Gawker Exclusive: Roger Ailes Caught Spying on the Reporters at His Small-Town Newspaper

[kpete]

EXCLUSIVE

Roger Ailes Caught Spying on the Reporters at His Small-Town Newspaper

John Cook and Hamilton Nolan — The small-town newspapers in New York's Hudson Valley that Fox News chief Roger Ailes owns with his wife Elizabeth are in a staff revolt after employees caught Ailes spying on them with News Corp. security goons.

In 2008, Roger Ailes purchased the Putnam County News and Recorder in rustic Putnam County, New York to start feathering his retirement nest. The idea was that he and Elizabeth would retire to their 9,000-square-foot redoubt in nearby Garrison, N.Y., and Roger would live out his days as the gentleman publisher of a sleepy small-town newspaper. (He bought another paper, the Putnam County Courier, a year later.)

But it was not to be. Ailes—who installed Elizabeth as the day-to-day manager of the papers while he finishes his tenure at Fox News Channel—has run the papers with the singularly paranoid and abusive management style he brings to all his projects, resulting in the defection of his hand-picked editor and two top reporters earlier this month after Ailes told them he'd had them followed, and their private conversations surveilled, to catch them saying mean things about him. The spying followed years of intense weirdness between the editor and the Aileses, who once asked him to personally stop a break-in at their home and who implied that, after Roger's death, he'd be expected to replace him in their marriage.


(it gets wierder) THE REST: http://gawker.com/#!5793012

MORE:
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/04/roger-ailes-caught-spying-on-the-reporters-at-his-small-town-newspaper.php

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. one sick bat fastert clone.

[hobbit709]

2. Why do all these RW asses look like the offspring of Jabba The Hutt?

[Cleita]

3. Yes, it seems there was never a donut they couldn't love. n/t

[hobbit709]

4. Anyone that weird probably did more than just love the donut.

[Cleita]

5. His wife, Elizabeth, is actually very attractive. I wonder

how much Xanax or Prozac it takes for her to go to bed with him.

[Peregrine Took]

7. But what about when she comes "to" and finds out its not a nightmare?

Yikes.

[LiberalAndProud]

6. I wonder what the papers would look like if Ailes was sole writer and editor.

If everybody who worked for Ailes quit, would he still wield power? It would be an interesting exercise in the power of money.

[TacticalPeek]

8. The New Yorker had a nice article about his new small town empire.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/31/110131fa_fact_boyer