Fox Business anchor David Asman is interviewed by Cigar & Spirits magazine, and there are some fantastic anecdotes. For example, a luncheon honoring noted cigar lover and Cuban “el Presidente” Fidel Castro was where Asman first met Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.
It was funny, the first time I met Roger was at a luncheon for Fidel Castro at the residence of Mort Zuckerman. I was seated between Roger, and the late Bill Safire who was a columnist for the New York Times. That was when Roger offered me a job, which I wasn’t that interested in at the time because of my antipathy towards television news, but he convinced me he was going to do something totally different. He also sweetened the deal significantly enough so that a year later I ended up accepting his offer to work on FOX Business Network, and I’ve been here ever since.
He also expands on that antipathy he had toward TV news:
My father had been in TV news his whole life, first with CBS then with NBC. At that time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I wasn’t crazy about network news coverage. It just seemed too monotone, and frankly, there didn’t seem to be enough hard journalism in most of the news that was on TV. So I was focused on print, and I was getting my master’s degree in Teaching, hoping that I could do both— teach full time and do writing on the side.