Gosh, I wonder why we're seeing this ridiculously hagiographic article today in USA Today from hackish media writer and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff:
The unbeatable Roger AilesAnd I wonder why, at the exact same moment, we're seeing this:
The Fox News chief continues to crush his cable news competitors.
... The 2013 numbers are out, and once more, for 12 years running, Ailes' Fox News trashes everybody else in the cable news space, with an audience larger than CNN's and MSNBC's combined.
It's a one-man business. Ailes is the beginning and end. Since he took the lead from CNN a few years after he launched the network in 1996, nobody has come close to competing with him. He gets larger, everybody gets lesser, creating perhaps the single most infuriating circumstance in modern media. Ailes, ever taunting the liberal media establishment, is ever further beyond its reach....
Fox Takes Out Full-Page NY Post Ad Using MSNBC and CNN Quotes to Declare 'News Wars' Victory
... Fox News took out a full-page ad in Monday’s New York Post, using quotes from MSNBC and CNN to boast about its continued dominance in the ratings.....
Um, could it possibly be because of this?
Random House is preparing for a "shitstorm," to borrow the phrase Matt Drudge used in a tweet four months ago, that will surely ensue with the publication of Gabriel Sherman's forthcoming Fox News book, The Loudest Voice in the Room, which is scheduled for a Jan. 21 release.More:
Advance press copies are presumably starting to circulate among reviewers and media reporters, and today, the book has a brand new website that "will be a source for pushback against misinformation throughout the book's release," a source close to the publisher tells Capital.
Sherman, who is a contributing editor at New York magazine, isn't talking just yet about The Loudest Voice in the Room, a deep dive on the Fox News Channel and its pugilistic ringleader, Roger Ailes....
Ailes has long seen Sherman's book as a threat to his legacy. Conservatives, including several affiliated with Fox News, have been trying to discredit the author for over a year now. In what sources described as an effort to counteract the book, Ailes denied Sherman all access while giving extensive interviews to another author, Zev Chafets, who published his largely favorable profile last March.What amuses me about this is the road-rage quality of it all. Ailes is basically the permanent Minister of Information for one of our two major parties, the one that hasn't let a Democratic president actually govern for several decades. He's amazingly powerful -- and yet he's going after this book, as he goes after every real or imagined enemy, as if his life depended on the enemy's total destruction. He essentially commission an entire pre-buttal biography of himself as a dominance challenge to Sherman. You'd think a guy who's as tough as Ailes thinks he is could take a punch, but I guess not.
The Sherman book's website, by the way, is here.
