Roger Ailes' Rise and Fall Makes Good TV
Showtime’s “The Loudest Voice” is an in-depth portrait of a shallow man. Adapted from Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book and subsequent reporting, “The Loudest Voice” posits Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, as the most important figure in American politics in the 21st century so far, the man who brought all the virulent forces of the right wing together, creating Fox News, which has given us Donald Trump.
Played by Russell Crowe, Ailes is a turgid monster, a toxic brew of vindictiveness, lust and gross, maudlin self-pity. He always seems one tick away from rage. Near the beginning, Ailes is finishing breakfast in a diner when a waitress cheerily tells him, “Happy Holidays!” He freezes her with a stare and replies with a menacing “Merry Christmas.”
Growing up in the blue-collar town of Warren, Ohio, Ailes was beaten by his father, who imprinted him with the message “don’t ever trust anyone.” Loyalty, he learned, wasn’t a quality to be earned but something to be wrenched from others through power and fear. On a sentimental journey, he takes his pre-teen son, Zac, to show him the town where his values were formed, but he finds Warren shabby and welfare-gutted.
In a public address to the townspeople, many of them unemployed, Roger reveals the cause of this blight—the liberal elites who have sent American jobs overseas. This was the genius stroke Ailes used to mold the Republican Party: the idea that the decline of the white working class was not the result of Reaganomics, which shifted wealth dramatically from the working class to the management class, but the fault of the so-called elites who, by the way, went to college and want to “take away your guns, let Muslim terrorists into your country, give Hispanic illegals your jobs, and let gay people get married.” The subliminal message, of course, is that when you hear “elite,” you are supposed to think “Democrat.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/roger-ailes-rise-and-fall-makes-good-tv/
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