Acquire The Loudest Voice In The Room: How Roger Ailes And Fox News Remade American Politics Translated By Gabriel Sherman Edition
so I couldnt wait to read this book because I thought it would reinforce my belief that Roger Ailes was possibly the biggest scumbag on the face of the earth.
So when it was delivered by Amazon on January,I read it straight through,
Guess what I was right it did completely reinforce what I already knew and believed Roger Ailes IS one of the biggest scumbags on the face of the earth.
That said, I also have to admit that I learned a lot about this man that adds to his otherwise one dimensional characterization as king of the right wing.
He is clearly an extremely talented person having succeeded in multiple mediums politics, theater, television, He did accomplish much and that cannot be taken from him, yet at the end of the day the authors conclusion and mine is that he has made a major contribution to the overall deterioration of politics and political discourse in America today.
Truth and Roger Ailes are not usually words to be found in the same sentence, Suffice it to say I am not a viewer/fan of Fox, nor a fan of Roger Ailes, but one does have to respect the success of his network and the talent and drive of its creator in spite of everything else that he has done.
Mr. Sherman has done a remarkable job researching and documenting every aspect of the book and Im sure he has caused Mr, AIles many sleepless nights worrying about his public perception and ultimately his legacy, Hopefully this book will be widely read and Mr, Ailes legacy will be perceived as it should and we will forever be in debt to Gabriel Sherman for his work in exposing “the man behind the curtain”.
I highly recommend this book and congratulate Gabriel Sherman on a job well done, As the thing I hate most in the entire world, besides Trump, Fox News has made disgusting people a lot of money, and, in my opinion, monetized hate and gave people who shouldn't have a voice, a voice.
I read this because, I guess, know your enemy It was wellwritten, Fox Nation elected Trump, in my opinion, which is reason enough to hate it forever, The astonishing inside story of Fox News, the most powerful media and political business in the world, from one of the hottest young investigative journalists today.
The story of Fox News' ascent is an epic story of political power, business success, brassknuckle tactics, and oldschool showmanship, BOOK REVIEW: 'The Loudest Voice in the Room': Detailed Account of Roger Ailes the Man Behind Fox News Channel
"I used to say, you pull a.
on Roger, he'll have a bazooka trained between your eyes" Catherine Crier, former Fox News Channel onair personality, quoted on Pageof "The Loudest Voice in the Room"
I was puzzled about all the controversy surrounding Gabriel Sherman's exhaustive and often exhausting dissection of Roger Ailes: "The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox Newsand Divided a Country" Random House,pages, notes, index, no photographs,.
.
After all, no matter what you say about Roger Ailes, even his enemies have to admit he's a programming genius, Otherwise, the canny Australian media supermogul Rupert Murdoch wouldn't have chosen him into start a cable news channel to compete with and ultimately defeat CNN and MSNBC.
To put Sherman's book in context, readers should get their hands on a book I reviewed on this site last Oct,, "Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires" by David Folkenflik, Link to my review: sitelink huntingtonnews. net/
Ailes' skills and knowledge of middle America derive from his being a product of same, He was born inin the once thriving, now rustbelt city of Warren Ohio to a real working class family not an ersatz one like Bill O'Reilly's, whose father worked as an accountant in Manhattan.
Roger Ailes' knowledge of what "flyover country" folks want was bred in the bone, I would dispute the part in the The Loudest Voice in the Room's subtitle that Ailes "divided a country": it's more of a case of Ailes's instinctively recognizing the divisions that existed in the country, exploiting them to the fullest in his grand design for Fox News.
Regardless of what people think of TV news, my guess is that most viewers want entertainment, If it comes with goodlooking women like Crier, Megyn Kelly, Andrea Tantaros to name just a few so much the better, If it comes with a bombastic loudmouth from Long Island named Bill O'Reilly, so be it, I regularly look at all three of the cable news channels and it seems that they all have goodlooking female and male personalities and bombastic types, too, like the Rev.
Al Sharpton on MSNBC.
This comprehensive look at Ailes and FNC covers events from the ClintonLewinsky scandal to the BushGore recount, from the war in Iraq to the Tea Party attack on the Obama presidency.
It also covers the allegations of sexual harassment against Bill O'Reilly from producer Andrea Mackris, which don't seem to me to have any relevance with the arc of the career of Roger Ailes, but which cost O'Reilly a lot of money in a settlement.
Nor does his campaign waged in his home in Garrison, NY, across the Hudson River from West Point, a subject to which I think Sherman devotes an inordinate amount of space to show something we already have learned: That Roger Ailes is a guy who just won't quit.
Sherman tried and failed to
get a sitdown interview with Ailes himself, but his book is based on three years of research, including hundreds of interviews with Fox News insiders past and present.
He interviewed disgruntled employees of FNC, but also gruntled ones, to coin a word,
Sherman documents Ailess tactical acuity as he battles the press, business rivals, and countless real and perceived enemies inside and outside Fox, Sherman takes us inside the morning meetings in which Ailes and other highlevel executives strategize Foxs presentation of the news to advance Ailess political agenda provides behindthescenes details of Ailess crucial role as finder and shaper of talent, including his sometimes rocky relationships with Fox News such as OReilly and Sean Hannity and probes Ailess fraught partnership with his equally brash and mercurial boss, Rupert Murdoch.
OK, did I like the book I did, As I said, it's an ideal companion to Folkenflick's tome, I wish the publishers had included a selection of photographs, "The Loudest Voice in the Room" will appeal largely to devotees of insidebaseball information, but general readers should gain an understanding of Fox News Channel from reading it.
Clearly I'm losing it, Why would I even check out a book on one of the most disgusting creatures ever The book, what I read of it, seems well researched but that's no excuse.
The man and his minions fabricate and twist stories every day, Sadly, they have a group of poorly educated bots and crackpots who cling to every word, Take heartoverof their viewers are overand Fox is actually repelling younger people, Pretty surprised that Roger Ailes actually believes the stuff he puts on air, I thought it was all a gimmick for money, This book could easily have been half its size, And it would have been much better for it,
Most of the book after the initial years of Fox is just, a drag, a repeat of the same principles already established in earlier chapters, And without a deep look into the personal side of Roger Ailes the book is too unidirectional and suffers for it,
Whatever your political leanings though, you cannot help but walk away from the book with grudging respect for the man who built his legacy from scratch.
His father taught him not to trust anyone, While away at college, his divorced mother remarried, sold the Ohio home and moved to California without telling him about the move or what became of his things.
Roger Ailes learned to fend for himself,
There are a lot of surprises about Ailes' early life, For instance: He is a hemophiliac, he produced Broadway plays including a countercultural ecology themed musical called "Mother Earth", and he allowed himself to be followed around by Richard Gere, who was studying for a role as a campaign guru.
Sherman follows Ailes through his successes and failures as a TV and theatrical producer, In the beginning his "media advice" on political campaigns was a sideline, His work with Nixon and the resulting best seller about his role in it sitelinkThe Selling of the President both hindered and launched him.
As his life and career progressed so did Ailes' anger and paranoia,
There is background on the most curious of Ailes' relationships such as Joe McGuinness author of sitelinkThe Selling of the President Rudloph Guiliani the NY elite his networks bashes and the Murdoch family his employer, whom he manipulates.
There is good back story on how Ailes got on with Nixon's staff, how he built Fox, Fox's hyping of Clinton's "scandals" and its presentation of the theElection returns, how Glen Beck came to leave Fox, the facts surrounding the O'Reilly harassment and libel Al Franken lawsuits and much more.
The chapter on the Ailes's move to the Philipstown and purchase of its local newspaper is the story of Fox News in a microcosm.
There was the unnecessary stirring up and empowerment of angry people and the spouting of talking points/halftruths like those heard daily on the network.
Total control was demanded of the small newspaper staff, This and a smothering paternalism you can stay at our place, for vacation, we'll take you to your family in our jet begat its own kind of indentured servitude.
Leaving was an act of disloyalty to be punished as many who left Fox News found out,
The early years are well sourced, For later years the author has to rely on public records, the broadcasts themselves and those who would speak out, When Ailes leaves public life we, the public, will learn a lot more since there will be a spate of tellall memoirs by Fox News staff.
I hope someone does an "Ailes on the Couch", As this book ends, Fox while still the cable news leader, is declining in viewership, Its technology is getting outdated, It has lost two elections and in the interest of helping its party, has had to back away from the Tea Party it championed, Rupert Murdoch is less enamored of his producer, It looks like there will be another battle ahead when Ailes' contract expires,
There are no photographs, I'd like to have seen the early Ailes, looking like Bobby Darin, It is hard to imagine, While his brother is quoted and his mother is referenced as present at one point, the family essentially is left after childhood, Similarly, his health is dropped, as though his hemophilia has been outgrown, The transition from a more normal type A person to a full blown paranoiac control freak is not clearly shown, which may be due to finding sources to speak to this period.
