Loudest Voice in the Room

Check out an excerpt from Gabriel Sherman's biography of Fox News' Roger Ailes--"The Loudest Voice in the Room" on The National Memo. Sherman's picture of Ailes is a lot like other backgrounders on right-wing figures . Ailes was reportedly abused both physically and emotionally by his father. He has spent his professional life paying that abuse forward with a paranoid, bullying mix of media savvy and political ambition.

Not long before the 2012 election, Ailes told a reporter, “If Richard Nixon was alive today, he’d be on the couch with Oprah, talking about how he was poor, his brother died, his mother didn’t love him, and his father beat the shit out of him. And everybody would say, Oh, poor guy, he’s doing the best he can. See, every human being has stuff—stuff they have to carry around, stuff they have to deal with. And Richard Nixon had a lot of stuff. He did the best he could with it, but it got him in the end.”

 Ailes’s own stuff is what has transformed Fox News from a news channel into a national phenomenon. “I built this channel from my life experience,” he told an interviewer. And it was true. At his daily 8:00 a.m. editorial meeting, Ailes regularly lectures his closest advisers, about a dozen men and women, on his experience of American postwar history, which they use to program the channel. As the producer of The Mike Douglas Show, he had soaked up the chatty commercialism of 1960s daytime television, learning countless techniques to hold viewers’ attention. As a consultant to Nixon, he adopted a sense of political victimhood, and a paranoia about enemies that has marked his career ever since. In the 1970s, he honed his theatrical instincts as a Broadway producer and ran a fledgling conservative television news service bankrolled by the right-wing beer magnate Joseph Coors—in essence, a dry run for Fox News. And in the 1980s, Ailes mastered the dark art of attack politics as a mercenary campaign strategist, skills he would soon put to use in turning a television news network into an unprecedented political force. At Fox, Ailes speaks frequently of his father, a factory foreman who lived a frustrated life. Fox News launched on October 7, 1996, but it truly began a half century earlier, out of a small frame house on a shady street in Warren, Ohio.