The Loudest Voice in the Room Quotes

“Today television news is watched more often-than people read newspapers-than people read or gather any form of communication. The memo explained why: 'People are lazy. With television you just sit-watch-listen. The thinking is done for you.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country

“The viewers Ailes was trying to attract did not want television to tell them what happened in the world. They wanted television to tell them how to think about what happened in the world—the news itself would be secondary.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“Repetition, Herschensohn wrote, is “the oldest and most effective propaganda technique.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“Though Ailes had spent more than four decades in Washington, D.C., and New York City, he still saw himself as a scrapper from a small town in a flyover state who’d had to fight for everything he had. When asked by one reporter what his antagonists thought of him, he replied, “I can pretty much pick the words for you: paranoid, right-wing, fat.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“affection. Roger remembered her hugging”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“For four and a half decades, Roger Ailes had directed his candidates from the wings, even if they were half-wits. He played tougher and said the inconvenient truths that no one wanted to hear. He knew it made him hated. “Most of the media in this country would prefer Roger went away,” his brother, Robert, said. “Fox News is the beacon of conservatism in the American media. There are an awful lot of people who would like to see Fox News collapse.” But it was Ailes’s burden to carry, and he was never going to quit: “I can’t walk away until I think enough people understand how valuable and how important being an American is.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“In interviews in recent years, Ailes reflected a politician’s sense of winning and losing, that the moment is today, and that tomorrow may belong to another. “I don’t care about my legacy. It’s too late. My enemies will create it and they’ll push it,” he said a week after the 2012 election. “Right now, everybody thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world,” he told another journalist. “The eulogies will be great, but people will be stepping over my body before it gets cold. Within a day or two, everybody will be complaining about what a prick I was and all the things I didn’t do for them.” It’s a surprisingly open-eyed assessment, both humble and grandiose, but it omits a larger truth. Ailes made his career in a winner-take-all world of 50.1 percent majorities measured by the pull of levers and click of remotes: thumbs up, thumbs down; in or out; like him or hate him. But his career, unlike a campaign, will be judged by both the good and the bad. There are no referenda on a man’s legacy.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“We gotta get together on this, that school sucks!” Ailes said to him. “What’s your problem with it?” Stewart said. “There’s no Christ child on the lawn at Christmastime!” Ailes said. “They have all this fucking Kwanzaa stuff, they have this Hanukkah shit, and you can’t even get Jesus! They think it’s illegal. You can’t show any flags. So I’m not sending our kid there.” As Stewart turned to leave, Ailes told him to stay in touch. “Call me,” he said.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“Ailes’s search-and-destroy approach to journalism and public relations destabilized his cable news opponents. They complained he played by a different set of rules. The news business was supposed to operate by a different creed than politics. Ailes did not agree.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“In hushed conversations around the halls, these young staffers wondered why the channel masked Ailes’s conservative aims with the “fair and balanced” slogan. One former producer remembered exchanges like this: “What is the crime in coming out and saying what we’re doing? Everyone knows this is what we’re doing.… Why do we have to keep it a secret? What’s this ‘fair and balanced’ thing the producers keep talking about behind the scenes? I don’t know why they don’t just say what it is. It’s so blatantly obvious.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“Hannity & Colmes was another management challenge. Despite its bipartisan billing, the show was a vehicle for Sean Hannity’s right-wing politics. An Irish Catholic from Long Island, Hannity came of age as two revolutions, Reagan conservatism and right-wing talk radio, sent the country on a new course. He harbored dreams of becoming the next Bob Grant, the caustic New York City radio commentator who provided an outlet for incendiary views on blacks, Hispanics, and gays. Radio personalities like Grant, Hannity said, “taught me early on that a passionate argument could make a difference.” In his twenties, Hannity drifted. He tried college three times but dropped out. By the late 1980s, he was living in southern California working as a house painter. In his spare time, he called in to KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station, to inveigh against liberals and to defend the actions of his hero Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. His combative commentaries impressed the station management. Though he was not a student, Hannity was soon given an hour-long morning call-in show, which he titled The Pursuit of Happiness, a reference to Reagan’s 1986 Independence Day speech.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“O’Reilly also shared another significant Ailesian trait: he understood television news was nothing but a show. “Bill O’Reilly is one of the greatest bullshitters in the world,” Ailes’s brother, Robert, said. “He can talk about any subject, he can get the best out of his guest by taking the opposite point of view even if he doesn’t believe it.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“As a consultant to Nixon, he adopted a sense of political victimhood, and a paranoia about enemies that has marked his career ever since.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“That a news executive was essentially running the Republican Party was a remarkable development in American politics. But it was an outcome Ailes foretold. After the 1968 campaign, Ailes spoke of a time when television would replace the political party, that other mass organizer of the twentieth century. With Fox News, that reality was arguably established.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate, drawing sharp, with-us-or-against-us lines, demonizing foes, preaching against compromise.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“He denied himself the American ideal of happiness—“home, family, the 9-to-5 job, a good golf score, three weeks paid vacation, a new car”—in the service of his career.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“His conservatism was a reaction against those who got breaks he never did, and his resentments consumed him.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“Fox News normalized viciousness and conspiracy theories so much so that Fox is now mainstream.”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics

“With a nightly news package we can create ongoing stories of importance,” Herschensohn wrote. (Fox would do the same with sagas such as the “War on Christmas,” “Obama’s Czars,” “Fast and Furious,” and “Benghazi.”)”
― Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics