Ailes: Palin Was a ‘Branding Issue’

Could Fox News be moving away from the right? As the Tea Party's popularity fades and the country grows increasingly tired of partisan bickering, Fox News chief Roger Ailes is making what he calls a “course correction.” Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin “became a bit of a branding issue for us,” he tells Howard Kurtz in Newsweek. Republican candidates still consult Ailes: when Rick Perry was still weighing a presidential bid, he stopped by Ailes's office and confided he was worried about being able to raise money, and Mitt Romney took Ailes out for a pasta dinner. But Ailes also engineered the Republican primary debate for maximum reality-television conflict, aiming tough questions geared toward the weaknesses of each candidate and prompting them to tear into each other.