Sexual Harassment and the Making of Modern Conservative Media

This is a podcast review of the book The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman (2014), a biography of Roger Ailes, and the miniseries based on the book, The Loudest Voice (2019). Ailes’ life story brings together many of my main interests. He created Fox News in 1996, and ran the network until 2016, the year before his death. Fox can be considered the beginning of modern conservative media. There had long been talk radio, magazines like National Review, and conservative newspapers, but nothing on the scale of a cable TV news network that would shoot to number one in the ratings just six years after its founding.

The story of Fox is also part of the story of the decline of American institutions. From the beginning, there was a tension between people who wanted to do straight news, and Ailes, who sought to create an entertaining product that played to the audience. The latter tendency would win out, and be rewarded by the market. By the time of the Obama administration, Fox was reacting to conservative grassroots energy rather than shaping it. Through looking at what were considered scandals in the first decade and a half of the network, we can understand how far standards have fallen. I discuss the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Fox started hemorrhaging viewers because it would not go along with Trump’s stolen election narrative. The market competition to Fox comes from outlets that are even more biased and sloppier with the facts. Conservative media had an audience problem, and although Fox could shape and harness that energy for a while, the culture the network created led to the rise of Trump and total victory for the angry ignorant masses over more refined sectors of the conservative movement.

Ailes’ predatory behavior towards women is also an important part of the story, and what eventually brought him down. I argue that what he was doing and the fact that he could get away with it for so long tell us something about rightist culture divorced from religious norms. Ailes had a cult of personality at Fox that was similar to the one that Trump would establish on a larger scale over the entirety of the conservative movement. I explain why I don’t think sexual harassment in the workforce is something government usually needs to get involved in, but in this case in particular because it occurred in a major journalistic institution it had negative societal consequences.

Sherman’s book was published in 2014, just before the rise of Trump, Ailes’ resignation from Fox News, and his death a year later. So the miniseries covered a lot of things that weren’t in the book, though the edition I read did have an afterword based on an article about how Ailes was brought down, which can be found online here. The miniseries, which was nine episodes and ran on Showtime, has a star-studded cast, including Russell Crowe as Ailes and Seth MacFarlane as Fox head of media relations Brian Lewis. Unlike the book, which is a full biography, the show only covers the founding of Fox News until Ailes leaves the network.

The miniseries does a good job of stringing the viewer along through the morbidly fascinating spectacle of the elderly and obese Ailes preying on his young dolled-up employees. I described the show as porn for smug libs, but I guess I’m a smug lib now so I enjoyed it. I talk about where the miniseries diverged from real life events as recounted in the book and where the producers took some creative license with the story.

For all the talk of TV being dead, Fox News just posted record ratings for the first quarter of 2025. Based on the clips I’ve seen, the network seems to be getting even dumber and more sycophantic towards Trump, so this is a depressing development. As with social media and the podcast circuit, low-quality content is winning in the marketplace of ideas.

If you’re interested in the history of conservative media, or simply want to learn about a dark character who revolutionized American politics, I strongly recommend both Sherman’s book and its TV adaptation.