Politics & Power Quote by Roger Ailes

Ailes is doing what he did best: collapsing a complicated media ecosystem into a single villainous blob, then inviting his audience to feel besieged together. “CNN International, Al-Jazeera and BBC” isn’t a careful comparison; it’s a rhetorical lineup. By naming outlets associated with cosmopolitanism and foreignness, he frames criticism of America as something imported, elite, and faintly disloyal. The phrase “the same” is the tell: it’s not about accuracy, it’s about branding. Once the networks are interchangeable, their differences in editorial culture, audience, and geopolitics stop mattering. All that remains is the sensation of bias.

The subtext is tribal: if these organizations “mostly” report that “America is wrong and bad,” then viewers who trust them are being trained to hate their own country. That’s a potent move because it turns journalism from a method (verification, sourcing, context) into an attitude (patriotism vs. contempt). It also preemptively delegitimizes external scrutiny. If a story is unfavorable, the framework is ready-made: it’s not accountability, it’s anti-Americanism.

Context matters. Ailes built Fox News on the premise that mainstream media carried a cultural and political slant against conservatives and traditional nationalism. Casting international outlets as a unified chorus amplifies that grievance into something global, suggesting America isn’t just debated at home but targeted abroad. The intent isn’t to persuade skeptics; it’s to harden a loyal audience against counter-narratives by recoding criticism as hostility.