The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Country Audiobook (Free)

A revelatory journey inside the world of Fox Information and Roger Ailes-the brash, sometimes combative network head who helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump

NEW YORK Occasions BESTSELLER • At this point A SHOWTIME LIMITED SERIES • NAMED ONE OF THE BETTER BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR

When Rupert Murdoch enlisted Roger Ailes to release a cable information network in 1996, American politics and press changed permanently. With an extraordinary level of details and understanding, Vanity Fair magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman about The Loudest Tone of voice in the Room: The way the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Nation puts Ailes’s exclusive genius on screen, combined with the outsize personalities-Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Gretchen Carlson, Bill Glimmer, and others-who possess helped Fox Information play a defining role in the great social and political controversies of days gone by two decades. In the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal to the Bush-Gore recount, through the battle in Iraq towards the Tea Party assault for the Obama presidency, Roger Ailes developed an unrivaled power to sway the national agenda. A lot more, he became the indispensable figure in traditional America and the man any Republican politician with presidential aspirations had to court.

How did this man become the professional strategist of our politics landscaping? In revelatory detail, Sherman chronicles the rise of Ailes, a frail child from an Ohio manufacturing plant city who, through pure willpower, the flair of the showman, fierce commercial politicking, and a profound understanding of the priorities of middle America, built the most influential television information empire of our time.

Drawing on a huge selection of interviews with Fox News insiders previous and present, Sherman files Ailes’s tactical acuity as he battled the press, business rivals, and countless genuine and perceived enemies outside and inside Fox. Sherman takes us in the morning hours meetings in which Ailes and additional high-level executives strategized Fox’s demonstration of the news headlines to advance Ailes’s political plan; provides behind-the-scenes details of Ailes’s crucial part as finder and shaper of talent, including his sometimes rocky associations with Fox News stars such as O’Reilly, Hannity, and Carlson; and probes Ailes’s fraught collaboration with his equally brash and mercurial manager, Rupert Murdoch.

Roger Ailes’s life is a tale worthy of Citizen Kane. The Loudest Tone of voice in the Room is an amazing feat of reportage with a compelling human drama at its heart.