This is an excellent and courageous job, I hope this author is not being followed or harassed like the staff of the PCNampR and other "enemies", I am so glad I never met, and never had to work for, Roger Ailes, It is terrifying that a man this unstable, paranoid, and full of hate has control of an entire network,
Here's the short version: Ailes makes Glen Beck look halfway sane, This goodbutnotgreat book tells the detailed story of Roger Ailes first rise in the political world, then second, much larger rise in the world of media, but combined with that, to head Fox News.
It also shows how Ailes has not only become more and more of an ahole along the way, but paranoid, and seemingly not just in a folk sense but a more narrowly psychological one.
Sherman details this through Ailes' move up the Hudson with his current wife to a small town near West Point, where he eventually buys the community paper, only to find, as Sherman puts it, that the Fox News bombast model doesn't scale down to the local level.
Well, at least not there, But, Sherman, while noting that Ailes was undone here in part by the rise of the Net, which in this case created online competition to the Putnam County Journal, that Putnam County, NY, isn't exactly smallcounty redstate Texas, Mississippi, or Oklahoma.
That's a lesser flaw to two bigger shortcomings, though,
First, Sherman notes that at one time, Ailes, like Rush Limbaugh, claimed this was all about entertainment, But later in the book, and far before the end, it's clear that Ailes really believes all of this, including blackhelicopter level paranoia,
Problem is that Sherman never, other than vague tieins to/, really explains what lead to this,
Second problem is his willingness to paint Rupert Murdoch as being good cop at times to Ailes bad cop, The reality of social psychology, though, is that when two people agree to play "good cop, bad cop," they're really both agreeing to play bad cop.
This book was written before Roger Ailes before his disgraceful conduct was made known, It has been on my TBR for a long time, but became easily available with the new TV movie based on this book, The book deals minimally with early in his professional life sexual harassment,
The book starts in Warren, Ohio, the city of his birth and follows though early jobs in show business e, g. The Mike Douglas Show and into his transition into politics, Although he always had a "healthy ego," it seems he really became a bully once he became the head of Fox News, Love 'em or hate 'em, it's a fact that Mr, Ailes helped to transform our country's manner of political discourse, No one person does it alone, Mr. Ailes had help as well as willing customers and clients, Mr. Sherman does an excellent job of keeping his eye on the ball by focusing on Mr, Ailes's life. It is no small matter when you consider Mr, Ailes was surrounded by many colorful controversial people, The author does very quick descriptions of other notorious celebrities such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, President Nixon, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mike Douglas.
Rupert Murdoch is more in depth because of the nature of his and Mr, Ailes's relationship. Executives and employees are also used to give a fuller picture of how Mr, Ailes's actions were received by his targets,
Mr. Ailes was a complicated individual, The author explains the evolution of Ailes from his humble beginnings to his rise as a media maestro, The book covers such topics as Mr, Ailes's college years, his work for the Mike Douglas Show, his chance meeting with candidate Richard Nixon which propelled him into political campaigns, his efforts into producing New York City plays, the George H.
W. Bush presidential run, his first dabbling into conservative television at TVN, and his eventual success creating Fox News, About half of the book focuses on the happenings during his tenure at Fox News, It involves a lot of examples of the power struggles and ideological clashes between Mr, Ailes and enemies, some actual while others are just a figment of his imagination, Mr. Sherman helps flesh out his subject matter even more by spending time explaining Mr, Ailes throwing his weight around in his bedroom community of Garrison, New York, It's safe to say that the Fox News bully had an unhealthy oversized ego which grew out of control as he rose to higher levels of power.
The paperback edition includes an Afterword which explains many examples of sexual harassment and his rapid downfall at Fox News, The Afterword was first published in 'New York' magazine, There are no photographs in the book, Also, please take time to read Mr, Sherman's 'A Note on Sources' which is after his Acknowledgements near the back of the book, It explains the reporter's few encounters with Mr, Ailes and the pushback Mr, Sherman received while writing 'The Loudest Voice in the Room, ' It is very illuminating. Sadly, viewers of Fox News will dismiss Mr, Sherman's excellent work because the propaganda station is much like an altar to them and they are the brainwashed disciples going forth to spread the conservative Fox News word.
Critical thinking takes a back seat to their emotional needs, The paranoid Mr. Ailes melded his conservative philosophy and his genius for creating marketable propaganda into personal power and contributed to our country's current political dysfunction, It was a large factor in helping that bombastic turnip head from New York City win the White House, It's well worth reading. .