By George Nelson
WARREN, Nov. 12 A week after the 2008 presidential election, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Fox News Channel returned to his hometown to salute veterans and offer some observations on the news media.
Roger Ailes, a 1958 graduate of Harding High School, was in Warren for the Veterans Day unveiling of life-size bronze statue of a World War II soldier at the Trumbull County Veterans' Memorial downtown.
The news media "has got to get a hold of itself and decide that they need to be just a watchdog," not a lapdog or attack dog, said Ailes, the chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group.
The media "were clearly the tank for one candidate" during the presidential election, he asserted, but the margin of victory for Democrat Barack Obama "was wide enough that you probably can't blame it on the media."
Ailes created the Fox News Channel and its "fair and balanced" promotion line. The cable channel is widely viewed as tilting right politically, in contrast to MSNBC, whose prime-time programming tilts left.
"There's hard news and there's opinion news, and you have to be able to distinguish which is which," he told local reporters following the dedication.
Obama, whom he described as "very charming and very smart," will face "as many problems as anybody who's ever held the office," including terrorism, economic problems and political divisions, but these challenges also present opportunities. "He has a chance to be a great president but he has to tackle these problems and get the American people behind him," Ailes said.
Politics were absent from Ailes' formal remarks at the ceremony, which instead were filled with remembrances of his childhood, praise for veterans and the effort to create the Warren memorial, and a few jibes at the news media.
Before the audience of more than 700 veterans, their families and supporters, Ailes recalled that he would sit in the Courthouse Square park with his grandmother after coming out of the Robins Theatre, learned to swim at the Warren YMCA, and attended the nearby Presbyterian church. When he and his family arrived in Warren in advance of Tuesday's event, he said the first place he stopped at was the Hot Dog Shoppe.
"My roots are pretty deep around here," he said. "Wherever I've traveled, I took with me the traditions, the values that I learned in this town. It's a part of everything I've done, including Fox News."
He acknowledged that the media and the military have never really gotten along, pointing out that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wanted to lock up all reporters as spies, and quipped that after Gen. George Washington crossed the Delaware River to mount a surprise attack on the British, the first American victory in the Revolutionary War, "The next day the papers gave him hell for doing it on Christmas Eve." In a similar vein, he quipped that a Marine's rescue of a little girl from a lion would be portrayed in a New York Times headline as "Violent U.S. Marine Attacks Innocent Animal."
It was humbling, Ailes said, "to be here with the men who risked their lives for our freedoms. My job is much easier to create a fair and balanced organization of news thatreports the truth while recognizing the contributions of our military." He also said that while the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, freedom depends entirely on fairness.
"In America we believe that people are innocent until proven guilty and I believe we owe that same courtesy to our country," he said. "As journalists we must report bad news when it exists, but we must not get up in the morning feeling negative toward our country's heroic history, traditional values or the institutions that made us a steady beacon of light in the universe."
Ailes, among other speakers, also recognized the role of the late William Muter in commissioning the statue, the work of New York sculptor Robert Eccleston, and forming the Western Reserve Veterans' Memorial Association to raise the money to complete and place the statue in Monument Park downtown. Muter died in 2007.
Attorney Ned Gold, an Air Force veteran of Vietnam who introduced Ailes, revealed that the Fox executive was the first to contribute to the memorial.
One of Ailes' classmates, Councilman Robert L. Dean Jr., recalled how their English literature teacher told Ailes, "Fifty years from now your mark is going to be all over this country."
Commenting on the children who occasionally made their presence known during the program, state Rep. Tom Letson, D-64 Warren, said he was glad that they were there. "This is so that we do not forget that which has gone before," he said.
The master of ceremonies, Charles Jarvis, publisher of the Tribune Chronicle, praised Letson for his role in securing $50,000 in state funds for the project. He also commented on the number of people attending the ceremony held late Tuesday morning.
"We might have slightly underestimated the crowd. It's a nice problem to have," he said.
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Copyright 2008 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.