As Mr. Ailes saw it, his network was the only place in the news sphere for an audience that the mainstream media failed to appreciate and daily disrespected. Though Mr. Ailes became inconceivably wealthy during his career, he never lost sight of what bonded him with that audience: resentment for the “New York-Hollywood elitists” he believed populated the rest of the news media.
“They just believe what they believe and they think their job is to drag the rest of the redneck morons toward the light,” Mr. Ailes told me in an interview in his office in December 2014. “They don’t understand that the so-called redneck morons, the people they don’t like, are the people that grew up with values, patriotism, all those things. And they hate all those words.”
Mr. Ailes, who regularly reminded associates that he dug ditches as a teen, told me, “I built Fox news on my own life experience — I built it understanding the pressures and the worries and the aspirations of average Americans.” He said, “I love those people.” And he took credit for “forcing some people to actually acknowledge that others exist in the world beside the people who went to Elaine’s back in the old days.”
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