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The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country Hardcover – January 14, 2014

by Gabriel Sherman (Author)

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Title: The Loudest Voice in the Room( How the Brilliant Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country) Binding: Hardcover Author: GabrielSherman Publisher: RandomHouse

Print length

560 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

January 14, 2014
Dimensions

6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

9780812992854
ISBN-13

978-0812992854
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[An] actually fair and balanced, carefully documented biography.”—Jacob Weisberg, The New York Times Book Review

“The book excels at compiling data establishing Ailes’s control freakishness and authoritarian nature. . . . A veteran of the New York media-reporting scene, Sherman nails the Fox News palace intrigue and brings to light interactions that Ailes clearly never wanted to go public.”—Erik Wemple, The Washington Post

“[An] enormously entertaining new biography.”—The New Republic

“A thoroughly reported look behind that curtain . . . Part of the reason [Ailes] and his allies have campaigned against the book is not because it is false, but because it tells a true story.”—David Carr, The New York Times

“Sherman is at his best writing with sweep about the history of cable news and placing Ailes in context.”—Los Angeles Times

“[An] eye-opening biography of the would-be political kingmaker and Fox News mastermind . . . A well-reported, engaging book. A bonus: Bill O’Reilly won’t like it, either. Politics and media junkies, on the other hand, will have a field day.”—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Gabriel Sherman is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. Most recently, Sherman served as national affairs editor at New York magazine, and he is a regular contributor to NBC News and MSNBC. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and GQ, among other publications. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jennifer Stahl. This is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE RAW MATERIALS FOR ROGER AILES’S MYTH of an America in danger of being lost come from his hometown of Warren, in the northeastern corner of Ohio. In the late 1800s, Warren became a center of trade and manufacturing, a city that worked. The town of six thousand boasted five newspapers, seven churches, and three banks. In 1890, two sons of Warren founded the Packard Electric Company, which would one day employ Roger’s father. They produced the first Packard motorcar in their Warren factory in 1899, and made Warren’s streets the first in America to be illuminated by incandescent light. Through the twentieth century, the company’s growth was spurred by deposits of coal and iron ore in the Mahoning Valley. The region became one of the largest steel manufacturers in the country.

In 1932, the General Motors Corporation acquired Packard Electric to manufacture cables for its automobiles. Roger’s father, who had been working at the plant since around the time of the 1929 stock market crash, held on to his job under the new management. Packard continued to thrive, as did the rest of Warren. In 1936, Neil Armstrong, age five, went for his first airplane ride in Warren in a Ford Tri-Motor. After World War II, Warren’s industries boomed, and throughout the middle part of the last century it was a seat of limitless American potential.

That was the world into which Roger Eugene Ailes was born, on May 15, 1940. Warren residents earned incomes that were nearly 30 percent above the national average, redefining the middle class in ways that still have painful resonance today. “There were no slums,” recalled Ailes’s childhood friend Launa Newman. Warren, like blue-collar towns across postwar America, had been built on a benevolent compact between management and labor, which spread prosperity widely, as long as profits were growing. Packard, which employed six thousand workers in 1953, was like a city unto itself. It had its own newspaper, the Cablegram, and sponsored annual picnics for tens of thousands, where kids competed in pie-eating contests and lucky penny scrambles. The career of Roger’s father, Robert Sr., who rose to the rank of foreman in the maintenance department, benefited from this arrangement. He raised his children in a tidy home on Belmont Street, with enough yard for his prized tomato garden and the family beagle hound, Tip. He worked for forty years at the company, retired in 1969 in his early sixties, and lived the last years of his life on a company pension.

Warren was a labor stronghold, but there were conservative currents coursing through the city’s politics. Growing up in the 1920s, Robert Ailes Sr. was drawn toward them. He recoiled from unions. To him, they were arbitrary, often rewarding people who were undeserving. At the Packard plant, Robert was considered management, and thus excluded from the benefits of joining the union. But without a college degree he had no chance to advance into the corporate hierarchy. “I never could understand why he’d ever be a Republican. Ninety-nine percent of the people who came up through the school of hard knocks were Democrats,” his son Robert Jr. said. His conservatism was a reaction against those who got breaks he never did, and his resentments consumed him.

Robert Sr. came of age at a time in which Warren was engaged in a culture war brought on by increasing ethnic and racial discord. Rapid industrialization brought waves of immigrants—Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Yugoslavians, Greeks—to northeast Ohio. They came in search of work in the mills. In Warren, the immigrants lived in the Flats, a scruffy neighborhood by the rail depot. It was the Prohibition era, and corruption bloomed. The foreigners operated betting parlors and speakeasies—“vice dens”—in the back rooms of social clubs in the Flats. The city’s Protestants blamed the newcomers, many of whom were Catholics and Orthodox Christians, for subverting their efforts to curtail bootlegging. One minister complained to the Dry Enforcement League that the county was “rich enough to lock up every bootlegger,” but refused to do so.

