Roger Ailes, a towering figure in TV news and politics whose long run was tarnished by the sexual harassment scandal that forced him out last year as head of Fox News, has died. He was 77.

Fox News confirmed Ailes died Thursday morning, three days after his 77th birthday. He was known to have battled health problems in recent years.

In a statement, Ailes’ wife Elizabeth called her husband “a patriot who was profoundly grateful to live in a country that gave him so much opportunity to work hard, to rise and to give back.” She hailed him as “a loving husband and father” who had wide-ranging impact in his professional life.

“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,” Elizabeth Ailes said. The statement also asked the public to respect the Ailes’ family privacy “at this time of sorrow and grief.” The family did not confirm details of his death, which reportedly stemmed from a fall he took at his Florida home earlier this month.

A master of communication, Ailes represented the convergence of television and politics. With the determination of a pit bull, he helped shape public opinion, first as an adviser to presidential candidates Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush and, later, as a television news executive: The founder and president of Fox News Channel turned it into a franchise with a vast footprint in politics as well as television.

The underdog news operation took on category leader CNN, eclipsing the channel in the ratings with a lineup of opinion-oriented talk hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and largely maintained its stability while the competition underwent change after change.

Ailes also established a famously hard-charging culture at Fox News. He was known for his bare-knuckle approach to dealing with competitors and those who he saw as adversaries. The old-school newsroom culture of Fox News was laid bare last July when former anchor Gretchen Carlson sued Ailes personally for sexual harassment, asserting that she was fired after refusing his request for sexual favors. Within a month, after Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox initiated an internal investigation, Ailes was forced to resign as Fox News chairman-CEO, a swift fall from power that stunned the media industry.

Just last month, Ailes’ longtime star anchor, Bill O’Reilly, was also forced out of Fox News after 21 years because of a cascade of sexual harassment allegations. Bill Shine, longtime Fox News programming executive, was forced to resign as co-president on May 1 amid internal and external pressure that he took no action in the face of questionable behavior by O’Reilly and other Fox News executives.

The fallout from the Ailes and O’Reilly scandals has prompted ongoing investigations by the Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service on whether Fox News parent 21st Century Fox properly accounted to shareholders for legal settlement payments in connection with the harassment allegations. After Ailes was forced out, Rupert Murdoch took the reins as chairman of Fox News. The company is said to have quietly begun the process of looking for a new CEO.

Never one to mince words, Ailes had an uncanny ability to discern what the public wanted, which served him well both in politics and business.

Fox’s “fair and balanced” slogan became a daily indictment of the so-called mainstream media. Ailes also appeared to relish the role of potential kingmaker — assuming even more power when the Republican Party appeared to be in disarray after Barack Obama’s election, and regularly employing and advising Republican politicians between runs for office. GOP officials, from Sarah Palin to Mike Huckabee, often kept their profiles up through Fox News talent deals after (and sometimes between) campaigns.

While Fox prided itself on loyalty under Ailes, the executive was also known to be a formidable enemy, pushing back hard against unflattering news coverage. This kind of behavior came into focus when writer Gabriel Sherman wrote an unauthorized biography of Ailes, “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country,” published in January 2014.

Thanks to his success, Ailes had enormous clout within Rupert Murdoch’s empire, so much so that when Ailes clashed with Murdoch’s son Lachlan during the early 2000s while the younger Murdoch was overseeing the TV stations division, it was the latter who eventually wound up leaving the company. (Lachlan later returned in a different capacity.)