Roger Ailes: Most Influential Conservative

That's the opinion of Don Surber, writing for the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail. Noting the Telegraph of London listed Dick Cheney as the most influential conservative in America, Surber writes in response:

I disagree. I would say it was the man that the British newspaper listed No. 7 — Roger Ailes.

No one has rallied conservatives more than Ailes through his Fox News Channel, which has a weekly cumulative audience of 27 million to 30 million registered voters.

That alone gives him more influence than any other conservative in the nation.

Said the Telegraph: “When Roger Ailes, a veteran media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr, heard that his boss Rupert Murdoch was preparing to back Obama for President in a New York Post editorial, he threatened to resign. Murdoch responded by giving him a pay rise (he is said to have earned $23 million last year – more than Murdoch) and endorsing John McCain. As the traditional broadcast networks see their profits and influence decline, Ailes has turned Fox News into a cash cow for News Corporation, trading on the President’s growing unpopularity to make Fox the go-to place for everything anti-Obama. Assessing Fox’s influence, Obama reckoned the ‘Fox effect’ had cost him two or three points in the 2008 election – which means that next time it could well decide who becomes President. Democratic operative James Carville recently said that if Ailes were a Democrat ‘I think there would be 67 Democratic senators right now.’ There are currently 60.”

Who thinks that Cheney, for example, would add Republican seats in the Senate?

Surber concludes:

But by providing nightly forums for Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, Ailes has done the most to influence the nation on Washington politics.

Exactly.

But what most observers miss is that Roger Ailes is not a right-winger. He is an American.