As an adult, Robert joined Freemasonry, a fraternal organization that also stood up against the city’s changing character. Robert devoted himself to the Masons. He became a 32nd-degree master and served for twenty-five years as chaplain of the Carroll F. Clapp Lodge in Warren. As a Master Mason, he was given entrée into an affiliated body called the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets, for which he served as Shriner and Past Monarch. The organizations were the pride of his career. They gave him the titles and the respect he was denied at Packard. His wife complained that he spent far too many hours at the lodge. “One of his disappointments in life was that Roger and I didn’t become Masons,” Robert Jr. recalled.

Robert Sr. and his wife, Donna, met at church. She was a famous beauty, lithe, nine years younger than he, with brown hair and wide-set eyes. She had come to Warren from Parkersburg, West Virginia, when she was less than a year old. Her father, James Arley Cunningham, who lacked a high school diploma, sought work in the local steel industry. He was a religious man, who took his family to the fervent Evangelical United Brethren Church every Sunday. “They didn’t believe in movies or dancing,” Roger said. Robert and Donna had a swift courtship, and less than a year into their marriage she became pregnant with Robert Jr.

When Roger Ailes spoke of Warren, he invoked a small-town idyll, a lost American dream, but those images were only part of his childhood story, one in which tenebrous parts were edited out. The difficulties started with his illness. At the age of two, not long after learning to walk, Roger fell and bit his tongue. His parents couldn’t stop the bleeding. Terrified, they rushed him to Trumbull Memorial Hospital. A doctor diagnosed their child with hemophilia, a genetic disorder that hinders the ability of the body’s blood to clot. There was no cure for the little-understood condition. “Well, you died. That’s what you knew about it,” Roger later recalled. “I was told many times I wasn’t going to make it.” “The treatment for hemophilia back then was terribly crude,” remembered Robert Jr., who would become a doctor. Their parents did what they could to keep Roger out of trouble, protecting him from uneven stretches of sidewalk where he could trip and scrape his knee, and from getting into backyard scuffles. The average life expectancy of a severe hemophiliac at the time was eleven years.

Notwithstanding his hemophilia, or perhaps in angry defiance of it, Roger had an incongruous physical boldness, with sometimes dire consequences. In grade school, when his parents weren’t looking, Roger sneaked up onto the roof of his family’s garage. He jumped to the ground and bit his tongue on impact. His father rushed him to Trumbull Memorial. This time the doctors there were unable to help him. “I heard the doctor say—I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I heard him say, ‘We really can’t do anything,’ ” Roger said. His father, a short, obstinate man, pugnacious by nature, refused to give up. Robert Jr. remembered the incident vividly: “My dad bundled Roger in a blanket and put him in the family Chevy and drove to the Cleveland Clinic.” Driving eighty miles an hour down Route 422, they were soon stopped by a state police car.

“Look, my son’s bleeding. We’ve got to get to the hospital,” Robert pleaded to a man in a Mountie hat standing outside his window.

The trooper looked at the boy wrapped in a blood-stained blanket in the backseat. “Get behind me,” he said and escorted them, his lights flashing the rest of the way to Cleveland.

A whole crew of Robert’s work friends, who had names like “Dirty Neck Watson,” went to the hospital to donate their blood. Many were so filthy that the doctors had to scrub them down before they gave Roger a direct blood transfusion from their arms to his. “Well, son,” his father said after he pulled through. “You have a lot of blue-collar blood in you. Never forget that.”

The hospital traumatized the young boy, and the threat of returning there denied him many of the pleasures of childhood. “Roger told me one time, when he was really young, he was suspended upside down for hours at the hospital to keep the blood from pooling in dangerous ways,” Launa Newman said. During recess, Roger often sat at his desk as the other kids played outside. But after school hours, his teacher could not stop him from playing touch football and sandlot baseball. “He participated until he got so black-and-blue he couldn’t move,” his brother said.

Simply walking to and from school was hazardous. A passing car clipped him once when he was in the second grade, an accident that landed him back in the hospital. “What saved me was a little square lunch box that I had,” Roger said. “He hit the lunchbox and I flew into the air and into the curb.” On another occasion, some neighborhood boys roughed him up on his walk home. “My dad, I saw tears in his eyes for the first time,” Roger recalled. “I’d never seen it. And he said, ‘That’s never going to happen to you again.’ ”

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0812992857
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (January 14, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780812992854
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812992854
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.02 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,198,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #421 in Media & Internet in Politics (Books)
- #1,897 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #3,845 in Communication & Media Studies

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Gabriel Sherman

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GABRIEL SHERMAN is a contributing editor at New York magazine. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and GQ, among other publications. He has served as a commentator on National Public Radio, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC's Morning Joe, NBC's Today show, and ABC's World News. Since 2012, he has been a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jennifer Stahl.

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jl

Five Stars for courage

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2014

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I'm only two and a half chapters into the Kindle version; clearly too early to write a comprehensive review. Still, I can see that it is good.

