The right captures the tube

GE funneled financial support directly into the right-wing message machinery. The company gave money to William Simon and Irving Kristol's Institute for Educational Affairs, which funded the racist, sexist, homophobic right-wing campus newspapers; to C. Boyden Gray's Citizens for a Sound Economy; and to the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In a 2002 interview on MSNBC's "Hardball" with Chris Matthews (who got his start on television with guest appearances on The McLaughlin Group), Welch spoke openly about his political views. "And this guy came in named Ronald Reagan that they all thought was stupid and he had a pretty simple thesis and you can disagree with some of his policies or other things, but this guy got American back on track. And the country thrived ..." Welch endorsed George W. Bush's proposals for "tort reform" and for ending taxation on stock dividends, an idea heavily promoted by Kudlow on CNBC's "Kudlow and Cramer" before the Bush administration adopted it. Welch has conceded that on Election Night 2000 -- when a critical call had to be made by network officials about who had won -- he was in the NBC News Control Room, one of "two or three of us cheering for George Bush." He labeled as "crazy" unconfirmed stories that he had said, "What would I have to give you to call the race for Bush?" NBC subsequently refused to release to congressional investigators a videotape of what went on in the room. NBC followed the FOX News Channel in calling the race, wrongly, for Bush.

In the Reagan years, "The McLaughlin Group" was the new normal. Twenty years later, it would be normal up and down the cable dial. The right wing was on call 24/7, while bona fide liberals were an endangered species. Syndicated columnist and former Moral Majority official Cal Thomas got his own show on FOX, while AEI's Ben Wattenberg got a PBS series. Until recently, the Wall Street Journal editorial board had its own hour-long weekly show on CNBC. The Journal's Peggy Noonan and John Fund are regulars on the GE-owned MSNBC cable network. Alone among the nation's editorial page editors, Tony Blankley of the Washington Times is a highly visible TV pundit, with a permanent berth on "The McLaughlin Group." Time's right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, who has not published a book, is a fixture on FOX News and "Inside Washington," the D.C.-based political affairs show. Time's left-liberal columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, a runaway best-selling author, is invisible.

GE launched CNBC in 1989. In 1991, GE made a fateful hire that shifted the entire cable news industry dramatically to the right: Republican operative Roger Ailes became president of CNBC.

Ailes entered politics working for Richard Nixon, showing the campaign how to present paid political events so that they would appear to be news, in order to manipulate public opinion about the candidate. A false warm-and-fuzzy Nixon was sold by Ailes like a "car or a can of peas," as Joe McGinniss put it in "The Selling of the President, 1968." Ailes's father was an Ohio factory foreman who complained of being talked down to by corporate executives at the plant. Ailes shared with Nixon contempt for "elites" and a knack for speaking to the racial prejudices of certain lower-class white men. Discussing the addition of a panelist to a staged Nixon "Man in the Arena" forum, Ailes said: "You know what I'd like? As long as we've got this extra spot open. A good, mean Wallace-ite cab driver. Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, mac, what about these niggers?'"

Ailes, who met Nixon while working as the producer of "The Mike Douglas Show," went to work at the Nixon White House; but his relationship with the president's inner circle soon cooled, and Watergate dealt his career a further setback. Over the next few years, Ailes, a fine arts major who worked his way through Ohio University as a radio disc jockey, toiled in the political wilderness as a speech coach for business executives and moonlighted as an off-Broadway producer. He ran a few political races in the late 1970s before returning to television in 1981 as executive producer of Tom Snyder's hugely successful "Tomorrow: Coast to Coast." When Ailes took the show down-market, ratings plummeted. In 1982, the show was replaced by "Late Night With David Letterman"; once one of NBC's biggest stars, Snyder never fully recovered. Ailes was more resilient.

By 1981, the Reagan revolution had dawned, and Ailes's ability to craft appeals to Nixon's disaffected cultural conservatives was to prove invaluable. Working with his second wife, Norma, a TV producer, Ailes rose to become the country's preeminent GOP political consultant. He spoke the language of the so-called Reagan Democrats: the construction workers and housewives featured in his widely imitated ads.

Still, he was never truly a Reagan insider, and it was not until George H.W. Bush came along that Ailes finally found his horse. His relationship with Bush was cemented after he helped the vice president turn the tables in an interview about the Iran-contra affair with CBS anchor Dan Rather. Ailes prepped Bush to equate his misdoings in the scandal with a temper tantrum that the voluble Rather had once thrown on the CBS set. "Dan Rather is the most biased reporter in the history of broadcasting," Ailes exclaimed after the interview.

Next Page: Ailes runs into Rush Limbaugh outside 21

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