Status
Available
Publication
New York : Random House, c2014.
Description
An inside account of Fox News offers insight into its operations and influence, covering the original launch of the cable news network by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch and the ways in which Fox has become a dominant force in American politics.
User reviews
LibraryThing member froxgirl
Roger Ailes and how he gruesome. His career started benevolently enough with the mild Mike Douglas show but "progressed"/sarcasm to teaching Richard Nixon how to come to terms with TV. It only went downhill from there as he helped co-evil twin Rupert Murdoch to invent Fox News. Great background on
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his sad childhood and his even sadder paranoia, which extends beyond Fox all the way to his attempted takeovers of his New Jersey town. Much of the book shows him being consumed with power and with revenge against anyone who defies his mandates. It also clearly demonstrates that he is only against and never for. A truly evil and warped persona made for these times. I thought this was well written and researched, and fair, if not balanced. Show Less
LibraryThing member VGAHarris
A fair and balanced treatment of the main figure in establishing Fox News as an ideological cable powerhouse. Essentially it portrays Ailes as a brilliant but morally flawed genius who never shed his skin as a political operative when he teamed with Rupert Murdoch to form Fox News. Certainly
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interesting, but at a certain point you reach a saturation point with Ailes's petty neurotic foibles as he mounts personal and professional campaigns on many fronts, and uses Fox News as an outlet for his grievances. Show Less
LibraryThing member bness2
Excellent book for insight into the man behind FOX News. I get the sense that the author is giving fair treatment to Roger Ailed, in spite of how easy it would be to just trash talk him.
LibraryThing member MontzaleeW
The Loudest Voice in the Room: Roger Ailes, Fox News and the Remaking of American Politics by Gabriel Sherman is not only a book about Ailes as an adult but about how his father raised him and his childhood to adulthood. His father was a douche bag also and taught Ailes to be the douche bag Ailes
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is today. Ailes has perfected it. This book is good in showing Ailes personality though out his live and how people catered to him, I am not sure why at time, and this gave him even more power. This was before he was fired from Fox. This must me Trump's soulmate and why Trump took him to his bosom. I wanted to knock the stars down just for the subject but that wouldn't be fair, lol. I did however decrease the rating for all the extra things I thought were just too much that didn't seem to lead anywhere that I could see, but there were sooooo many people in his life it was difficult to track. Too many and it gets confusing. Good book on a bad character. Thanks for showing us that he was a dick his whole life and how he got that way. Show Less
LibraryThing member wb4ever1
If anyone wants to understand how America got where it is today at the end of the Trump era, then Gabriel Sherman’s THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM, a biography of Roger Ailes, is required reading. Originally published in 2014, when Ailes was at the height of his power at the head of FOX News, my
Because Ailes did not sit down with Sherman, there is more than a little extrapolating when it comes to trying to find out what made him tick. Attention is paid to a childhood with a cruel father, and a strained marriage to Ailes’s mother, a woman who sued for divorce as soon as Roger left for college in 1958, selling his childhood home before remarrying and moving to California, in the process, throwing away all of his “stuff.” Did this ultimately make Ailes one of those conservatives who in middle age longed for that mythic Eisenhower era America, and thought that the country’s salvation rested upon the return to the status quo of a bygone time? Nevertheless, the young Roger found work in radio, and then television. A job with the Mike Douglas Show led to fortuitous meeting in 1967 with then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon, where Ailes talked himself into a job as a media advisor on Nixon’s campaign. He did such a good job in presenting the very untelegenic candidate to the American public that he was able to get work on other Republican campaigns in the years ahead, while still keeping one foot in the door of television and entertainment. The high point (or low point, depending on which side you fall on) was in 1988 when Ailes helped turn George H. W. Bush from Reagan’s wimpy Vice President into a clone of Clint Eastwood. This entailed the infamous Willie Horton ad which implied that Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was an accessory to rape and murder. Ailes may not have been solely responsible for a political ad that forever changed American politics for the worse, but his finger prints were on it despite vociferous denials later when the Bush campaign’s scorched earth tactics came in for heavy condemnation. Ailes moved on to a new frontier, cable television news; establishing himself at MSNBC before Rupert Murdoch came calling with an offer to head up a fledgling “fair and balanced” news network that would be a counterweight to the all powerful “liberal media.”
