It's Time To Root For Roger Ailes

The making of Showtime’s series about the Fox News founder.

- Boris Kachka

ON JULY 21, 2016, Gabriel Sherman, a journalist then at New York Magazine, was standing on a residential street in Cleveland, his newly fractured elbow in a sling, simultaneously covering the Republican National Convention and the forcing out of Fox News’ charming, conniving, and seemingly omnipotent ring­ master, Roger Ailes. Sherman’s phone flashed an L.A. area code, and he fumbled for it with his one good arm: Someone wanted to turn his first book into prestige­cable TV. ¶ That book, the Ailes biography The Loudest Voice in the Room, had upended Sherman’s life—he’d been followed, threatened, and slandered on right­wing sites—even before its 2014 publication. Then it sold modestly, received generally positive reviews (but was panned by some critics with friends in high places), and made barely a dent in Ailes’s reputation. “I thought of it as somehow fundamentally changing the way people thought of him,” Sherman says now. “Then it was over, and nothing changed.” HBO had optioned it, but by the time of the convention, the option had lapsed. Yet finally, as he scrambled in Cleveland, the tables were turning. Ailes was out, Hollywood was interested again, and The Loudest Voice in the Room was en route to becom­ ing a Showtime limited series.

The Loudest Voice is based on Sherman’s book as well as his follow­up reporting for New York on Ailes’s pattern of abuse. The show is produced by Tom McCarthy, who previously made Spotlight, the Oscar­ winning film that did more to valorize journalists than any movie since