Newsmax says there is a reason progressives like former Obama Green Jobs Czar Van Jones are so incensed about a new biography chronicling the life of presidential strategist-turned-Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes: he is “the man Obama fears the most.”
“To say that the president hates Fox News may be an understatement,” writes Newsmax in a book review of Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets. “Early in his first term Obama actually sought to ban Fox News from the White House press corps, ripping away its press credential.”
Chafets, who received unprecedented access to Ailes and his Fox News inner circle, recounts an intense private 2008 meeting at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel between News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, Barack Obama, and Roger Ailes. When Ailes asked Obama about his stated support for unilateral arms reductions, Ailes says Obama looked him square in the eye and denied ever taking such a position.
“He said this looking me right in the eyes. He never dropped his gaze, which is the usual tell. It was as good a lie as anyone ever told me,” said Ailes.
The Newsmax book review says the Ailes biography contains several “surprising revelations,” including:
- How Glenn Beck’s exposé on Van Jones led to the White House efforts to ban Fox News;
- Obama’s surprising remark at a White House Christmas party, telling Ailes that he was “the most powerful man in the world;”
- The truth about the George Soros-backed efforts to torpedo the “two Great Satans” — Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh;
- Why Beck really left Fox News to start his own network;
- Fox and Hollywood: the funny account by Ailes of the time he went to dinner with Al Pacino and Shirley MacLaine;
- Ailes’ role in saving Ronald Reagan after his disastrous debate performance against Walter Mondale;
- O’Reilly wars: the inside story of how Fox dealt with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and why, to this day, Bill O’Reilly hates his liberal critics at NBC
Newsmax is not alone in its praiseworthy book review; Rush Limbaugh said the biography is “great because Ailes opened up to Zev like he hasn’t opened up to anybody else.” Limbaugh encouraged readers who are tired of progressive caricatures of Fox News to “get Roger Ailes: Off Camera.”