TV

Is The Loudest Voice just preaching to the choir?

In The Loudest Voice, Sam Delaney laughs at the cartoonish monster that is Fox News' Roger Ailes - but is the truth a little more mundane?

Russell Crowe in The Loudest Voice

The Loudest Voice is one of many recent dramatisations of life inside Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Succession, starring Brian Cox as an ageing and grumpy patriarch at the helm of a warring family and sprawling news network, is a “close approximation” of the Murdoch Universe, and is probably the funniest show on TV. Bombshell, which was in cinemas in January, was a powerful depiction of the Fox News channel’s recent sex scandals that drove out legendary president (and, as it transpired, prolific sexual abuser) Roger Ailes.

In The Loudest Voice, we get the full Roger Ailes backstory, tracing his political career (he advised Nixon, Reagan and Bush Snr) and the sensational launch of Fox News in the mid-nineties. Russell Crowe plays Ailes as a cross between Henry VIII and Jabba The Hutt. He waddles and slobbers his way through the Fox newsroom, screaming right-wing vitriol and groping at staffers’ backsides, scheming up evil plots to destroy Obama and anoint Trump.

It is convenient for us to believe that people like Ailes are super-villains with sinister agendas presiding over mass brainwashing schemes

As the sort of metropolitan liberal Ailes would have despised, I get a peculiar buzz from watching him portrayed as a semi-comedic monster. Like a conservative Geppetto, we see Ailes manipulate American public opinion with his grandly meticulous misinformation masterplan.

But just like liberals believe the conservative masses to be slack-jawed dingbats who merrily lap up the prejudices of right-wing media, we liberals are just as dozily suggestible. It is convenient for us to believe that people like Ailes are super-villains with sinister agendas presiding over mass brainwashing schemes. The truth is that Ailes was a TV producer from Ohio with a common touch who applied the lessons learnt in entertainment to the tired and tedious world of news. He started a small cable news channel and gave it two major points of difference: firstly, it was fun, light and conversational. Secondly, and even more remarkably in the context of the American news media, it was right-wing.

But so what? Isn’t that what a pluralist democracy needs? Sure, Fox News has facilitated the dissemination of all sorts of iffy, offensive and sometimes slightly disgusting views over the years. But they were rarely, if ever, views generated out of a void by Ailes and his team. They were reflections of the views that, wrongly or rightly (by which I mean wrongly), existed across the American heartlands.

Having worked in various newsrooms over the years, I am always amused when I see depictions of these places as hotbeds of intricate moral debates and nuanced political decisions. Newsrooms are mad houses where everyone’s single agenda is just get the story out on time. Did Ailes have a secret strategy to shift the American public’s mindset – beyond putting newscasters in short skirts and being rather more laissez-faire about what his journalists could say on air?

No. Ailes was a bad man and these portrayals of his misdemeanors as a despicable boss, husband, abuser and exploiter are compelling and important. But as a newsman I don’t think he was as dark as sinister as pearl-clutching liberal critics believe. He just made the news accessible to previously alienated swathes of viewers. Perhaps that’s what really upset all the snobs.

The Loudest Voice is available on Sky Atlantic.

Support the Big Issue

For over 30 years, the Big Issue has been committed to ending poverty in the UK. In 2024, our work is needed more than ever. Find out how you can support the Big Issue today.
Vendor martin Hawes

Recommended for you

View all
Ralf Little on leaving Death in Paradise, his replacement and taking on Jeremy Hunt
Ralf Little
Exclusive

Ralf Little on leaving Death in Paradise, his replacement and taking on Jeremy Hunt

Mary & George's Tony Curran on playing pacifist, pleasure-seeking King James
Tony Curran as King James I
TV

Mary & George's Tony Curran on playing pacifist, pleasure-seeking King James

John Malkovich on fashion, hope and why beauty is mandatory for the survival of the species
TV

John Malkovich on fashion, hope and why beauty is mandatory for the survival of the species

Filmmaker Adam Curtis on epic new BBC drama The Way – and how the power of TV is shaking up Britain
Callum Scott Howells in The Way
TV

Filmmaker Adam Curtis on epic new BBC drama The Way – and how the power of TV is shaking up Britain

Most Popular

Read All
Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits
Renters: A mortgage lender's window advertising buy-to-let products
1.

Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal
Pound coins on a piece of paper with disability living allowancve
2.

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal

Here's when UK households to start receiving last cost of living payments
next dwp cost of living payment 2023
3.

Here's when UK households to start receiving last cost of living payments

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know
4.

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know