"A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News" — the Nixon-era blueprint for Fox News

In the summer of 1970, a 15-page Republican memo titled “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News” circulated inside the Nixon White House, addressed to chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, with media consultant Roger Ailes’ handwriting in the margins (his notes responding back to Haldeman). The plan proposed building an operation to produce prepackaged, pro-administration video news stories and feed them directly to local TV stations — bypassing the three national networks, which Ailes and Nixon regarded as irredeemably liberal — at an estimated startup cost of ~$310,000. Its premise, stated plainly, is the document’s most-quoted line: “Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers… The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.” The memo surfaced publicly only in 2011, when journalist John Cook reported it at Gawker from documents held in the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries.

The blueprint was partly executed a few years later as Television News Incorporated (TVN), the conservative video-news service financed by beer magnate Joseph Coors (~1973–1975), which injected pro-administration segments into local newscasts before folding. The full vision — a nakedly partisan national news channel built to circumvent the accountability press — arrived 26 years after the memo as Fox News (1996), launched by Rupert Murdoch with Ailes at its head. The 1970 memo is therefore the documentary origin point of the media-capture lane: the explicit strategy to manufacture and distribute pre-thought “realities” to voters in order to neutralize independent journalism. Its logic — that television does the audience’s thinking, and that this can be weaponized to blunt accountability — is the through-line from the Nixon enemies-list era to the modern partisan-media ecosystem, and the precondition for the claim, made by JD Vance at the Nixon Library in June 2026, that Watergate “would be a 12-hour news story” today: the foreshortened news cycle Vance celebrates is the one this memo set out to build.