Roger Ailes

Saturday

Cockburn

Propping up the bar at Andrew Giuliani’s Palm Beach fundraiser

Cockburn has the good fortune to be invited to all the right places. And one of the rightest of places on Palm Beach Island is the home of Beth Ailes, widow of the man that was the “I” in the masterclass book of persuasion, You Are the Message. On occasion, an invitation to a good liberal party comes Cockburn’s way. But they are getting few and further apart. He'll be going to the Coachella of mainstream moralism, the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend. (A subject for another missive). But for now let’s get back to Palm Beach, Florida, where the girls are pretty and the streets not gritty. The occasion for the party was Andrew Giuliani — son of America’s Mayor, Rudy — who was in town doing the political rounds.

andrew giuliani

Tuesday

Erin Gaetz

A former Fox producer separates the fact from fiction in Bombshell

Walking into the theater to see Bombshell — which recounts the high-profile sexual harassment cases that led to Roger Ailes’s ouster from Fox News — I felt a bit like a feline about to take in a showing of Cats. I was, after all, about to see a re-creation of the people and spaces that made up my work environment for the better part of two years. I started at Fox Business Network as a producer in October 2013 and stayed until March 2015, when I left to work for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign (please clap). During my time there, I only met Roger Ailes once, very briefly, and my main takeaway from that interaction was that I was taller than him in heels.

bombshell

Sunday

Dominic Green

Is Roger really what Ailes the American republic?

It’s important to hate the right person, and not the left person. If the fate of the United States depends on hating an unscrupulous media manipulator and sexual predator, then it’s only right — or rather, only left — to hate Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News, over Harvey Weinstein, bundler of money for the Clintons. Like people still say, at least the socialists had good intentions when they killed all those people. Contemplate both Ailes and Weinstein simultaneously, and you feel your brain splitting into partisan halves. They seem to exist in separate worlds. It feels like only a Dante could have imagined them in the same space.

roger ailes