![]() In February of 1935, Beard addressed an audience of nine hundred schoolteachers in Atlantic City. He wasn’t someone Hearst could easily crush, or daunt. ![]() (Beard himself favored American involvement what he opposed was the university’s assault on intellectual freedom.) He’d been elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1925 and, in 1933, president of the American Historical Association. Beard had resigned from Columbia in 1917, after the university began firing professors who opposed U.S. “Only cowards can be intimidated by Hearst,” the historian Charles Beard said. Hearst attacked his critics in his papers relentlessly and ferociously. Swing despaired over what had happened to journalism under Hearst, and said so, which took courage. In 1935, the distinguished war correspondent and radio broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing observed, “People who are not capable of disliking the lower middle class in toto, since it is a formidable tax on their emotions, can detest Hearst instead.” Ailes haters, take note. Hating some crazy old loudmouth who is a vindictive bully and lives in a castle is far less of a strain than thinking about the vulgarity and the prejudices of his audience. This charge derived, in part, from the fact that Hearst had professed his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Many of the people Hearst thought were Communists thought Hearst was a Fascist. In the fall of 1934, he ordered his editors to send reporters posing as students to college campuses, to find out which members of the faculty were Reds. William Randolph Hearst needed a mouthpiece he couldn’t trust an actual biographer-he was convinced that most people who wrote serious books for a living were Communists. Rupert Murdoch says, of meeting Ailes, “I thought, Either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen.” Chafets adds, by way of aside, “Ailes was thinking pretty much the same thing.” Holy Moses. There’s also a great deal of what might be termed the testicular imagination. Ailes on Gingrich: “Newt’s a prick.” Biden: “He’s dumb as an ashtray.” Maddow: “Rachel is good and she will get even better when she discovers that there are people on earth who don’t share every one of her beliefs.” Krugman: “He’s a dope but nobody wants to say it because he’s won awards.” There’s plenty of obloquy in Chafets’s book. Potter and each of his little witticisms. Ailes, Chafets says, looks like “a small-town banker in a Frank Capra movie.” That sounds disapproving, but in this particular Bedford Falls we are meant to admire Mr. “I got a closer, more prolonged look at Roger Ailes than any journalist ever has,” Chafets writes in “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” (Sentinel), which appeared, preëmptively, last year. Chafets shadowed Ailes at Fox News watched his son play basketball walked with him, flanked by his bodyguard and visited his home, in Garrison, New York, where Ailes has bought up not only the land around his nine-thousand-square-foot mansion but also the local newspaper, to which he named, as publisher, his wife. “Take your best shot at me,” Ailes is said to have told another New York writer, “and I’ll have the rest of my life to go after you.” Unwilling to sit down for an interview with Sherman, Ailes met instead with Zev Chafets, a former columnist for the Daily News, a contributor to the Times Magazine, and the author of a biography of Rush Limbaugh. Ailes, who is known for menace, was not among them. Sherman interviewed more than six hundred people for “The Loudest Voice in the Room” (Random House). ![]() Gabriel Sherman, an editor and reporter for New York, was beginning work on a book about him. That year, Roger Ailes, its head, turned seventy. In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News. Hearst therefore did what many a rich, aging megalomaniac has done before and since: he hired a lackey to write an authorized biography, preëmptively. How would the world remember him when he could no longer dictate the headlines? Ferdinand Lundberg, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was beginning work on a book about him no one expected it to be friendly. was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” : “Holy Moses!” : “God Almighty!” Still, you can yank people around for only so long. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. Ailes’s critics, like Hearst’s, have found it easier to denounce him than to think hard about the audience he appeals to. ![]()
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