Roger ailes unauthorized biography

Tucked away at the end of Gabriel Sherman’s disingenuous Roger Ailes biography, there is a note on sources that should have opened the book. The night her review of my book went online, Ailes’s lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., wrote an email to Fox colleagues that read, “Wonderful.

(Rachel Maddow, for instance, asked Ailes to blurb her book.) As I did interviews to promote The Loudest Voice in the Room in the winter and spring of 2014, many questioned my portrayal of Ailes as a paranoid and ruthless cult leader. Charlie Rose questioned why I wrote about Ailes’s family, and Norah O’Donnell asked me if I was just a “liberal journalist.”

Even the New York Times participated unwittingly in Ailes’s smear campaign against me: Fox executive Peter Boyer discussed my book with his friend Janet Maslin before she reviewed it, sources told me.

Roger Ailes Investigated Journalist Who Wrote Ailes Biography (Report)

Former Fox Newschairman and CEO Roger Ailesdistributed a 400-page document with details about the property records, voter registration, lack of criminal record and wedding of journalist and Ailes biographer Gabe Sherman, according to CNNMoney.

We knew a person familiar with the theme would hit eventually,” according to a person who read me the email. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Ailes’s vast footprint on our culture obsessed me. There is Newsmax Television, which is a conservative media company run out of Florida that is now broadcasting into people's homes.

Sources told me the behavior continued at Fox, but no one was willing to go on the record to speak about it. The subject that had been a singular focus of my writing life is now gone.

Roger and Me

The New York Times made room for a second book review of the Gabriel Sherman unauthorized biography of Fox News founder Roger Ailes.

I read letters he wrote that were tucked away in archives across the country, obtained confidential corporate documents, and consulted countless articles and books. Sherman has done a lot of interviewing, but there are so many citations of “author interview with a person familiar with the matter” that The Loudest Voice in The Room may set a record for blind items and the untrustworthiness they engender.

But if he loses - you know, the Republican Party is going through soul searching, and the same is going to happen for Fox News.

Fox News is going through the same competition that the mainstream networks went through when Ailes launched the network. The allegations of sexual predation did not surprise me. I wanted to understand what drove him to amass so much power.

For all the time I spent thinking of Ailes, I spent very little time with him.

He gave him a weekly segment to call in to the morning show and spout off on politics. And from those early days, he learned the techniques of show business and communication as an effective tool of political messaging.

And in 1968, he was hired by Richard Nixon as a 27 year old to be his chief television adviser.

It would have helped to know right from the get-go why Sherman found this kind of journalism necessary.

The Baltimore Sun‘s David Zurawik has his take on the book:

I know that understanding the life and mind of Ailes would make us smarter about our media and ourselves — and we desperately need such understanding.

For all its promotional push, I don’t think The Loudest Voice in the Room will be long remembered — or even talked about past the short buzz life of most media these days.