{"id":9236,"date":"2013-03-05T14:16:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T22:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=9236"},"modified":"2014-01-09T13:02:43","modified_gmt":"2014-01-09T21:02:43","slug":"roger-ailes-uses-fox-news-personnel-as-his-personal-attack-dogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=9236","title":{"rendered":"Roger Ailes Uses Fox News Personnel As His Personal Attack Dogs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dylan Byers of Politico posted an article<\/a> yesterday that dug into the literary battle between two competing biographies of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. One of the bios is by an independent reporter, Gabriel Sherman, who has demonstrated his ability to break stories from within the Fox bubble. The other is by a hack, Zev Chafets, who previously penned a gushing homage to Rush Limbaugh and who has the blessing of Ailes – including access to the subject, his family, friends, and colleagues.<\/p>\n

\"Roger<\/center>
\n<\/p>\n

Byers noted that Sherman has already been targeted by Ailes’ defenders on the Fox News payroll. He has been assailed as a \u201cphony journalist,\u201d<\/em> a \u201cstalker,\u201d<\/em> a \u201charasser,\u201d<\/em> and when all else fails, as \u201ca [George] Soros puppet.\u201d<\/em> [Sherman is presently a fellow of the New America Foundation to which Soros has donated a miniscule sum. Conservative and Fox News pundit Jim Pinkerton also has a fellowship]. Despite this full-court bad press assault, Byers is not convinced that there is any coordinated effort to malign Sherman. He writes…<\/p>\n

“To date, no evidence has emerged that Ailes ordered his employees to stir up the attacks on Sherman \u2014 which have gone beyond the usual confines of professional critiques and into the realm of personal insult and innuendo.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Byers is looking for evidence, he might examine the track record at Fox when they decide that they are under fire from an ideological enemy. When David Brock of Media Matters was preparing the release of his book “The Fox Effect,”<\/em><\/a> the Ailes team fired up a preemptive blitzkrieg<\/a> of slander and character assassination. They labeled Brock everything from mentally unstable to a drug user to a self-hating megalomaniac. They also mounted a campaign to get Fox viewers to file complaints with the IRS to get Media Matters’ tax exemption as a charitable organization revoked. All of this because Brock had a book that was about to come out.<\/p>\n

This is all consistent with the Ailes business plan. He sits atop an enterprise that engages in scorched earth assaults against perceived enemies, driven by his own well-known paranoia. So it is not particularly surprising that, after hearing about an unauthorized (and perhaps unfriendly) biography in the works, he would solicit his own biographer whom he could be certain would canonize him and then attempt to discredit the opposing author before any truth inadvertently slipped out.<\/p>\n

Sherman recently certified his reporting skills, and the reliability of his sources within Fox, by exposing a couple of incidents that revealed some of the inner workings of the network. In one case he found that shortly after the massacre in Newtown, CT, Fox producers had been given instructions<\/a> “not to talk about gun-control policy on air.”<\/em> In the other case, just after the election results that Fox had so badly botched, Sherman discovered that Ailes had sent out orders<\/a> “mandating that producers must get permission before booking [Karl] Rove or [Dick] Morris,”<\/em> two of the more notoriously flawed Fox analysts.<\/p>\n

Sherman’s book is expected to be released in a few months. If his prior reporting is any indication, it should be an interesting read. The same cannot be said for the book by Chafets, unless you happen to be partial to sycophantic hero-worship based on fantastical diversions from reality. But because of the timing, neither book is likely to record how Ailes unethically deploys his “news”<\/em> staff to smack down independent reporting that he is afraid might be too honest and probing – especially when it is about himself. It is easy to predict that, as the publish date for Sherman’s book approaches, Sherman will become increasingly under attack by the Ailes machine. It may be a withering onslaught of defamation, but it will also be an affirmation that he is doing his job.<\/p>\n

[Update]<\/strong> An excerpt of the Ailes-approved Chafets book was published in Vanity Fair<\/a>. Aside from the expected adulatory tone, Chafets revealed how juvenile Ailes can be when criticizing those he dislikes. He called Newt Gingrich “a prick.”<\/em> He said VP Joe Biden is “dumb as an ashtray.”<\/em> He mocked CNN’s Soledad O’Brien as the anchor “named after a prison”<\/em> (actually, she was named after the Virgin Mary). He went after his own son-in-law saying that he “needed to see a psychiatrist.”<\/em> And he sunk to racist dog-whistling by calling President Obama “lazy.”<\/em> Based on these excerpts, this is one book that should hit the bargain bins pretty fast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dylan Byers of Politico posted an article yesterday that dug into the literary battle between two competing biographies of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. One of the bios is by an independent reporter, Gabriel Sherman, who has demonstrated his ability to break stories from within the Fox bubble. The other is by a hack, Zev […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[264,33,1082,143],"class_list":["post-9236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-david-brock","tag-fox-news","tag-gabriel-sherman","tag-roger-ailes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Ijg-2oY","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9389,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=9389","url_meta":{"origin":9236,"position":0},"title":"A Panicky Roger Ailes Unleashes The Fox News Hounds","author":"Mark NC","date":"3\/31\/2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Fox News CEO Roger Ailes is revealing the creeping dread he harbors at the prospect of being exposed in a new biography that will be released in a few weeks. As a result of his manic paranoia he has assembled his Flunky Brigade to mount a large-scale offensive meant to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10415,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=10415","url_meta":{"origin":9236,"position":1},"title":"Cloak And Dagger: Why Did Fox News Fire Roger Ailes’ Right-Hand Man?","author":"Mark NC","date":"8\/22\/2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Last month Brian Lewis was quietly escorted from the Fox News offices by security personnel. It is only now becoming known that this long-time employee was terminated under suspicious circumstances. The statement from Fox News said that Lewis, Fox's Executive VP of Communications, was... \"...terminated for cause, specifically for issues\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":32090,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=32090","url_meta":{"origin":9236,"position":2},"title":"YOU’RE FIRED: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes To Be Canned For Alleged Sexual Harassment, Sources Say","author":"Mark NC","date":"7\/18\/2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The continuing saga of Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes just took a leap off a cliff. Longtime Ailes watcher and biographer, Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine is reporting that: \"Roger Ailes's tenure as the head of Fox News may be coming to an end. Rupert Murdoch and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"Roger Ailes Fox News","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/..\/Pix\/Trump\/ailes-the-hutt-e1468869697160.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/..\/Pix\/Trump\/ailes-the-hutt-e1468869697160.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/..\/Pix\/Trump\/ailes-the-hutt-e1468869697160.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":9326,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=9326","url_meta":{"origin":9236,"position":3},"title":"Roger Ailes Kept Glenn Beck On The Air To Irritate MoveOn And Media Matters","author":"Mark NC","date":"3\/21\/2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The new biography of Roger Ailes by his hand-picked fluffer, Zev Chafets, is getting some exposure in the press via reviews and excerpts. News Corpse recently reported that Ailes agreed to cooperate with Chafets in order to make a preemptive strike against a more critical look at his career by\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11234,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=11234","url_meta":{"origin":9236,"position":4},"title":"No Kidding, Snerdley: It’s Safe To Say That Fox News Is ‘In The Christie Camp’","author":"Mark NC","date":"1\/10\/2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Everyone has something to say about the revelation that Chris Christie's office was intimately involved in the closing of the George Washington Bridge despite their prior denials. 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