I am no admirer of Ailes’s politics and the way he practiced them, but I found myself grudgingly impressed with the young Ailes, who clearly possessed great self confidence, was a very quick study, and capable of creating opportunities for himself (the meeting with Nixon), plus he was very good at office politics; whatever the game was, he knew how to play it. Though Sherman never quite comes out and states it, the picture the book presents is of a driven man in whom success did not bring out the best. As a boss, Ailes was overbearing in the extreme, demanding absolute loyalty with a thin skin when it came to any form of criticism. He had an eye for talent, and could be very supportive, which was often returned in the form of genuine loyalty from those he hired, but like many powerful and successful men, Ailes obviously came to consider himself entitled, ultimately to things for which he had no right to ask.
Many on the left wrote Roger Ailes off as a huckster, out to exploit gullible right wingers by giving them a TV network with propaganda 24 hours a day affirming their racist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual world view. That he did, but Sherman more than makes the case that the man was a true believer in his own right, that his abilities as a salesman were put firmly behind a product in which he truly believed; FOX News succeeded because the man calling the shots behind the scenes was one of the audience he was trying to reach. He tapped into an underserved constituency that tuned in each and every day wanting more…and more. Most of all, he understood that conflict sells, that it is us against them, the true hard working Americans and patriots versus liberal elitists who sneered at them, and wanted confiscate their hard earned dollars, while forcing sexually deviancy to be taught in every classroom. To get this message out, he hired sneering blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. Along the way, anyone who questioned the policies of the second Bush administration after 9/11 was denounced as traitors, while the invasion of Iraq on flimsy grounds was rammed down the throats of anyone who objected. The Tea Party, Birtherism, and the evils of Bill and Hilary and Barack and Michelle became synonymous with the FOX News brand. And the on air female talent had to be sure and show some leg. Ailes’s creation became the most powerful entity inside the Republican Party, with its power to make or break Presidential candidates. Those whom Ailes favored got special treatment on FOX, thus giving him the kind of power once reserved for the bosses of political machines. How sad and ironic it must have been for him to have been forced out of his job the very week that Donald Trump, a personal friend and a man beloved by the FOX News audience, accepted the Republican Presidential nomination at its convention in July of 2016. One wonders what might have been if Ailes had remained in command during the Trump years, when, no doubt, he would have talked with the President daily. But it was not to be.
In the end, I think Roger Ailes gloried in the power, but he had no conception of responsibility, the kind that even the lowliest of public office holders come to respect. Common ground and compromise held no value, not the least because they generated no ratings and no revenue.
Gabriel Sherman’s book is a superb work of investigative journalism, but I doubt it will be the definitive work on the subject. I’m not taking anything away from Sherman, but I think we are still too close to the time and place to truly understand events, that Roger Ailes’s final place in history is yet to be determined, but until that time comes, THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM will do.
