Biography Casts Critical Light on Fox News Chief
Roger Ailes was so eager to influence national politics that in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, he told fellow Fox News executives point-blank: “I want to elect the next president.”
In the corporate thicket of News Corporation, according to a new book, Mr. Ailes dared to battle with Lachlan Murdoch, a son of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman, openly gloating when the younger Mr. Murdoch eventually left his post at the company and even commandeering his chair.
At Fox News, the book says, Mr. Ailes was disdainful of even his most bankable on-air talent, privately calling Bill O’Reilly “a book salesman with a TV show” and Brian Kilmeade, a peppy Fox host, “a soccer coach from Long Island.”
Those episodes are described in “The Loudest Voice in the Room” by Gabriel Sherman, a 560-page biography of Mr. Ailes being published on Jan. 21 by Random House.
The book aims to be an exhaustive look at Mr. Ailes’s life and his monumental career, particularly as chairman of Fox News Channel. Under his stewardship, the network, known best for its conservative opinion shows in prime time, dominates the cable news competition, frequently posting ratings better than those for its main rivals, MSNBC and CNN, combined. It has also become the most profitable division of 21st Century Fox, its parent, with annual earnings that have been estimated at $1 billion.
The book describes in detail Mr. Ailes’s professional ambition, his desire to influence American politics through a conservative prism, and his status as a visionary who possessed an intuitive understanding of the power of television to shape public opinion. Before entering the corporate world, Mr. Ailes was a political consultant, and Mr. Sherman’s book credits him with being a pioneer in using television during election campaigns.
In the months before publication, the book has drawn sharp criticism from a chorus of people connected to Fox News, including employees and contributors who have taken to Twitter to attack Mr. Sherman.
Mr. Ailes, in what some viewed as an attempt to pre-empt Mr. Sherman’s book, cooperated with another biography, “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” by Zev Chafets, which was published last year by Sentinel, a conservative imprint at Penguin.
In his book, Mr. Sherman, a contributing editor at New York magazine, follows Mr. Ailes, 73, from his boyhood in Ohio to his perch as one of the most powerful figures in the history of television.
Despite being unsatisfied with many of the Republican candidates for president in 2012, Mr. Ailes endeavored to promote Mitt Romney on Fox News programs, the book says. Before the Wisconsin congressman Paul D. Ryan was chosen as Mr. Romney’s running mate, Mr. Ailes advised Mr. Ryan that his television skills needed work and recommended a speech coach.
At the beginning of the general election, a four-minute video criticizing President Obama’s policies was broadcast on “Fox and Friends,” provoking outrage from the left and prompting the network to say publicly that Mr. Ailes had no involvement in its creation. In “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” Mr. Sherman writes that the video “was Ailes’s brainchild.”
The New York Times obtained a copy of the book in advance of its publication.
Mr. Sherman said in the source notes that he interviewed 614 people who knew or worked with Mr. Ailes for the book, which took more than three years to report and write. More than 100 pages are devoted to source notes and bibliography.
Former employees cited in the book talked of Mr. Ailes’s volatile temper and domineering behavior. In one anecdote, a television producer, Randi Harrison, told Mr. Sherman that while negotiating her salary with Mr. Ailes at NBC in the 1980s, he offered her an additional $100 each week “if you agree to have sex with me whenever I want.”
A Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement on Tuesday: “These charges are false. While we have not read the book, the only reality here is that Gabe was not provided any direct access to Roger Ailes and the book was never fact-checked with Fox News.”
The book also describes an explosive episode dating back to 1995, when Mr. Ailes was a high-ranking executive at NBC and locked in a power struggle with another executive, David Zaslav.
At a company dinner, according to the book, Mr. Ailes made clear he was ready to do battle with Mr. Zaslav. “Let’s kill the S.O.B.,” he told his dining companions, Mr. Sherman writes. At a separate meeting with Mr. Zaslav, the book says, Mr. Ailes was said to have unleashed a vulgar, anti-Semitic slur at his rival.
That episode was promptly investigated, at NBC’s behest, by a partner from the firm Proskauer Rose, Mr. Sherman writes. The partner concluded in his internal report that he believed the allegation that Mr. Ailes made an anti-Semitic remark — an obscene phrase with the words “little” and “Jew” — was true. Bob Wright, the former chairman and chief executive of NBC who was Mr. Ailes’s boss at the time, is quoted in the book as saying, “My conclusion was that he probably said it.” Mr. Sherman also cites documentation from the investigation.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Ailes specifically denied using an anti-Semitic slur against Mr. Zaslav.
Mr. Zaslav, now the chief executive of Discovery and one of the most powerful executives in television, also denied it. “We fought with each other and we fought with a lot of other people,” he said Tuesday in a phone interview. “But this allegation is false.” He added that he and Mr. Ailes were now friends.
In his source notes, Mr. Sherman quotes Mr. Zaslav as denying the episode.
Random House, which acquired “The Loudest Voice in the Room” in December 2010, said that Mr. Sherman was prepared to speak up in the news media to defend the book. An excerpt will run in New York magazine.
Both Mr. Sherman and Random House say they are girding for a counterattack from Fox News. Some Fox employees have already denigrated Mr. Sherman publicly, with the prime-time host Sean Hannity calling him a “phony journalist” on Twitter.
Last year, lawyers from Fox News met with lawyers from Random House to discuss Mr. Sherman’s book. Fox requested the meeting because it had heard about allegations that might be in the book that it said were inaccurate, and to emphasize that the book had not been fact-checked by Fox News.
Theresa Zoro, a spokeswoman for Random House, said in a statement that Mr. Sherman’s book was “an objective and rigorously reported account of Roger Ailes’s life and his running of Fox News. We fully stand by the book. If anyone has issues with it, we will respond with the facts as Gabe Sherman has reported them.”
Mr. Sherman said in an email: “I consider Roger Ailes to be one of the most fascinating, consequential figures in contemporary American life. I wrote this book to shed light on the full scope of his talents and power, which have found their fullest expression at Fox News.”
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