One political hot topic today is the new biography of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, entitled “The Loudest Voice in the Room” and allegedly published despite Ailes’ best efforts to squash it. It’s easy to see why he didn’t want people to read it: the book charges that he once offered to pay a female producer more if she would sleep with him on demand, that he once called a rival a “Jew prick,” that he bought and turned a local newspaper into a right-wing attack vehicle, and much more.
There’s some eye-opening stuff in the book about immigration, too. Despite appearing as a moderate on the issue–in 2013, Ailes told the New Republic that “I don’t have any problem with a path to citizenship”–the new biography finds Ailes to be harboring some pretty horrible views. As Media Matters highlights:
Ailes said that if he were president, he would solve the immigration problem by sitting the president of Mexico down and giving him a stern talking-to: “Your country is corrupt. You can now only take thirty percent of what the people earn instead of seventy percent. If you don’t do that, I’ll send the CIA down there to kill you”…
Ailes told [Philipstown, NY supervisor Richard] Shea that as president he would send Navy SEAL trainees to the border as part of a certification program: “I would make it a requirement that you would have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would have to bring home a dead body.” [The Loudest Voice in the Room,pg 392]
It’s a comment eerily similar to something Kansas state legislator Virgil Peck once said–that we should shoot immigrants down from helicopters, like feral hogs. Only this time, it’s coming from the CEO of Fox News, the guy who directs an entire network with millions of viewers.
Scary stuff.
