The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Author: Gabriel Sherman | Language: English | ISBN:
B00AD6O6BU | Format: PDF
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A deeply reported journey inside the secretive world of Fox News and the life of its combative, visionary founder. When Rupert Murdoch enlisted Roger Ailes to launch a cable news network in 1996, American politics and media changed forever. Now, with a remarkable level of detail and insight,
New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman brings Ailes’s unique genius to life, along with the outsize personalities—Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, and others—who have helped Fox News play a defining role in the great social and political controversies of the past two decades. From the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal to the Bush-Gore recount, from the war in Iraq to the Tea Party attack on the Obama presidency, Roger Ailes has developed an unrivaled power to sway the national agenda. Even more, he has become the indispensable figure in conservative America and the man any Republican politician with presidential aspirations must court.
How did this man, whose life story has until now been shrouded in myth, become the master strategist of our political landscape? In revelatory detail, Sherman chronicles the rise of Ailes, a sickly kid from an Ohio factory town who, through sheer willpower, the flair of a showman, fierce corporate politicking, and a profound understanding of the priorities of middle America, built the most influential television news empire of our time.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Fox News insiders past and present, Sherman documents Ailes’s tactical acuity as he battles the press, business rivals, and countless real and perceived enemies inside and outside Fox. Sherman takes us inside the morning meetings in which Ailes and other high-level executives strategize Fox’s presentation of the news to advance Ailes’s political agenda; provides behind-the-scenes details of Ailes’s crucial role as finder and shaper of talent, including his sometimes rocky relationships with Fox News stars such as O’Reilly and Hannity; and probes Ailes’s fraught partnership with his equally brash and mercurial boss, Rupert Murdoch.
Roger Ailes’s life is a story worthy of
Citizen Kane.
The Loudest Voice in the Room is an extraordinary feat of reportage with a compelling human drama at its heart.
Praise for The Loudest Voice in the Room “[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 TimesFrom the Hardcover edition.- File Size: 2303 KB
- Print Length: 560 pages
- Publisher: Random House (January 14, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00AD6O6BU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,948 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Industries > Media & Communications - #5
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Histories
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Industries > Media & Communications - #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Media Studies - #16
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Histories
“The Loudest Voice in the Room” by Gabriel Sherman is a story about a TV station known all around the world, even by those who have never viewed a minute of its program - Fox News.
Gabriel Sherman made an extensive research to present a less known pieces of the puzzle about this TV station that became a synonym for conservative and Republican America; his book is going deep into the details that explain the reader how it came to this phenomenon providing information about the controversial person Roger Ailes of which time has yet to tell its judgment.
“The Loudest Voice in the Room” is not a book for Democrats or Republicans in particular, even not only for Americans, but for all those readers who want to find out how Fox News became what they are today, to learn about all the means used to achieve and maintain their popularity and became a symbol of one type of political thinking.
On its pages the author is discussing particular role of Roger Ailes, related to all the affairs that were produced, fueled or carefully monitored by Fox Network from Clinton era, war in Persian Gulf, Tea Party and attack on current American president.
And although it’s known that the author of this book have political attitudes different from those advocated by this TV station, Gabriel Sherman managed to overcome these differences, making his exhaustive and rich in detail work equally suitable for reading to supporters of all the political parties.
Therefore, this book is an excellent behind-the-scenes material, for reader to find out what happened and it’s still happening behind the camera - and this can be expected to be of interest for all of us who follow the media, hope and wish for objective information about the events that surround us.
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.
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