""People are lazy," wrote Ailes in 1970. "With television you just sit-watch-listen. The thinking is done for you." This is effectively the mission statement of a generation of conservative propaganda ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to Alex Jones to Tim Pool to Candace Owens to Charlie Kirk. Just substitute YouTube, Twitter and podcasts to update it for our modern era targeting America's laziest thinkers like Joe Rogan."
"The political legend is that in the wake of President Richard Nixon's impeachment, future Fox News head honcho Roger Ailes and his conservative compatriots supposedly believed that with a conservative media, Nixon would never have been impeached, and so they set off to build a fictional counter-narrative for political purposes. The spirit of this story is directionally correct, but the timeline is off."
Conservative operatives planned and built a media ecosystem decades before Nixon's impeachment to shape public opinion and protect political allies. Roger Ailes's 1970 memo outlined putting the GOP on TV news as a strategic mission to simplify thinking for viewers. That strategy evolved into a billion-dollar industry encompassing talk radio, cable news, and online platforms that prioritized repetition and emotional messaging over factual accountability. The apparatus amplified conspiracy theories and incentivized lazy consumption of politics, enabling figures like Christopher Rufo to expand influence online and within government. The result is a sustained conservative propaganda system that materially affected electoral outcomes and policy battles.
Read at Jezebel
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