Ailes and Nixon - The Importance of Camera Placement

Ailes was impressed with Lenny Rifenstahl's groundbreaking Nazi propaganda piece, the Triumph of the Will. He collaborated on the Nixon campaign with speechwriter and Nixon aide Roman Price who introduced him to the idea that politics is similar to TV. Ailes later remembered that I never had a political thought until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon Presidential campaign. The television networks have become a powerful force in American life. They saw themselves like journalists and philosophers and daughters before them as being a rational, avant-garde leading the nation into the future. In his history of television news, historian Charles Ponce de Leon writes: 'They were seeking to inform through a medium that