The man at the center of Chafet’s book has transformed television news and made superstars of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, along with Brit Hume, Bret Baier and others
After more than fifty years of reviewing books, I only occasionally come across a biography that gets my juices flowing; a book so well written that it is almost a physical pleasure to read it and a subject that is totally engrossing. This was the case for me when I began to read Zev Chafet’s “Roger Ailes Off Camera.”
Like many people I was aware that Ailes had created Fox News with the backing of print and broadcast tycoon, Rupert Murdoch. He literally did so from scratch. There were no studios, no equipment, no staff, and no infrastructure. When he suggested the venture to Murdoch, the media giant asked “How much will it cost me?” “Nine hundred million to a billion,” Ailes replied, adding “And you could lose it all.” “Can you do it?” asked Murdoch. “Yes.” “Then go ahead and do it.” That took a lot of courage and confidence on the part of both men and it transformed television news.
Ailes is a Horatio Alger story, born into a family of modest means, a boy from a small Ohio town with the great talent and virtue of telling people the truth even if they did not want to hear it. He had a passion for television and the luck of being in the right place at the right time. When, in 1961, KYW-TV in Cleveland decided to launch a daytime variety show hosted “by a little known song-and-dance man, Mike Douglas”, Aisles, just out of Ohio University joined the team producing it. The show would go onto run in national syndication for more than twenty years. It took long hours and hard work to make it one of the most popular shows on TV, but Aisles thrived on it.