Ailes’s critics, like Hearst’s, have found it easier to denounce him than to think hard about the audience he appeals to. Illustration by Stanley Chow

In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. Page 1 was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” Page 2: “Holy Moses!” Page 3: “God Almighty!” Still, you can yank people around for only so long. Wonder ebbs. Surprise is fleeting. Even rage abates. In 1933, Hearst turned seventy. He started to worry. How would the world remember him when he could no longer dictate the headlines? Ferdinand Lundberg, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was beginning work on a book about him; no one expected it to be friendly. Hearst therefore did what many a rich, aging megalomaniac has done before and since: he hired a lackey to write an authorized biography, preëmptively.

In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News. That year, Roger Ailes, its head, turned seventy. Gabriel Sherman, an editor and reporter for New York, was beginning work on a book about him. Sherman interviewed more than six hundred people for “The Loudest Voice in the Room” (Random House). Ailes, who is known for menace, was not among them. “Take your best shot at me,” Ailes is said to have told another New York writer, “and I’ll have the rest of my life to go after you.” Unwilling to sit down for an interview with Sherman, Ailes met instead with Zev Chafets, a former columnist for the Daily News, a contributor to the Times Magazine, and the author of a biography of Rush Limbaugh. Chafets shadowed Ailes at Fox News; watched his son play basketball; walked with him, flanked by his bodyguard; and visited his home, in Garrison, New York, where Ailes has bought up not only the land around his nine-thousand-square-foot mansion but also the local newspaper, to which he named, as publisher, his wife.

“I got a closer, more prolonged look at Roger Ailes than any journalist ever has,” Chafets writes in “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” (Sentinel), which appeared, preëmptively, last year. Ailes, Chafets says, looks like “a small-town banker in a Frank Capra movie.” That sounds disapproving, but in this particular Bedford Falls we are meant to admire Mr. Potter and each of his little witticisms. Ailes on Gingrich: “Newt’s a prick.” Biden: “He’s dumb as an ashtray.” Maddow: “Rachel is good and she will get even better when she discovers that there are people on earth who don’t share every one of her beliefs.” Krugman: “He’s a dope but nobody wants to say it because he’s won awards.” There’s plenty of obloquy in Chafets’s book. There’s also a great deal of what might be termed the testicular imagination. Rupert Murdoch says, of meeting Ailes, “I thought, Either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen.” Chafets adds, by way of aside, “Ailes was thinking pretty much the same thing.” Holy Moses.

William Randolph Hearst needed a mouthpiece; he couldn’t trust an actual biographer—he was convinced that most people who wrote serious books for a living were Communists. In the fall of 1934, he ordered his editors to send reporters posing as students to college campuses, to find out which members of the faculty were Reds. Many of the people Hearst thought were Communists thought Hearst was a Fascist. This charge derived, in part, from the fact that Hearst had professed his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. It was easy to despise Hearst. It was also lazy. Hating some crazy old loudmouth who is a vindictive bully and lives in a castle is far less of a strain than thinking about the vulgarity and the prejudices of his audience. In 1935, the distinguished war correspondent and radio broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing observed, “People who are not capable of disliking the lower middle class in toto, since it is a formidable tax on their emotions, can detest Hearst instead.” Ailes haters, take note.

Swing despaired over what had happened to journalism under Hearst, and said so, which took courage. Hearst attacked his critics in his papers relentlessly and ferociously. Some fought back. “Only cowards can be intimidated by Hearst,” the historian Charles Beard said. Beard had resigned from Columbia in 1917, after the university began firing professors who opposed U.S. involvement in the war. (Beard himself favored American involvement; what he opposed was the university’s assault on intellectual freedom.) He’d been elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1925 and, in 1933, president of the American Historical Association. He wasn’t someone Hearst could easily crush, or daunt. In February of 1935, Beard addressed an audience of nine hundred schoolteachers in Atlantic City. “William Randolph Hearst has pandered to depraved tastes and has been an enemy of everything that is noblest and best in the American tradition,” he said. “No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole.” The crowd gave Beard a standing ovation.

To write the story of his life, Hearst turned to a woman named Cora Baggerly Older. Her husband, Fremont Older, was one of Hearst’s editors; the Olders had often visited Hearst at his hundred-and-sixty-five-room castle, San Simeon. In December of 1935, Mrs. Older, at work on the biography, alerted Hearst’s office that she had learned “that a hostile book called THE LORD OF SAN SIMEON written by Oliver Carlson and Ernest Sutherland Bates is soon to be published by the Viking Press.” Lundberg’s biography was about to come out, too. It was called “Imperial Hearst.” A preface was supplied by Charles Beard.

Roger Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1940. He has hemophilia, which didn’t stop his father from beating him with an electrical cord. A story Ailes has told—“his Rosebud story,” according to Stephen Rosenfield, who worked with Ailes in the nineteen-seventies—is about a lesson he learned in his bedroom as a boy. His father, holding out his arms, told him to jump off the top bunk and then deliberately failed to catch him, saying, “Don’t ever trust anybody.”

Ailes went to Ohio University, where he majored in television and radio, and worked for the campus radio station, WOUB. While he was in college, his parents divorced; his mother told the court that her husband had threatened to kill her. After graduation, Ailes took a job at KYW-TV, in Cleveland, working for “The Mike Douglas Show.”

“Roger Ailes was a legend at a very young age,” according to Marvin Kalb, and by all accounts Ailes was an exceptionally talented television producer. In 1967, he met Joe McGinniss, then a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who wrote about him in “The Selling of the President 1968,” an account of Nixon’s Presidential campaign, and catapulted him to celebrity. The book’s turning point comes when, one day in 1967, in the green room of “The Mike Douglas Show,” Nixon says to Ailes, “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected.” Ailes says, “Television is not a gimmick.” Ailes became Nixon’s television producer. In McGinniss’s telling, Ailes more or less got Nixon elected.