A fine overview of a pivotal figure in American socio-political history and an insightful piece of cultural anthropology
Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate, drawing sharp with-us-or-against-us lines, demonizing foes, preaching against compromise.
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.
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.
Although it may seem bizarre to more rational minds, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of protective face masks has somehow become a partisan issue in the Divided States of America. Those on the left argue that masks should be worn, must be worn if necessary; those on the right see the mandatory wearing of masks as an infringement on their civil liberty (and an affront to God, apparently). Those of us lucky enough to live elsewhere in the world look upon the US in bemusement, watching as the social fabric becomes more and more tenuous by the day. But how does a country get to this point – how does it become so fractured and ideologically at odds with itself that even the issue of breathing has become a political battleground? It's easy to blame Trump – he is, after all, as incendiary as he is incompetent – but this division was gestating before his rise to power (he's a result, not a cause). The US from 2016 has been called Trump's America, but it is less his than another man's; the real architect of the partisan hatred we see today at all levels of society was Roger Ailes.
The Loudest Voice takes as its subject Ailes's rise and fall, and the concomitant rise and ongoing success of Fox News, the "fair and balanced" news network he created in 1996, creating a nationwide platform for his particular brand of fear, intolerance, and xenophobia masquerading as patriotism. Based on Gabriel Sherman's The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country (2014), the seven-episode series was developed by Tom McCarthy (The Visitor; Spotlight; Christopher Robin) and Alex Metcalf (An American Affair; God's Pocket). And whilst Jay Roach's film Bombshell (2019) focuses on the women who brought Ailes down, The Loudest Voice is more interested in the man himself. Anchored by a superb central performance, and built upon a fascinating aesthetic design and wide-ranging thematic concerns, the show does an excellent job of arguing that Fox's onscreen reactionary politics and the behind-the-scenes culture of sexual harassment and xenophobia were simply two sides of the same pernicious coin. Depicting a man who believed (correctly, as it turned out) in the profitability of fudging the distinction between reporting the facts and offering opinions on them, the show illustrates the damage such an ideology can have on society as a whole. Does it tell us anything new, anything one can't glean from reading a decent Ailes biography? No, not really. Is it biased, with its own agenda? Yes, absolutely. Is it subtle? Hell, no; not even a little. However, it's well-written, brilliantly acted, extremely well-mounted, and, for the most part, it avoids caricature. All things considered, it's a very fine overview of a pivotal figure in American socio-political history and an insightful piece of cultural anthropology, showing how one man's paranoia reshaped a nation and birthed ideological chaos from which the country has yet to emerge.
Rather than providing a straightforward biographical account of Ailes (played a superb Russell Crowe behind a layer of not-always-convincing prosthetics), the show instead focuses on seven key events, looking at one per episode. "1995" begins on the eve of the launch of MSNBC, with Ailes, a former media strategist for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, being fired as president of CNBC. Forced to agree to a non-compete clause in his severance package, Ailes dupes his former employers by having the wording changed to promise he won't take a job with any "existing" network, having already been hired by News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch (an unrecognisable Simon McBurney) to oversee the formation of an entirely new network. And so, with an impossible deadline of creating a network from scratch in only six months, Ailes surrounds himself with people he trusts and begins building what would become Fox News. "2001" focuses on Ailes and Fox's response to 9/11, particularly the galvanisation of their jingoism and the weaponisation of their xenophobia. Ever the opportunist, Ailes uses the tragedy of the attacks to become a voice of influence in the George W. Bush administration, promising in return that Fox will support the Iraq War. "2008" sees Ailes find a new nemesis in Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who he sees as a non-American Muslim-educated communist intent on destroying the country. "2009" focuses on more personal issues as Ailes and his wife Beth (Sienna Miller in a performance every bit as good as Crowe's) purchase the Putnam County News and Recorder, a local newspaper in their home town of Garrison, New York, and Ailes hires 25-year-old Joe Lindsley (Emory Cohen) to run it, moving him into their guesthouse and tutoring him in the ways of journalism as propaganda. "2012" sees Ailes turn his attention back to Obama, whilst various personal relationships reach their volatile conclusion. In "2015", the now 75-year-old Ailes is suffering poor health, but continues to run Fox without oversight. Secretly promising possible Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that the network will support him if he runs, Ailes is unaware that Gretchen Carlson (Naomi Watts), host of The Real Story, has begun audio recording their meetings, building up a dossier of his sexual harassment and bullying behaviour. In "2016", Carlson sues Ailes personally, and before long, a litany of other women come forward alleging similar sexual harassment. And although Ailes denies everything, his hold on power starts to grow increasingly tenuous.