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copy contains an afterward which details his fall from power in July 2016 amidst a sexual harassment scandal. Ailes did not cooperate with the writing of this book, but Sherman talked to a lot of people who worked with the man from his earliest days in Warren, Ohio, to his glory days at FNC, when he was arguably one of the most consequential Americans of the 21st Century. Most of what they had to say was not flattering, but that is only fair, for Ailes had a sharp tongue himself, and he knew how to use it against those who got on his bad side.Because Ailes did not sit down with Sherman, there is more than a little extrapolating when it comes to trying to find out what made him tick. Attention is paid to a childhood with a cruel father, and a strained marriage to Ailes’s mother, a woman who sued for divorce as soon as Roger left for college in 1958, selling his childhood home before remarrying and moving to California, in the process, throwing away all of his “stuff.” Did this ultimately make Ailes one of those conservatives who in middle age longed for that mythic Eisenhower era America, and thought that the country’s salvation rested upon the return to the status quo of a bygone time? Nevertheless, the young Roger found work in radio, and then television. A job with the Mike Douglas Show led to fortuitous meeting in 1967 with then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon, where Ailes talked himself into a job as a media advisor on Nixon’s campaign. He did such a good job in presenting the very untelegenic candidate to the American public that he was able to get work on other Republican campaigns in the years ahead, while still keeping one foot in the door of television and entertainment. The high point (or low point, depending on which side you fall on) was in 1988 when Ailes helped turn George H. W. Bush from Reagan’s wimpy Vice President into a clone of Clint Eastwood. This entailed the infamous Willie Horton ad which implied that Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was an accessory to rape and murder. Ailes may not have been solely responsible for a political ad that forever changed American politics for the worse, but his finger prints were on it despite vociferous denials later when the Bush campaign’s scorched earth tactics came in for heavy condemnation. Ailes moved on to a new frontier, cable television news; establishing himself at MSNBC before Rupert Murdoch came calling with an offer to head up a fledgling “fair and balanced” news network that would be a counterweight to the all powerful “liberal media.”
I am no admirer of Ailes’s politics and the way he practiced them, but I found myself grudgingly impressed with the young Ailes, who clearly possessed great self confidence, was a very quick study, and capable of creating opportunities for himself (the meeting with Nixon), plus he was very good at office politics; whatever the game was, he knew how to play it. Though Sherman never quite comes out and states it, the picture the book presents is of a driven man in whom success did not bring out the best. As a boss, Ailes was overbearing in the extreme, demanding absolute loyalty with a thin skin when it came to any form of criticism. He had an eye for talent, and could be very supportive, which was often returned in the form of genuine loyalty from those he hired, but like many powerful and successful men, Ailes obviously came to consider himself entitled, ultimately to things for which he had no right to ask.
Many on the left wrote Roger Ailes off as a huckster, out to exploit gullible right wingers by giving them a TV network with propaganda 24 hours a day affirming their racist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual world view. That he did, but Sherman more than makes the case that the man was a true believer in his own right, that his abilities as a salesman were put firmly behind a product in which he truly believed; FOX News succeeded because the man calling the shots behind the scenes was one of the audience he was trying to reach. He tapped into an underserved constituency that tuned in each and every day wanting more…and more. Most of all, he understood that conflict sells, that it is us against them, the true hard working Americans and patriots versus liberal elitists who sneered at them, and wanted confiscate their hard earned dollars, while forcing sexually deviancy to be taught in every classroom. To get this message out, he hired sneering blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. Along the way, anyone who questioned the policies of the second Bush administration after 9/11 was denounced as traitors, while the invasion of Iraq on flimsy grounds was rammed down the throats of anyone who objected. The Tea Party, Birtherism, and the evils of Bill and Hilary and Barack and Michelle became synonymous with the FOX News brand. And the on air female talent had to be sure and show some leg. Ailes’s creation became the most powerful entity inside the Republican Party, with its power to make or break Presidential candidates. Those whom Ailes favored got special treatment on FOX, thus giving him the kind of power once reserved for the bosses of political machines. How sad and ironic it must have been for him to have been forced out of his job the very week that Donald Trump, a personal friend and a man beloved by the FOX News audience, accepted the Republican Presidential nomination at its convention in July of 2016. One wonders what might have been if Ailes had remained in command during the Trump years, when, no doubt, he would have talked with the President daily. But it was not to be.
In the end, I think Roger Ailes gloried in the power, but he had no conception of responsibility, the kind that even the lowliest of public office holders come to respect. Common ground and compromise held no value, not the least because they generated no ratings and no revenue.
Gabriel Sherman’s book is a superb work of investigative journalism, but I doubt it will be the definitive work on the subject. I’m not taking anything away from Sherman, but I think we are still too close to the time and place to truly understand events, that Roger Ailes’s final place in history is yet to be determined, but until that time comes, THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM will do.
Show Less
Awards
NPR: Books We Love (2014)