ROGER AILES DEAD AT 77 – AT 9:50 A.M. ET:  Roger Ailes, arguably the most important news executive of our time, is dead at the age of 77.  From CNBC:

Media titan Roger Ailes, who resigned from his positions as chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network amid sexual harassment allegations last year, has died at age 77.

Ailes resigned from Fox in summer 2016 in the wake of former Fox News Channel Host Gretchen Carlson's sexual harassment lawsuit against him. Ailes had denied the allegations from Carlson, who claimed she was fired last year after she refused to have a sexual relationship with the executive.

Ailes founded Fox News and helped shape the modern cable news landscape in the process. Before that, he worked as a producer and also worked in politics as a consultant. In the early 1990s, he served as president of CNBC, which he left to create Fox News.

In a statement, his wife Elizabeth Ailes said, "I am profoundly sad and heartbroken to report that my husband, Roger Ailes, passed away this morning surrounded by his beautiful family. Roger was my best friend, the most wonderful loving husband and father to our son Zachary, He was a loyal friend to so many. Roger was a patriot, grateful to live in a country that gave him so much opportunity to work hard, to rise-and to give back. During a career that stretched over more than five decades, his work in entertainment, in politics, and in news affected the lives of many millions."

No cause of death was given.

COMMENT:   Ailes built Fox News by giving the audience an alternative to the blatant liberal bias of mainstream journalism.   What he built was solid – opinion shows that were clearly conservative, and gained fame as such, but news programs that usually represented fine journalism.  Many of the Fox reporters he hired remain among the best in the business.

He was regularly smeared.  There are those so intolerant that they don't believe that a network that presents "the other side of the story" has any place in journalism.

As the obituary above noted, Ailes was brought down by a sexual harasssment suit, not by any assessment of his work.  I cannot attest to the truthfulness of the charges against him, but Fox accepted that they were true.  There have since been a number of other sexual harassment charges made against Fox figures, including Bill O'Reilly, the highest-rated personality in cable news, who was fired as a result.  It is widely reported that both Ailes and O'Reilly were hurried out the door by the young sons of the Rupert Murdoch family who are far more liberal than their father, and want to remake Fox into a liberal operation, and thus gain a certain respectability on the Washington/Los Angles/New York circuit.

I'd be interested to see what is said about Ailes today by the news organizations he defeated in competition for viewers.  What should be said, and conceded, is that he won on the basis of his journalism, and not on anything else.  In a way, he gave a voice to the voiceless, to those cut out of the mainstream.

Controversial, yes.  Consequential, no doubt,.

May 18,  2017