As well as the above few characters, the show also features Laurie Luhn (Annabelle Wallis), Fox News Director of Booking; Judy Laterza (Aleksa Palladino), Ailes's Executive Assistant; Brian Lewis (Seth MacFarlane), Fox News VP of Corporate Communications; Bill Shine (Josh Stamberg), Fox News Executive Producer, later Senior Executive VP of Production; Chet Collier (Guy Boyd), Fox News Senior VP; Lachlan Murdoch (Barry Watson), News Corp Deputy COO, later 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman; Ian G. Rae (Jamie Jackson), News Corp Senior VP and Fox News Executive VP; Casey Close (Josh Charles), Gretchen Carlson's husband; John Moody (Mackenzie Astin), Fox News Executive Editor; James Murdoch (Josh Helman), 21st Century Fox CEO; Dianne Brandi (Susan Pourfar), Fox News Executive VP of Legal and Business Affairs; Fox News hosts Glenn Beck (Josh McDermitt) and Sean Hannity (Patch Darragh); David Axelrod (David Cromer), Chief Strategist for Obama's presidential campaigns; journalist Gabriel Sherman (Fran Kranz); Suzanne Scott (Lucy Owen), Fox News VP of Programming; Jack Welch (John Finn), Chairman & CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC; Peter Johnson, Jr. (John Harrington Bland), Ailes's personal attorney; Nancy Erika Smith (Jessica Hecht) and Neil Mullin (Timothy Busfield), Carlson's lawyers; Irena Briganti (Jenna Leigh Green), Fox News Senior Executive VP of Corporate Communications; Richard Shea (James Michael Reilly), Ailes's neighbour in Garrison; Wendi Deng Murdoch (Julee Cerda), Rupert Murdoch's third wife; Paul Manafort (Eric Michael Gillett), Donald Trump's Campaign Manager; Roger Stone (Joe Cortese), Trump campaign senior advisor; Gerson Zweifach (Richard Topol), Fox News General Counsel; Vice President Dick Cheney (John Rue); and Karl Rove (Allan Greenberg), Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush.
The most immediately obvious element of Loudest Voice is its unusual aesthetic design – particularly the editing. I don't know who was responsible for the show's visual template, but I do know that one of the showrunners was Padraic McKinley, an editor by trade (Igby Goes Down; Homefront; Pride + Prejudice + Zombies), and who cut five of the seven episodes, so presumably he had significant input. In essence, the show adopts a form of non-linear editing not dissimilar to Oliver Stone's use of "vertical editing" in films such as JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), U Turn (1997), and, especially, Natural Born Killers (1994). So whilst 90% of any given scene will be cut fairly conventionally, the other 10% will be out of sequence – so a conversation, for example, might feature the occasional shot of one of the participants returning to their office, or a meeting might feature shots of something taking place at a different time in a different location.
