Two on Roger Ailes & Fox News

 The Loudest Voice (2019)

Based on a book by Gabriel Sherman
TV mini-series on Showtime with multiple writers and directors

Bombshell (2019)
Directed by Jay Roach
Written by Charles Randolph


These are thoughts reflecting on seeing Bombshell last night and The Loudest Voice some months ago.

Given, it’s length, depth and more outside point of view, The Loudest Voice is the greater of these two projects in showing what Fox News is. There is a natural focus on Roger Ailes. Fox News is a corporate broadcasting projection of his personality, politically and beyond.

The Loudest Voice has a dynamic and convincingly terrific central performance by Russell Crowe as Ailes. We see him before Fox News was created. We see how he pulled it all off and the series goes into more depth about his right wing political allies, from Richard Nixon through to Donald Trump.
The Loudest Voice takes us through the selecting of the on-screen talent such as the casting of radio shock talk entity Sean Hannity, which elevated him to a national political pundit that people take seriously and listen to, even President Trump. We see the building of the network that becomes the highest rated in the cable news business and dominant in the political dialog of the USA. There is no doubt that Ailes knew how to appeal to the lowest in the country, the fears and greed, and channel the power of Rupert Murdoch’s international information business empire into the awesome force of right-wing propaganda that it became. Roger Ailes was a talented man in a nasty game.
The series takes us through to the eventual downfall of Ailes and shows us rather explicitly the nature of the sexual acts he coerced out of women ambitious for bigtime TV careers. He liked them to suck him off.

The series takes us through 20 years of the career of Roger Ailes. It is a detailed story of the horribly business information entity that Fox News became and sadly remains even after Ailes is gone. 
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Bombshell being just a theatrical movie and not a long one coming in at 109 minutes has a much shorter focal length. It’s all about the final year of Ailes. The story is told from the perspective of the Fox News women and the attempt led by Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidmen in this, Naomi Watts in The Loudest Voice)  to expose the sexual harassment by Roger Ailes.
Unlike The Loudest Voice, it is not an indictment of Fox News itself. We are asked to have sympathy for Gretchen Carlson who was happy to work to comply or deflect the harassment by Roger Ailes for many years and not call him on it, sue him, until she is eventually canned from the network. We could leave the movie with the impression that Fox News is not a bad entity, and not a bad place to work except for Ailes.

It depicts this, sort of, intramural battle between the right wing boss and these right wing hack women, who were ambitious and ruthless enough to go along with slimeball Roger Ailes, his needs and his broadcast tone demands up to a point. That point being, for some the main stars, no longer of use to the network and out of a job.
Ailes himself in John Lithgow’s characterisation of Roger Ailes, as a rather pathetic old man in his final year of power, might bring him more sympathy than is appropriate given his history.

It might be hard for some viewers to have total sympathy for these women even as their treatment was criminal and despicable.
You want to play in the sewer you might get shit on.