The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman

Philadelphia, soDebbie Miller and a friend hopped on a flight to Los Angeles for a last-minute vacation. They were joined shortly after by Launa Newman. Sitting one afternoon on the bed of their closet-sized room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Launa noticed a piece of paper being slipped under the door. She picked it up and gasped. Ailes had called the hotel and left a message for Miller. “The deal is done,” the note read. Fraser was leaving.Ailes was his replacement, not Larry Rosen.
    Newman called Fraser to ask him what was going on. He confirmed that he had been ousted.Officially, Fraser had been moved into a corporate role overseeing “talent and program development” for WBC Productions in New York. But being kicked upstairs was Westinghouse’s way of doing business.In 1967, Fraser left for a job at ABC producing
This Morning
with Dick Cavett.“That was a real palace coup,” Newman recalled. “You would never have known it if you watched from the outside.”
    Larry Rosen was at home with his wife when he got the call. “Are you sitting down now?” Fraser asked. “I’m gone, and Roger is the executive producer.”
    Rosen was stunned. He was four years older than Ailes and had been on the show much longer.
    “You gotta be kidding me.”
    “No, that’s what they did.”
    The next day, Rosen drove to Douglas’s home to confront him. “I was livid,” Rosen recalled. “I was humiliated. Roger had been there nowhere as long as I had.” Douglas told him it was
his
decision. “I hired Roger Ailes,” Douglas later said.
    How exactly Ailes leapfrogged Rosen to get Fraser’s job remained a matter of debate.One producer heard that during the week off, Ailes had gone to Collier with an ultimatum: he was going to leave the show unless he got the job over Rosen.In his book,
You Are the Message
, Ailes casts himself as the triumphant victor who stood up to a senior producer’s bullying. Fraser isn’t named, but is clearly identified in other ways, and described as a “brutal, sadistic personality” who would “pick out a staff member and browbeat him or her all day long.” Ailes writes that when it was his turn to face the producer’s wrath, he snapped. “I went right up to him, looked him in the eyes, and said, ‘That’s it. Don’t do that to me anymore.’ ” Fraser didn’t stop. “So I took a swing at him. It turned into a regular brawl. We broke up some office equipment and finally two guys dragged me into the men’s room to end the fiasco. I’d figured I just ruined my career. But actually it had quite the opposite effect.” Ailes goes on to say that “the company president” (presumably Collier) promoted him because of the incident. According to Ailes’s account, the executive told him, “Two years ago you proved that you’re nobody’s boy. You’re the only one who fought back.” When asked about the story, a half dozen staff members on
The Mike Douglas Show
could not recall such a brawl ever occurring.
    A s executive producer, Ailes acted quickly to consolidate his control.Within days of Fraser’s ouster, Ailes moved into Fraser’s large office, a spacious expanse on the first floor.On the wall, he hung a framed quotation fromTheodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” one of his favorite sayings: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again; because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
    On his first day in charge,Ailes fired Debbie Miller. He claimed she spread the story of his involvement in Fraser’s departure. Because of her, everyone on the staff believed that he had been promoted because of politics, not on the merits. “He was very blunt about it,” Miller