The most important and impactful scene in this respect occurs in "2009", in a scene that functions as a kind of inverse of the famous sex scene in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973). There, the scene is intercut with the couple getting dressed afterwards, but here, a scene of Ailes compelling Luhn to give him oral sex is intercut with her cleaning her mouth out in the bathroom afterwards, her self-loathing obvious. It's a horrific moment and a brilliant example of using the mechanics of the medium to comment on the events depicted without resorting to dialogue. It's also a terrific illustration of how disjointed editing can be thematic, telling us all we need to know about Luhn's attitude towards her relationship with Ailes, particularly the power disparity upon which it is built and upon which he depends. It's an exceptionally well-staged and nauseating scene which gets to the core of Ailes's predatory behaviour – the humiliation aspect of sexual harassment. Like rape, it's not about sex (at least, not entirely) – it's about power, dominance, and submission. It's about ego. Ailes knows that if women like Luhn value their job, they'll submit, just as they have done for men like him throughout history. As he sees it, ambitious women will always need powerful men, and he behaves as he deems appropriate within that paradigm.
While we're on the subject of Luhn, her storyline is one of the show's most effective. When things begin, she and Ailes have already been engaged in a sexual relationship for some years, having first met in 1988 when they both worked for George H.W. Bush. A decade later, as Ailes builds Fox, he offers her a job as a talent booker. Although initially enthusiastic about this new opportunity, as time passes, she becomes less and less comfortable with their relationship. This is hinted at throughout the first two episodes, but it's only in "2008" that it takes centre stage, culminating in a horror show of mental collapse spread across two episodes. There's an obvious reason for structuring things this way; Luhn's role in the story is to serve as a precursor to Carlson (whose narrative arc isn't really introduced until the fifth episode). Her role in the first three episodes is important insofar as the scenes between her and Ailes are really the only ones that speak to his darker characteristics, which go on to be such an important theme in later episodes. Much like John Lithgow in Bombshell, Crowe initially plays Ailes as intelligent, inspiring, funny, charming, even nurturing (a scene in the second episode, in particular, shows him as fiercely and admirably protective of his staff); and the only real suggestion of the depravity beneath that veneer comes in the form of the increasingly disturbing sex scenes between him and Luhn, especially his complete and utter disregard for her clearly deteriorating mental health. Wallis isn't the most expressive actress of all time, but her stoicism works well here, clearly conveying how Luhn is becoming increasingly shut down as she attempts to continue functioning (I'd be remiss here were I not to mention that prior to the show premiering, Luhn sued Showtime for $750 million, claiming they violated her right to privacy by not informing her that she was to be a character. The suit was settled out of court a few months later for an undisclosed amount).
Thematically, the show doesn't do a whole lot you wouldn't expect. So, for example, Ailes and Fox's roles in irreparably dividing the country along ideological lines is a major focus, and nowhere is it more paramount, or more effectively conveyed, than in "2009". Here, through the surrogate of Lindsley, we see Ailes stoking the fires of division in Garrison by interjecting himself into a dispute amongst the locals about zoning regulations, supposedly playing the conscientious neighbour fighting for the little man, but really just out for himself. This is the microcosm. In the same episode, we see the increasingly volatile clashes between Obama supporters and those who oppose him, fuelled by Fox's anti-Obama vitriol and scaremongering, even as the network champions itself as standing up for the silent "real Americans". This is the macrocosm. Both strands depict Ailes fomenting division for his own ends, consequences be damned, all the while claiming to be fighting for the common man. As visual metaphors go, cutting between a fractious townhall meeting in Garrison and news coverage of street clashes across the country is more than a little heavy-handed, but it is effective in getting the point across – Ailes was very good at breeding division, and even better at convincing people he was acting out of genuine grievances, a concern for working-class America, and a love of the flag. The show essentially suggests that Fox was the propagandistic manifestation of Ailes's conservatism – self-interested, permanently aggrieved, unashamedly xenophobic (when watching the audition tape of an Asian woman, he asks, "who ordered the pussy masala?"), and convinced that middle-Americans are more American and therefore superior to less-white/less-conservative Americans.
The show also looks at issues such as Beth's radicalisation. Introduced as a moderate who's happy to be working at NBC as VP of Programming and is somewhat dismissive of Ailes more paranoid and controversial ideas, by "2012", she's become just as unreasonable and intolerant as he is – seen most clearly in a scene where she proudly shows Lindsley the fortified basement in their house, complete with an escape route to the Hudson River, telling him, "we're prepared for whatever happens. Natural disaster, political turmoil, terrorism. We need to be protected, we need to be safe." It's another far from subtle, but extremely effective scene, and is a nice showcase for Miller, whose work here has been, understandably, somewhat overshadowed by Crowe's more grandiose performance.
