As a teenager growing up in the 1950s in Lima, Ohio, (population 50,000 then), I learned that our local daily, The Lima News, had been purchased by a man named R. C. Hoiles. Hoiles lived in Orange County, California, and was a member of the John Birch Society. He owned a chain of small-town newspapers which he called (surprise!) Freedom Newspapers. I didn’t know any of that at the time, though. What I knew was just what I read in the News: editorials denouncing the “socialistic” concept of free public schools and paeans to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the drunken liar and bully who claimed to see Communists under every desk.
Growing up Democratic in a Republican stronghold with a Communist art teacher
By now you’ve guessed, of course, that I grew up in a Democratic household. My parents were New Deal Democrats we’d consider quaint and conservative today. And I learned very early to disregard the ravings of Hoiles’ mouthpiece at the local paper. Although we Democrats were a small minority in a conservative Republican town, where the News frequently represented local opinion, Hoiles and his ilk were almost as widely disregarded in the larger society as my painting teacher, Mrs. Elmer McClain. She was a ranking member of the Communist Party who was warmly received in Moscow by Nikita Khrushchev (I kid you not).
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman (2014) 578 pages ★★★★★
Pushy, and, yes, loud
Oh, those were the good old days, when there was a Left and a Right, and nobody paid much attention to either! But in the 90s we got Roger Ailes (1940-2017). He was just as loopy and far to the Right as old R. C. Hoiles, if not more so. And not only was he widely regarded as brilliant—but he’s also launched and ran the most successful television news network in the country. Early on, it became a billion-dollar venture that is widely understood to have been an extension of the Republican Party’s Right Wing ever since.
Ailes, it turns out, was raised in a similar Ohio town, Warren, and at about the same time as I was. (He was almost exactly one year older than me but died in 2017.) Surprisingly, though, Ailes showed little interest in politics until 1967. Then he managed to trap then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon in an hour-long private meeting. At the time, he was a producer at an Ohio television station. Ailes talked himself into a job as “media advisor” to Nixon. That, despite being, to all appearances, a liberal who disdained many of Nixon’s policies.
Ailes’ influence grew steadily over the years
The future founder of Fox News played a relatively small role in Nixon’s campaign. But in subsequent elections (Reagan in 1984, Bush I in 1992, Bush II in 2000, McCain in 2008, Romney in 2012) his influence was considerably greater. This allowed him to claim that he had “elected presidents.” By then, politics had hooked him thoroughly. And with every successive campaign in which Ailes became involved, his political views seemed to shift further to the Right. Along the way, he:
- Helped swing the 2000 election to George W. Bush
- Became Rush Limbaugh’s executive producer and a personal friend
- Put Glenn Beck on national television
- Championed the rise of the Tea Party
- Promoted partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill and throughout the country
- Made billions of dollars for his boss, the Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch (born 1931)
Roger Ailes built the Fox News Network beginning in 1996. He based the network on his conviction that news should be presented as entertainment. He emphasized maximum drama and conflict. It’s a little hard to tell whether this belief helped propel Ailes Rightward or it served as rationalization for his and Fox’s steady drift toward Right-Wing extremism.
He was as extreme as the times allowed
Clearly, the outwardly visible benchmarks of Ailes’ career identified him as about as extreme as you could get in contemporary America a decade ago. Now, of course, during Donald Trump’s second term in the Oval Office, Ailes might not make the cut into the president’s inner circle. He may have been smart enough to understand the massive blowback, both short-term and long, to Trump’s violence-prone and kleptocratic behavior and policies. For me, having observed national politics for 70 years, it’s hard to imagine how anyone at all could support the man. And someone like Roger Ailes, who set at least some limits on the extremism of his network’s stars, doesn’t seem he would be a big fan of the president today
What was not so easily visible back in Ailes’ day was his behavior at the office and at home in Garrison, New York. There, he maintained a 9,000-square-foot mountaintop fortress with a “panic room” underground. It was there to protect him and his wife for six months in the event of a terrorist assault on the site. In The Loudest Voice in the Room, you can read all about Ailes’ outrageous behavior toward his colleagues, his subordinates, his neighbors, and even his friends as well.
Of course, you’ll find a bare-bones outline of Ailes’ life on Wikipedia. However, if you want the real story, read this book. It was carefully researched and written with restraint. Despite the fact that the full spectrum of Ailes’ lunacy does come through clearly.
A century ago, men who behaved like Ailes would have been tagged as “eccentric.” Nowadays we know better. The man was simply nuts. Brilliant, but nuts.
About the author
American journalist, author, and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and contributes to NBC News and MSNOW. The Loudest Voice in the Room was the first of his two books to date. He followed it in 2026 with the related Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World.
Sherman was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1979. He graduated from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. He is married. Sherman, his wife, and children live in London, England.
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