With Gabriel Sherman’s book on Roger Ailes “The Loudest Voice in the Room” being released on January 21, Capital New York reports publisher Random House has launched a wesbite dedicated to the facts.
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.
Capital reports Sherman’s book is based on “hundreds of of interviews with Fox News insiders past and present.”
Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff is also out with a column about “The unbeatable Roger Ailes,” asking why rival executives Phil Griffin and Jeff Zucker work in a profession where they’re destined to fall short of Ailes.
Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC — and an old schoolmate of mine — is an affable fellow and longtime network news survivor who is credited with helping raise MSNBC from virtual nothingness, the lagging nonentity of cable news, into a Fox-like wannabe on the liberal side. But the accomplishment, while an advance over when he arrived, still finds the network pulling up the rear and, as well, having resigned the moral high ground. MSNBC may be even more one-note and more pugilistic than Fox. But, even at that, it’s a common hoofer and Ailes is Fred Astaire.
Zucker has been at CNN for a year (following a lineup of top CNN personnel all consigned to failure and ignominy by Ailes), making small moves, with ever-larger rumors of his big game to come. In one sense, he needs only a small measure of success. Any increment of improvement will be to his credit, and CNN is so far down, any effort ought to improve it. But in another sense, the famously ambitious Zucker has only one measure of success and that’s against Ailes. Television is, after all, a number-one game.