There are plenty of other scenes that conform to the "not subtle, but certainly effective" paradigm. For example, the second scene of "1995" sees a waitress casually wish Ailes "Happy Holidays", to which he pointedly responds, "Merry Christmas". A scene in "2009" has Ailes proclaim that most oft-repeated of Fox News battle-cries, arguing that such and such "hates America" (in this case, he's talking about the Obama administration). In "2012", there's a dinner from hell scene where Ailes is horrified to learn that Lindsley's sister isn't vehemently anti-Obama, and proceeds to ridicule the girl to her face ("I thought you told me your sister was smart"). Also in this episode, there's a scene where Lewis confronts Ailes about Sherman claiming Ailes has someone following him, and Ailes furiously throws a cup at him, missing, but childishly shouting, "I would've hit you. If I wanted to hit you, I would've fucking hit you".
And of course, there's the constant theme of Ailes and Fox's crimes against journalism (in an early quote, he hilariously argues, "at Fox, our aim is to be objective"). "2001" features a scene in which Ailes willingly turns Fox into the propagandist arm of the Republican Party, promising the Bush administration that the network will support an illegal war he knows has no justification in reality (of course, this scene contrasts with the earlier one where he passionately defends his staff – he may go to bat for his own people, but he has no compunction with his complicity in sending tens of thousands of Americans off to an unjust war);
Rove: I spoke with the president. We'd like your help moving forward.
Ailes: Whatever you need, Karl.
Rove: Now, this event is a national tragedy. But it is an opportunity to achieve a strategic objective.
Ailes: Iraq?
Rove: Yes.
Ailes: You want to go back?
Rove: The president feels there's unfinished business.
Ailes: I agree.
Rove: Now, we'd have to message this correctly.
Ailes: It's a new kind of war.
Rove: It will be an international mission.
Ailes: A worldwide hunt to destroy terrorism.
Rove: Exactly.
Ailes: You know, Rove, my take on this; if the president steps up, if the president takes the harshest possible measures…the country will back him. Fox News will back him.
The theme of journalistic integrity (or lack thereof) is again examined in a conversation between Ailes, Lewis, and Lindsley in "2009" regarding a story about Obama's involvement with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), members of whom were secretly filmed supposedly offering tips on how to start up a prostitution ring;
Lewis: It's like a game, Joe. It's like baseball. See, first base, we find the ACORN story. We put it out there. Second base, everyone else picks up the story. Our story.
Lindsley: But it's a fake story.
Ailes: Who said it was fake?
Lewis: Doesn't matter if it's real or fake. Third base, The New York Times, the paper of record, says that if a lot of people are talking about a story, it has to be important. And, real or not, they have to cover it. Finally, a Democratic Congress just defunded ACORN without a single investigation – because of us. That's a home fucking run.
Ailes: We created that, Joe. We don't follow the news. We make the news. We're changing the world.
An even clearer look at Ailes's lack of journalistic morality comes in "2008", when discussing the presidential election being contested by Obama and John McCain;
Ailes: I like John a lot. He's a goddamn war hero. But his message, it's about as limp as Liberace's handshake. It's not his only problem. They got George Soros and all of his hard-left media buddies. They've decided they're gonna put an affirmative action hire into the White House. Now, we got to be on top of that. Where are we with Obama's Islamic education?
Unnamed Exec: The madrassa? Still nothing confirmed.
Ailes: You got to keep digging. He 100% was raised in a Muslim school. I have that on very, very good authority. Where are we with the Michelle Obama tape?
Shine: My guy's still chasing it down. He swears he's heard the audio. Michelle saying, "I hate whitey."
Ailes: That's solid gold. It really is.
Shine: I mean, it won't be sourced.
