Pat Caddell: Roger Ailes ‘Was a Visionary, He Changed the Way We Communicate in This Country’

roger ailes
AP/Jim Cooper

Pollster and political strategist Pat Caddell responded to breaking news of former Fox News head Roger Ailes’ death on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily.

“I am profoundly sad and heartbroken to report that my husband, Roger Ailes, passed away this morning. Roger was a loving husband to me, to his son Zachary, and a loyal friend to many. He was also a patriot, profoundly grateful to live in a country that gave him so much opportunity to work hard, to rise – and to give back,” Ailes’ wife Elizabeth said in a statement read on the air by SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.

“Roger Ailes brought me to Fox News,” Caddell recalled, stunned by the news. “He was a friend. My heart goes out to her and Zachary. I am profoundly sad. It’s a great loss of a man who was a patriot. Whatever his faults, he was a visionary and he changed the way we communicate in this country. He brought balance to our political discourse. He was a genius, and that’s all I can say.”

“I’m just profoundly, personally in shock right now,” he added.

Marlow noted that despite the scandals surrounding Ailes’ departure from Fox News, “it’s very hard to separate him from freedom of speech, from conservative values, and from fighting for a fairer America on the media landscape where so much of it is left-wing.”

“Let me just say, think of what the world would be like in terms of news and the availability of information if he and Rupert Murdoch had never created Fox,” Caddell agreed. “It would be a very different and much more limited world.”

He said he was not expecting “what I think would be proper and respectful reporting” from the mainstream media about the life and death of Roger Ailes.

“Maybe I’ll be surprised,” he added.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

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