The Swinish Hellscape

A Review of Michael Wolff's Book on Fox News

“The people you know live in this moment,” Fox News founder Roger Ailes once told the journalist Michael Wolff, “the people who Fox is for live in 1965.” The Murdoch family enabled Ailes to create an alternate world for this curated audience of regressives at the network. But Wolff reports that Ailes had no use for the Murdochs, especially the sons, James and Lachlan, whom he derided as “gay”—a label he applied to all coastal elite men. 

Ailes carefully chose his stars and style with 1965 and not-gay in mind. Dumb was OK. Plucking Sean Hannity from an $800-a-week radio job in Atlanta, Ailes boasts, was a brilliant move precisely because Hannity is, well, not that bright. “Smart is what people hate. God they hate it,” the old man tells Wolff.

Michael Wolff has a strong stomach and a knack for blending into the woodwork around rightwing freaks. He has put those qualities to extremely profitable use in recent years spelunking into the sewers of the right, starting with Trump’s White House, emerging with bestsellers brimming with scandalous anecdotes and grotesques. Here he produces a notebook dump from years of sitting with Ailes, and time spent with some various Fox anchors, whose cynicism, venality and misogyny is the id inside the greatest node in the right’s alternate facts messaging network.

During Ailes’ reign, before he was me-too’ed out on his ass, soon dying from a fall in his home, Ailes was very precise about his casting of females. They had to be “not just white, but not ethnic,” Wolff summarizes, and “each needed to have a more particular sexual-role function. The girl next door. The vixen. The disciplinarian.” Perhaps most importantly, they had to pass what Ailes called “the American blow-job test”—what Wolff calls “a homegrown Ailes theory, which he was pleased to frequently expand upon, about every man’s evaluation of whether or not a woman would give head and with what verve and style.”

The girls don’t seem to care: Wolff paints one scene, a ride on Sean Hannity’s plane to and from Ailes’ funeral, with some of the Fox stars and execs. Kimberly Guilfoyle is on board, “dressed in black widow’s weeds, to sinister effect” and apparently, obvious to all, flying commando. Laura Ingraham is there too, Wolff claiming she was drunk by the time she tried to hitch a ride on the flight home.

This was an excerpt from my review for The New Republic, you can read the full article here.