The ails of Ailes
BIOGRAPHER Gabriel Sherman reports. You decide. In “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” Sherman presents a noholds-barred, behind-the-scenes look at iron-fisted Fox News CEO
Roger Ailes, his loose lips and his right-wing newsroom. For example: When Ailes reportedly threw
Gov. Chris Christie under the bus, the Republican duo were nowhere near the George Washington Bridge.
It was Election Night 2012 when the Fox bigwig griped that the Garden State governor’s post-Hurricane Sandy bromance with Presi
dent Obama helped turn the electoral tide, according to the new biography.
Sherman describes in detail the tense scene at Fox News as Obama captured a second term.
“Thank you, Chris Christie,” complained a furious Ailes, convinced the GOP governor’s recent Jersey Shore photo-op with Obama gave the President a huge boost against Mitt Romney.
Told that polling data refuted his belief, Ailes was unmoved: “Well, hugging the guy couldn’t help people feel good about Romney either.”
The sprawling 560-page book, based on more than 600 interviews, also reveals that Ailes didn’t think much of candidate Mitt.
Romney was “like Chinese food — 20 minutes after you eat it, you can’t remember what you had,” Ailes is quoted as telling a Fox News host.
The 73-year-old Ailes felt Romney received little help from their party: “The GOP couldn’t organize a one-car funeral.”
Ailes, when not confiding in his anchors, lobbed nasty verbal grenades their way.
Hard-right host Sean Hannity struck Ailes as too stiff, the book reports. “I want you guys to slap him in the head,” he once announced. “There’s entertainment value here, and he doesn’t get it.”
When Gretchen Carlson’s name came up, the book says, Ailes pointed out she was once Miss America, then added: “It must not have been a good year.”
And Ailes was initially put off by renowned CNBC financial reporter Maria Bartiromo’s weight gain before her November 2013 jump to Fox Business. “He said she went from Sophia
Loren to Mamma Leone,” said one executive involved in the negotiations. “He felt he was being used to get more money from CNBC.”
While Fox News says the book was never fact-checked with the network, Sherman says the biography was vetted by a pair of professional fact-checkers. And, he said on “CBS This Morning,” he made a dozen attempts to interview Ailes before the veteran network exec turned him down.
Publisher Random House set up a web page, reportedly to defend Sherman’s book from the folks at Fox — like Hannity, who dismissed the author via Twitter as a “phony journalist.”