Ex protege disclosing AILES's paranoia & Faux's being "a brand not a news outlet"

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/17/roger-ailes-protege-fox-news-215612?lo=ap_f1

I Want to Explode’ — A Roger Ailes Protégé Bares His Soul

For two years, as an ambitious twentysomething, Joe Lindsley had a closer relationship with Roger Ailes than any Fox News executive. He lived, for a time, on the Aileses' property in upstate New York, vacationed with Ailes and his wife, Beth, and served in effect as a surrogate son. Ailes’ secretary even leaned on Fox News staffers and on-air talent to make themselves available as dates for Lindsley, ... ....

But then Lindsley suddenly decided to leave, throwing the then 71-year-old media mogul into a panic. Ailes was so furious about his departure that he tried to ensure Lindsley could never work as a journalist in Washington. Or, at least, that’s what he told Bill Kristol shortly after Lindsley’s departure. ....

... He (AILES) goes on to tell the impressionable young journalist that truth doesn’t exist—only narratives. “That’s why we have five Supreme Court justices,” he declares. “Everything must be made into a narrative … Facts don’t matter.” ... ....

In reality, Lindsley says he had come to feel increasingly suffocated by Ailes’ paranoia. (“Paranoia was his great comfort,” he says.) Ailes was convinced, for example, that President Obama was working an operative inside Fox News, and he hounded staff members in an effort to out the mole, according to one Fox News executive. “He couldn’t rest easy at all in life. Peace was a phantom. He was always raging,” Lindsley says of Ailes. ....

He suggests that the network, with its catchy graphics and busty blondes, seduces viewers and creeps up on them in the same way that Ailes did on him — and to the same effect, producing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of paranoid, angry, and agitated voters. Though he won’t say it outright, he also suggests the network and its viewers helped to produce the election of Donald Trump. Fox News Channel, he says, is more a brand than a news outlet, and Ailes succeeded in “convincing a large part of the American people" that Ailes was “on their side.” ....

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