Roger Ailes: ‘Fox Has Taken More Incoming; We Have a Bigger Bull’s-Eye on Us Than Anybody’

By Alissa Krinsky 

Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes is interviewed by the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal. Excerpts:

• On viewers distinguishing between objective reporting and opinion programming: “People who watch news are pretty smart. Most of them don’t just go to one channel for all their news anyway…[the majority of viewers] will select the place that’s the most comfortable, and they will retain the information they’re the most comfortable with. But undecideds, people who are smart, tend to float around, look, listen…They’re very perceptive.”

• On the White House agreeing to make the President available for an interview with Bret Baier last week: “Look, they understand the game…They did the right thing, and we respect them for it.”

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• On former New York Times editor Howell Raines’s recent assertion in the Washington Post: “Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration”?

“That’s hysterical,” Ailes tells Rosenthal. “Fox has taken more incoming; we have a bigger bull’s-eye on us than anybody. What he’s upset about is we haven’t been hit.”

• About the possibility of Fox signing Conan O’Brien, and the potential price tag: “We all like Conan…It’s an arithmetic problem.”

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