One of the Regulars Certain larger-than-life figures tend to become running characters in New York— Ed Koch, Anna Wintour, Donald Trump—and, for nearly our entire history, that cast has included Roger Ailes. The Nixon adviser turned cable-news mastermind (and accused sexual harasser) first appeared in our pages in 1970, when the journalist Joe McGinniss was writing about the experience of plugging his book The Selling of the President 1968, in which Ailes figures prominently.

Barbara Walters had come after McGinniss hard in a TV interview: “Afterwards she says she is angry because she is a friend of Roger Ailes, who is a character in the book. She thinks I treated him unfairly.” (He replies that Ailes likes the book and has helped him promote it.) And when someone asks McGinniss how a particular politician might fix his TV image, the answer is simple: “I tell him to call Roger Ailes.”