Ohio University will host alumnus and Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes Monday, and event organizers say they’re looking to use the discussion to shed light on mass media rather than field accusations of the network’s political bias.
Ailes, a 1962 OU graduate, will deliver a lecture titled “FOX News: Past, Present and Future” at 7:15 p.m. Monday in Baker University Center Ballroom.
The program will incorporate a question-and-answer session. While Ailes gives a 20- to 25-minute address, audience members will have a notecard on which they can write a question. The notecards will be collected and given to Andy Alexander, the forum’s moderator.
Alexander, former ombudsman of The Washington Post, is the Scripps Howard visiting professional at OU. He also served as editor of The Post during the 1969–70 academic year.
“This format has the best chance of producing light instead of heat,” said Robert Ingram, an associate professor of history and director of the George Washington Forum. “There are no stipulations on questions.”
The lecture is designed to approach American politics and the media from a practical perspective as opposed to an academic one, Ingram said.
“(Ailes, Alexander and I) are completely on the same page in wanting to have civil and forthright debates and thinking those are a good thing on campus,” Ingram said.
Ailes returns to his alma mater on the heels of an April 12 speaking engagement at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The lectures at UNC and OU received heat last week from an op-ed piece by Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters for America, which was published by The Huffington Post.
“Journalism is supposed to be fact-finding and diligent and fair and conscientious, and Fox News — particularly since Obama’s inauguration — has become kind of delusional and deranged,” Boehlert said.
Ailes visited Athens in 2007 and, after a substantial gift to the Scripps College of Communication, became the namesake of the Roger E. Ailes Newsroom in the Radio–Television Building in 2008.
“The newsroom gift came about as a result of many talks he and I had about his affection for the college and, especially, for the time he spent as the student general manager of WOUB,” said Gregory Shepherd, the former dean of the Scripps College.
Ailes had funded scholarships for Scripps students since 1994, and the larger gift allowed OU to upgrade aging facilities, Shepherd said.
“It totally allowed us to upgrade the newsroom, put in seven edit bays, modernize the news apparatus in many ways.” said Tom Hodson, director and general manager of the WOUB Center for Public Media and former director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. “The old newsroom probably hadn’t been touched in 25 or 30 years.”
IF YOU GO:
WHAT: FOX News: Past, Present and Future
WHEN: 7:15 p.m. Monday
WHERE: Baker University Center Ballroom
ADMISSION: Free
bv111010@ohiou.edu
