Roger Ailes' Funeral: An Act Of Defiance

Friends and family of Fox News’ controversial founder take aim at the media (and the Murdochs) as the once-dominant network falls to third place and Sean Hannity says, ‘It’s really over, isn’t it?’

- Michael Wolff

One question traveling quickly through Fox News on May 19 was about who had been invited to the funeral of the network’s ousted founder Roger Ailes the next day in Palm Beach, Florida. Another was who would risk management disapproval by attending.

Ailes’ wife, Beth, fiercely protective of him and, in the hours after his May 18 death at age 77, already a determined keeper of the flame, meant to exclude anyone who wasn’t a true friend and to test anyone who said they were. If the liberal media saw Ailes as a disgraced, broken man — quite taking credit for his professional if not actual demise through its coverage since July of the sexual harassment allegations against him — his funeral aimed to be an act of defiance. Without apology, it was a celebration of husband, father, friend, employer, political figure, media titan, TV impresario and, hardly least of all, man of many provocations. It was, too, an unyielding front against his enemies, whose names hung in the air with scorn and imprecations: Gretchen Carlson, the Fox News anchor he’d fired who filed the initial claim against him for sexual harassment; Megyn Kelly, the woman whose career he had built and who, many of their colleagues believed, had sold him out for her own career advancement; and Gabriel Sherman, the reporter fixated on him who became the prime conduit of leaks from Fox News parent 21st Century Fox. Most of all the villains were the Murdochs: Rupert Murdoch, who had hired Ailes in 1996, and his sons, James and Lachlan, who had assumed executive authority two years ago. Ailes had given the Murdoch family 20 years and built them a $30 billion company, and, in the opinion of family, friends and his confidants at Fox, had been sacrificed by them when it suited their purposes.