety program. To hold people’s interest, “you have to be punchy and graphic in your conversation,” he wrote in a 1988 book, “You Are the Message.”
He put that instinct to effective use, and to personal profit, after he left the Douglas show in 1968 to devote himself to political stagecraft. Across more than two decades, he devised media strategies for several dozen political campaigns, including the winning presidential candidacies of Richard M. Nixon in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Mr. Bush in 1988. In 2016, he informally advised the triumphant Trump campaign.
At Mr. Ailes’s Fox, the news was delivered with eye-catching graphics and whooshing sound effects. Female broadcasters tended to be attractive blondes encouraged to show more than a little leg. “Look, there’s a certain element of the melding with show business or entertainment,” he told Broadcasting & Cable magazine in 2003. “Entertainment and news should always be separate, but you should walk right up to the line and get your toe on it.”
His methods served the network well. In January 2002, barely five years after its birth, Fox passed the well-established CNN as the most-watched cable news network. It stayed No. 1, reinforcing Mr. Ailes’s political influence. Power made him anxious about his personal safety. Convinced that enemies like Al Qaeda had him in their cross hairs, he installed elaborate security measures at work and at home.
At the end of his tenure, the network had an average daily viewership of 2 million, more than CNN and the left-leaning MSNBC combined. Its audience skewed white, male and old, the median age approaching 70. But they were passionate viewers. Their fidelity produced billion-dollar profits and made Fox News an indispensable component of the Murdoch empire, 21st Century Fox.
Although an Ailes admirer, Mr. Murdoch reluctantly concluded in the summer of 2016 that his news chief had to go after a former network anchor, Gretchen Carlson, brought a lawsuit charging Mr. Ailes with sexual harassment. Her action set in motion a cascade of allegations from women who reported unwanted groping and demands for sex by him, along with what some of them described as an overall culture of misogyny. The scandal also enveloped Mr. O’Reilly, the network’s top star, whose employment at Fox News was abruptly ended last month.
Mr. O’Reilly denied the charges of sexual impropriety, as did Mr. Ailes. But Mr. Ailes was finished at Fox, and walked away with a payout reportedly worth $40 million.
Those were not the first accusations of their kind. They went back at least to the early 1990s, when Mr. Ailes returned to television full time.
