“Let’s see if Fox News is still on the air,” he said.įor months, Roger Ailes and I had been meeting regularly at Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, at his home in Putnam County, and at public and private gatherings. During a time-out he extracted his BlackBerry for a quick peek at the standings. As they fell behind, Ailes grew tense, barking instructions at his son and the rest of the team, but the advice wasn’t helping. But Zac’s team, wearing red, was no match for the other school’s. Hands up on defense!” Zac hit the first shot of the game, and Ailes clapped loudly and shouted his approval. Zac was easily the tallest kid on the team, and when the action commenced, his father encouraged him to take advantage of it. This was the third game of the season, and he had been there every time.Īs we waited for the tip-off, Ailes ran down the roster. But Zac is his only child, and perhaps the only person who could lure Ailes away from his office on a Wednesday afternoon. The other parents were young enough to be his children. The overall effect was that of a formal, somewhat forbidding small-town banker in a Frank Capra movie.Īiles is past 70 and looks it, especially when he tries to walk on his bum leg. His hair was slicked back and a pair of bifocals perched on his nose. Ailes, in a folding chair along the sideline, was dressed in his work clothes: black suit, starched white shirt, gold tie clip, and matching cuff links. The contest featured his 12-year-old son, Zac, who plays for his Upper East Side Catholic boys’ school. In mid-January 2012, Roger Ailes skipped out on his duties at Fox News to attend a basketball game. has obtained an exclusive adaptation of Chafets’s book, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, to be published later this month by Penguin Sentinel, in which several of these private moments are detailed-including one famous face-off with the president. What resulted from the latter effort was a series of intimate encounters that have made their way into the book, showing the world from Ailes’s perspective. The books will hit stands within months of one another and undoubtedly paint strikingly different portraits while Sherman has for years covered the media, Fox News, and Ailes in particular, Chafets was given unprecedented access to the man himself, as well as his friends, family, and colleagues. This year, the veil is pulled back by two high-profile biographies-one written with Ailes’s cooperation, by award-winning columnist and author Zev Chafets, and one unauthorized, by prolific New York–magazine media reporter Gabriel Sherman. But as outspoken as the Fox News chief may be, little is known about Ailes the man-an extraordinarily private and security-conscious person who once personally safety-tested the thickness of the glass at the network’s Manhattan studios. His Fox News was accused of being the “communications arm of the Republican Party” in 2010 by then White House communications director Anita Dunn and has been criticized by Barack Obama himself (criticism that Ailes publicly countered with gusto, claiming the president “just has a different belief system from most Americans”). Roger Ailes is one of the most powerful-and controversial-characters in television media, pilloried by critics and many in the mainstream media and lionized by conservative viewers who can’t get enough of his posse of charismatic hosts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |