ELIANA JOHNSON - How Trump Blew Up the Conservative Media
Months before Donald
Trump blew up American politics with
his surprise win in November, he did the same thing to the conservative media.
Through much of the campaign, two very different media moguls with colliding
visions for the Republican Party vied for Trump’s soul: Roger Ailes, the
longtime president and CEO of Fox News, and Steve Bannon, the executive
chairman of the populist online tabloid Breitbart. Both were angling to be the
media Svengali whispering in Trump’s ear.
At one point, it
seemed they might have been allies: Bannon worked to insinuate himself at Fox,
and Ailes’ network aired some of his populist documentaries. Then came the
first Republican primary debate in August 2015, when Megyn Kelly, Fox’s feisty
prime-time anchor, hammered the candidate from all sides. It was at that moment
that Bannon says his relationship with Ailes began to sour. “The big rift
between Breitbart and Fox was all over Megyn Kelly. She was all over Trump
nonstop,” Bannon said in an interview. He says he warned Ailes that Kelly would
betray him. “I told him then, I said, ‘She’s the devil, and she will turn on
you.’”
By the summer of 2016,
Ailes’ life lay in ruins: A blockbuster sexual-harassment lawsuit from former
Fox host Gretchen Carlson forced his resignation from the network he had
founded 20 years earlier. Since then, his legacy has been systematically
dismantled, as several of the stars Ailes brought to the network have departed
or been shown the door: Greta Van Susteren, then Kelly and, on Wednesday
evening, Bill O’Reilly, whose dismissal under a cloud of sexual harassment
allegations, some dating back decades, mirrored that of Ailes months earlier.
Trump, who once seemed
to augur a renaissance for conservative media, has instead triggered a civil
war in its top ranks. Ailes stepped down July 21. That night, Trump officially
accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland. Three weeks
later, he tapped Bannon to be the CEO of his campaign. That short period did
more to alter the trajectory of the Republican Party than any event since the
nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, handing the GOP to a populist television
star whose style was a rebuke to the intellectual roots of the American
conservative movement. The shock played out most immediately in right-wing
media, where Trump’s ascension marginalized the elite intellectual outlets that
did so much to shape the modern Republican Party. It also settled the tug of
war between Ailes and Bannon over who would hold the most sway over the least
ideological president in history: Ultimately, Trump rejected the corporatist
conservatism that had come to define Fox, draping himself instead in
Breitbart’s nationalist populism throughout the campaign.
This account, the
result of conversations with nearly two dozen sources inside various news
organizations, reveals how Trump’s nomination and subsequent election scrambled
the pecking order across the conservative media landscape in ways its leaders
are still grappling with… read more
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/21/trump-conservative-media-breitbart-fox-news-wall-street-journal-215035