I'm giving 5 stars for courage. Based on everything I've ever heard, the blowback at the author from this powerful and vindictive man is likely to be considerable. I'm not far enough through to give the entire work a five star rating, but it is fascinating, well written, and well researched. I think the 5 will stick.

Gabriel Sherman is saying what needs to be said. The curtain needs to be pulled back to reveal the actual man operating the powerful puppet show of Fox "News." Politics aside, the impact of this TV station on older American's sanity and state of mind is considerable. I've watched my parents go from reasonably laid-back and somewhat equanimous to being highly anxious and caught in the spell of fear and anger. Ailes manipulates his victims by expertly playing on their fears, triggering their anger, channeling that fear and anger to play into his personal politics. This level of manipulation applies even more to the people who are caught directly in the forcefield of his power. It also applies quite directly to the levers of power driving major events in the world: the run up to the Iraq war, and countless contemporary political machinations. So this is an interesting and powerful figure in our time.

The book so far is well written and seems well researched. I don't believe he is just making anything up here.

The main criticism of this book that I've encountered is that the author never interviewed Ailes directly. OK, yes, we should all have a chance to define ourself, clear up the facts of our lives. But Ailes is not one to clear things up with facts, as far as I can tell. He is one of the most masterful liars of our time. To get his word would be to get a self-defined funhouse mirror on the reality. A counter argument is that Ailes has enemies, and those enemies would also lie. Yes, a good point. The other thing Ailes has are many many minions who are completely in his power. Their veracity might also be questioned. In the end it is really a fascinating house of mirrors, a story of power and distorted reality that would be worthy of Shakespeare, if only it were fiction, or distant history. If only. In the end Gabriel Sherman does a masterful job of navigating the funhouse full of mirrors and frightening power without losing his bearings or his voice.

Again, bravo for the courage of the author, and I look forward to reading more.

147 people found this helpful

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Mary Ann Liebert

Would enjoy lunching with Ailes. He's one in a million

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2015

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Roger Ailes is a complex man, extremely smart and talented in different fields as shown from his early years onward. He is also a VERY difficult man to work with or for, then and now! . But it is his career at Fox that is the most compelling reading, and yes, it is compelling! From Early on when Fox News Network was establishing itself, to its competition with CNN, the details and the players themselves are well painted. And what a group, including disturbing facts about as Bill O'Reilly, who comes off VERY poorly. Hannity, and Greta are also given plenty of ink. But even without a cast of characters including Rupert Murdoch, Ailes himself is the be all in every situation, always maddening, ambitious, devious, and powerful . Ailes personal life is also explored; forget political correctness if you should happen to meet him in December and wish him a Merry Christmas, not Happy Holiday. The book is well written so despite its length, it held my interest from start to finish.

7 people found this helpful

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Critical Rationalist

Revealing portrait of media demagogue who's even worse than you think

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2014

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Many of the reviews here were posted right after the book came out, without (I suspect) reading the entire book. But to truly understand the poison that Roger Ailes has injected into the American body politic, one really should read The Loudest Voice in the Room in its entirety. Before reading this book I had judged Fox News to be a facts-be-damned right-wing propaganda outlet using many of the same audience manipulation techniques that Cold War era Radio Moscow used, and before that the Reichsministerium fuer Volksaufklaerung -- only slicker, since Fox has video plus lots of "babes" who must wear dresses and show leg.

All that is still true, but I had no idea how crazy, conspiratorial, off-the-rails loony Ailes is. He's very smart (no genius though, just lucky), yet he is politically insane and an unmitigated bully. For those who don't want to read the entire book, just read the last couple of chapters about how Ailes and his wife tried, and failed, to take over the little Hudson River town where they reside and install far-right anti-government puppets there. Shocking. Eve-opening. And very sad. America will be a better place when people like that are seen for the irrational, destructive forces they are.

An excellent, well-researched, well-written book.

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Luke Penney

Great book

Reviewed in Canada on January 25, 2022

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Writing and research that is second to none with a beautiful ending summary from the writer.

Cliente Amazon

Revealing and riveting

Reviewed in Italy on May 19, 2022

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I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm finding it monstrously full of content.

Hector Hound

AS DESCRIBED

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2020

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YEP ALL GOOD AND DELIVERED

Xavier Herbert -Will

The corruptive greed of Murdoch supported the rise of this neo fascist to such dizzy heights.

Reviewed in Australia on June 6, 2021

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The lack of adequate research by Murdoch and News Corp Management to investigate the disgusting behaviour before engaging Ailes to establish Fox News confirms primarily why Murdoch should have his media interests in Australia eliminated or at least significantly reduced so that he no longer has such input into the disgraceful delivery of lies and manipulation.

mario63a

libro molto importante per capire televisione, politica, potere

Reviewed in Italy on March 10, 2021

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è un libro molto interessante sul tema informazione, televisione, potere, propaganda, politica; consigliatissimo per capire il mondo di oggi

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