Ailes: Well, it doesn't matter. You just frame it as a question; "Does a new tape reveal that Michelle Obama hates white people?"
Shine: That's one way to do it.
Unnamed Exec: Roger, that's pushing it.
Ailes: No, it's not pushing it. Barack Obama has managed to trick the entire media, except for us, into getting behind him and his socialist ideas and manifestos. The last two guys who did that? Hitler and Stalin. That man is a danger to this country, and it is on us to make sure the voters know.
Of course, this conversation dovetails with other themes, such as Ailes's racism, paranoia, and tacit hatred for the left, themes also on display in the final episode, when, after being sued by Carlson, he rants to Beth,
Do you think it's a coincidence that Gretchen sues me two weeks from the Republican Convention? The Clintons are behind this. Probably footing her legal bill as well. They know that Hillary cannot beat Trump unless they destroy me. It is wicked. Wicked. They're all in on it. Obama. Soros. Brian Lewis. Little fucking Joe Lindsley. Lachlan. Rupert. James. These people hate America. They are my enemies.
Again, none of this is subtle, but neither was Ailes himself. And in any case, it's all effective in getting the point across – this was anything but a good man.
Of course, a lack of subtlety isn't the show's only issue, but none of its other problems are especially damaging. Although it improves exponentially as the show goes on and Ailes grows older, the prosthetic work in the first couple of episodes is really poor, especially in bright light. Ailes's skin is far too smooth and plastic-like, as if he's been run through a Photoshop filter a dozen times too many, and it was only around the third episode or so that I was able to forget I was watching an actor in make-up. Crowe's performance is terrific throughout, but he's not helped at all in the early episodes by the prosthetics (although the fat suit does look very convincing from the get-go). Another issue is that the high quality of the first two and last two episodes leads to some narrative sag in the middle three, and I'm not entirely convinced that seven hours were necessary, with some real slackness around the midpoint of the story. Tied to this is some unusual choices when deciding what content to include and what to leave out – so we get, for example, an entire episode on the purchasing of a local newspaper, but there's no mention of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, which was Fox's first big ratings win, and the first time it courted controversy with the vehemence of its anti-Democratic rhetoric. The show also features one of my pet peeves – it opens with a VO to which we never again return. Opening a story by having a narrator speaking to us and then never again utilising such narration smacks of laziness, as if the writer couldn't be bothered coming up with a better way to introduce exposition, and it makes very little practical sense.
And, of course, as with any "based on a true story" enterprise, you're going to have issues of authenticity – facts left out or distorted for ideological reasons, characters changed from whom they really were, dialogue invented by the screenwriter, events made up entirely etc. So, for example, the show somewhat downplays just how popular Ailes was with his staff, suggesting that only a few loyalists joined him at Fox when in fact over 100 people who worked for him at NBC left to join the new network – not just his inner circle as the show implies.
A Manhattan one-percenter, sexual predator, and self-serving opportunist, Roger Ailes managed to convince half the country that he was really a patriotic, God-fearing, anti-elite. And just how successful he was is evident in how many supporters he continues to have (many of whom still believe he was the victim of a vast Democratic conspiracy designed to get Hilary Clinton into the White House). If Ailes didn't exactly build the Divided States with his own hands, at the very least, those who did were working from his blueprint, and The Loudest Voice is a very fine deconstruction of that blueprint. Certainly, it's more interested in probing the political impact of Fox than examining the psychology of the man, and it's disappointingly silent on the question of why he did what he did – it never really deals, for example, with whether or not Ailes genuinely believed he was fighting the good fight or if he recognised that he was essentially a snake oil salesman. And accusations that it's one-sided can't be denied – it's a show that never advances beyond reinforcing everything the left already believe about Ailes and Fox, never taking much of an ideological stance of its own. However, for all that, it's very enjoyable – the acting is top-notch, the aesthetic superb, and the events it recounts of great importance in today's cultural climate. It may not say anything especially original, but it doesn't need to in order to be effective.
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