In Fox News’ America, seeing is believing
MOST PEOPLE WHO WATCH SHOWTIME’S NEW miniseries The Loudest Voice will go in knowing quite a bit about its protagonist. Though he started in daytime TV, Roger Ailes made his name as a ruthlessly effective media strategist for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1996, after a bad breakup with NBC, he joined forces with Rupert Murdoch to found Fox News. Over the next two decades, Ailes became a household name—not just because of the success of his startlingly partisan network, but also because he was exiled from his empire in 2016 amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. He died at home the following spring.
It’s a Shakespearean tale that, as Ailes would have sensed, makes for captivating TV: a man who rode base urges to unparalleled political influence was ultimately destroyed by those same appetites. Based on Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 biography The Loudest Voice in the Room:
