About this episode
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThis is a podcast review of the book The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman (2014), a biography of Roger Ailes, and the miniseries based on the book, The Loudest Voice (2019). Ailes’ life story brings together many of my main interests. He created Fox News in 1996, and ran the network until 2016, the year before his death. Fox can be considered the beginning of modern conservative media. There had long been talk radio, magazines like National Review, and conservative newspapers, but nothing on the scale of a cable TV news network that would shoot to number one in the ratings just six years after its founding.The story of Fox is also part of the story of the decline of American institutions. From the beginning, there was a tension between people who wanted to do straight news, and Ailes, who sought to create an entertaining product that played to the audience. The latter tendency would win out, and be rewarded by the market. By the time of the Obama administration, Fox was reacting to conservative grassroots energy rather than shaping it. Through looking at what were considered scandals in the first decade and a half of the network, we can understand how far standards have fallen. I discuss the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Fox started hemorrhaging viewers because it would not go along with Trump’s stolen election narrative. The market competition to Fox comes from outlets that are even more biased and sloppier with the facts. Conservative media had an audience problem, and although Fox could shape and harness that energy for a while, the culture the network created led to the rise of Trump and total victory for the angry ignorant masses over more refined sectors of the conservative movement.Ailes’ predatory behavior towards women is also an important part of the story, and what eventually brought him down. I argue that what he was doing and the fact that he could get away with it for so long tell us something about rightist culture divorced from religious norms. Ailes had a cult of personality at Fox that was similar to the one that Trump would establish on a larger scale over the entirety of the conservative movement. I explain why I don’t think sexual harassment in the workforce is something government usually needs to get involved in, but in this case in particular because it occurred in a major journal
