The phrase “evil genius” is generally applied with either exaggeration or irony; how many people really fall into both categories? The Loudest Voice in the Room, Gabriel Sherman’s enormously entertaining new biography of Roger Ailes, leaves the reader in little doubt about the maliciousness of its subject, who refused to cooperate with a book he saw as an attempt to undermine both himself and the network he runs, the Fox News Channel. Sherman is studiously non-judgmental about Ailes’s relentlessly disgusting behavior and toxic political views, which only has the effect of highlighting his exhaustive (and eventually nearly exhausting) reporting.

This leaves genius. There isn’t much doubt about the political acuity Ailes displayed during his successful career as a Republican operative working for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And there is absolutely no doubt that Ailes is a remarkably intuitive and innovative television executive who took an upstart conservative channel and turned it—in less than a decade—into an agenda-setting behemoth.

Sherman is so awed by Ailes’s skills, however, that he ends up overstating his influence, and taking Ailes’s own narrative too much for granted. “Roger Ailes has the power, more than any single person in American public life, to define the president,” he writes in his prologue. The problem is that Sherman’s account never sufficiently challenges Ailes’s cynical view of politics, wherein image and narrative are everything. Ailes has certainly revolutionized television news, but winning audience share is a far cry from winning the White House.

Sherman’s story begins with Ailes’s childhood in rural Ohio where, it will surprise approximately no one, he was burdened with poor health and a sadistic father. “The cruelest lesson Roger would speak of occurred in the bedroom Roger shared with his brother,” Sherman writes.* “Roger was standing on the top bunk. His father opened his arms wide and smiled. ‘Jump, Roger, jump,’ he told him. Roger leapt off the bed into the air toward his arms. But Robert took a step back. His son fell flat onto the floor. As he looked up, [Ailes Sr.] leaned down and picked him up. ‘Don’t ever trust anybody,’ he said.” This bizarre form of sadism was coupled with more traditional varieties --“If they ignored him, he pulled out his belt, whipping them not until they began to cry, although they did wail, but until they fell silent” —and a mother who was alternately controlling and cold. “Roger remembered her hugging him only ‘once in a while,’” Sherman reports. “He speculated to a reporter that perhaps she was scared of his hemophilia.”

It is to Sherman’s credit that he both elicits sympathy for Ailes, and quickly dispels any hope that Ailes’s story is an uplifting one. This book is not about overcoming one’s odds, and rising above pettiness. No, pretty soon young Roger is off working for The Mike Douglas Show and then Richard Nixon, who had a similarly rough upbringing, and who happened to have all the qualities that Ailes would eventually develop: pettiness, self-pity, and paranoia.