The Roger Ailes book wars have begun.
On Wednesday Vanity Fair’s Web site published an excerpt from the first of two — or maybe three — books about Mr. Ailes and the network he runs, the Fox News Channel.
The excerpt, from the book “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” by Zev Chafets, revealed little about Fox, but included a number of pointed one-liners uttered by Mr. Ailes, whose conservative politics appeal to many Fox viewers but infuriate his critics.
Mr. Chafets’s book will be published on March 19. It precedes another book about Mr. Ailes, tentatively titled “The Loudest Voice in the Room: Fox News and the Making of America,” by Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine.
Of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Ailes is quoted in the excerpt saying: “I have a soft spot for Joe Biden. I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray.” Of Newt Gingrich, a former Fox News analyst and Republican presidential candidate, Mr. Ailes said, “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” He proceeded to use an obscenity to describe Mr. Gingrich.
It is Mr. Ailes’s comment about President Obama that may garner the most attention. Mr. Ailes has been sharply critical of Mr. Obama in the past; last month he was quoted as saying “The president likes to divide people into groups. He’s too busy getting the middle class to hate rich people, blacks to hate whites. He is busy trying to get everybody to hate each other.”
In the book excerpt in Vanity Fair, Mr. Ailes is shown reacting to a remark during the presidential campaign by a Democratic strategist, Hilary Rosen, who said that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” Mr. Ailes responded, “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time.” Mr. Ailes added, “He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.”
Mr. Chafets said that when Mr. Ailes noticed his arched eyebrows, Mr. Ailes added, “I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.”
This is the type of quote that gets partisans on both sides riled up. Mr. Obama brought up laziness when Ms. Walters asked him in a 2011 interview on ABC, “What’s the trait you most deplore in yourself and the trait you most deplore in others?”
When he said laziness, she sounded surprised. He explained, “There is a — deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me.” He chalked it up to his boyhood in sunny Hawaii.
He added, “But when I’m mad at myself, it’s because I’m saying to myself, ‘You know what, you could be doing better; push harder.’ And when I — nothing frustrates me more than when people aren’t doing their jobs.” Mr. Obama then said, to answer the other half of Ms. Walters’ question, that the trait he most dislikes in other people is cruelty. “I can’t stand cruel people,” he said. “And if I see people doing something mean to somebody else just to make themselves feel important, it really gets me mad.”
Mr. Ailes is also quoted in the excerpt on the subject of MSNBC, which has emerged as a less-highly-rated liberal counterweight to Fox News. Mr. Ailes said he warned NBC in the mid-1990s not to name the channel MSNBC because “M.S. is a damn disease.” At the time Mr. Ailes was the head of America’s Talking, the NBC cable channel that was effectively replaced by MSNBC in 1996. He left NBC to create Fox News.
Sometime after Mr. Sherman began working on his book, Mr. Ailes agreed to cooperate with Mr. Chafets, whose previous books include a favorable biography of Rush Limbaugh. Within the television industry, Mr. Chafets’s book is widely seen as an attempt to get out ahead of Mr. Sherman’s book. (Perhaps the better word for it is “prebuttal,” a word political operatives sometimes use).
The publisher of Mr. Chafets’s book, Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Group, told Politico earlier this week that Mr. Ailes “decided to grant our author exclusive interviews for his book, and he told his Fox News colleagues and friends that they were free to talk to Chafets. But Mr. Ailes had no control over the editorial process, which was between us and our author.”
Mr. Sherman’s book, meanwhile, has a May release date, but it is believed to have been delayed. Mr. Sherman wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning that he was struck by the way Mr. Ailes and his boss Rupert Murdoch talk about each other in the excerpt from Mr. Chafets’s book.
Mr. Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, is quoted as saying that he defers to Mr. Ailes: “I have ideas that Roger can accept or not. As long as things are going well. …”
And Mr. Ailes is quoted as saying, “Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn’t matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I’m killed. Our relationship isn’t about love — it’s about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I’ve met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert’s money like it is mine.”
Mr. Ailes is also said to be working on an autobiography — but there’s no release date for it. Perhaps he wants the last word on himself.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/the-first-strike-in-the-roger-ailes-book-wars/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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