Breaking Ranks

Roger Ailes: White House Has a Point on Fox

Heather Horn Mar 5, 2010
Fox News president Roger Ailes admits: the Obama administration isn't entirely off-base in their complaints about slanted Fox coverage. The admission came in a striking interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, taped and posted at the National Review. Ailes holds his ground on a number of matters, and doesn't buy the liberal portrayal of Fox News in general. "What we do," he says, "is we go on the air every day with two points of view in the news." He also points out that they've never had to retract a story for factual inaccuracies. While Glenn Beck has a phone on set for people to call him if he's wrong about something, no one has ever called, according to Ailes, "because what he's saying is true." Nor does Ailes think Fox is any more right-skewed than MSNBC is skewed to the left. For most of the interview, Ailes hits hard at the Obama administration and liberals over health care, government spending, and more.

That said, he's not sure he'll stand by Fox's Chris Wallace calling the Obama administration "crybabies." Says Ailes, "well, I don't think they're whining over nothing and look, there's legitimate complaints that they can have and I've had this dialogue with David Axelrod." He also questions conservative narrative about the great liberal media bias: "I mean Richard Nixon got himself into trouble ... George w. Bush probably could have been more articulate about some of the things he was doing."

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