Categories: OLD Media Moves

Roger Ailes and The Wall Street Journal

Gabriel Sherman‘s biography of Fox News head Roger Ailes — who also oversees Fox Business Network — called “The Loudest Voice in the Room” will be released next week, and New York magazine runs an excerpt that includes details of what Ailes thought of The Wall Street Journal, also owned by News Corp.

Sherman writes:

The ratings failure of the Fox Business Network, which Murdoch had tapped Ailes to launch 2007, was all the more glaring given that Murdoch had acquired The Wall Street Journal around the same time. But Ailes spoke of the Journal as a threat. The paper had no synergy with Fox. Executives noticed that Ailes resented Murdoch’s lavish support of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, and his close friendship with Robert Thomson, the former editor of The Times of London whom Murdoch tapped to be publisher of the Journal. As Les Hinton, then president of Dow Jones, accompanied Ailes on a tour of the Journal’s gleaming new newsroom a few floors above Fox News, Ailes grumbled, “So, you’re showing me what I paid for.”
In the fall of 2012, Ailes held a meeting with Fox Business executives to discuss whether Fox should sign a content arrangement with Dow Jones. That year, Dow Jones was exiting a long-term partnership with CNBC and was free to sign up with Fox. “Why would I pay them anything?” Ailes said, referring to the Journal. Fox anchor Neil Cavuto stoked Ailes’s fears of a corporate rivalry. “The Wall Street Journal is a Trojan horse. They want the business channel,” he told Ailes.
Then Ailes largely banned Journal reporters from his air. It happened after Ailes learned that Journal Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray, who was steering the Journal’s expansion into video production, had made a snide comment about Fox. “Alan made the mistake of telling folks how he could make FBN better,” the executive said. A few months later, a junior Fox Business staffer mistakenly disclosed the ban to a Journal employee.
“We had to deny that there ever was a ban. It was so silly,” a Fox producer said.