People Die, Ideas Don’t
Roger Alies died recently. For 20 years, until he was forced out, along with eventually Bill O’Rielly recently due to sexual harassment settlements and accusations, he was the titular head of Fox News Channel and the most polarizing man in the media next to his boss Ruppert Murdoch.
Sinclair Broadcast Group is the largest owner of TV stations in the United States. Earlier this month, they announced plans to acquire Tribune Media (WGN-America) and 70 stations owned by Tribune. The acquisition would make Sinclair the largest media company in the country and put them in position, especially with the flagship and viewership of WGN-America, to become the successor to FOX News.
If Tribune and Sinclair come to terms, it would mark 70 percent penetration in the country and with WGN-A they will be positioned to surpass FNC as the conservative giant politically. They have been known to be extremely conservative, so much so that Mrs. Iselin would be considered a liberal by their standards.
People die, ideas don’t. Alies, who started out producing the Mike Douglas Show in the 1960’s, worked for the Nixon campaign in 1968 and for a while in the Trickster’s White House, had plans to start a “Conservative Broadcast Network” in the early 1970’s to combat the liberal news bias, as he saw it. Alies, like Nixon, was a brilliant but deeply flawed paranoid. His office at FOX was supposedly bomb-proof. He was a hemophiliac as well.
His plans to start a network to rival CBS (Cronkite) NBC (Chancellor) and ABC (Jennings) during the 1970’s never came to fruition, but the ascension of Ronald Reagan in 1980, ushering in a new generation of conservative “values” —( “Trickle-down economics, anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”) and the arrival of cable TV and 24-hour programming began the fragmenting and reshaping of the American political landscape as we knew it.
Murdoch's founding of FOX in 1987 to middling success but for one show, “Married with Children,” a raunchy sitcom that drew the ire of everyone from Jerry Falwell to a suburban Detroit housewife named Terry Rakolta, who sought to cancel the show alltogether, even though the show was a satire of your typical television family — the show’s working title when it first started production was “We’re Not The Cosby’s” — showed the conservative movement’s power during those years.
Still, it took a bold move by Murdoch to bring his network into the lives of everyday Americans. His foray into the NFL made the big boys at the Big Three stand up and take note. In obtaining the NFC package from CBS, it caused a seismic shift in broadcasting and put him in position to start, much as he had already done in Britain and elsewhere, a 24-hour news channel. The profits he made from his first years with the NFL allowed him to start FOX News.
Alies had been in and out of television in the 20-plus years after leaving Nixon. He was at “America’s Talking,” the predecessor to MSNBC, when he was approached to run the fledgling network. He took it and quickly found a receptive audience, already on the warpath because of a Democratic president and his wife.
With a primetime lineup anchored by the bombastic O’Reilly, Fox News Channel, with rare exception, was the number one cable news network. But then came last summer and the revealing of a culture of harassment by the boss towards the women both on-the-air, like Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, contributors and guests, Alies resigned. Then, a couple months ago, O’Reilly.
Where this leaves FOX is anyone’s guess, but Sinclair might be the heir to the kingdom. “Might be” being the key phrase here because people are getting sick and tired of paying $200 to watch TV. The 1984 Cable Act allowed both networks and providers to “bundle” programming. It basically means that you get Lifetime, Disney and ESPN, whether you watch those networks or not.
“Cord-cutting,” streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, along with selective programming have all cut into cable and satellite’s dominance. Whether FOX or Sinclair, Comcast, Viacom and Disney survive in tact over the next few years is, at best, iffy.
If that is the case, Sinclair would concentrate its efforts within the stations they own. If the proposed sale goes through, they would have a presence in every major market in Ohio except Youngstown. In 2004, they showed the anti-John Kerry smear-job by the Swift Boat Veterans about Kerry’s opposition to the Vietnam War after coming home. They also declined to broadcast, on their ABC affiliates, a “Nightline” broadcast listing the names of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some stations aired a questionable video of a speech, later discredited, by then candidate Barack Obama in the run up to the 2010 mid-term elections.
The Smith family owns the publicly-traded company and have given extensively and almost exclusively to Republican candidates over the past 20 years. That they are about to become the most powerful broadcasting group in the country is at once unsettling and disquieting to many. Cable may or may not be with us in a few years, but there will always be some sort of media to inform and entertain. But if the information is all one-sided, then what?
