When Roger Ailes started FOX News in 1996, people said he'd have no chance against CNN.

This year, FOX News will likely make $700 million of profit--more money than CNN, MSNBC and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS combined.

Ailes rules not only the news business but politics: If Ailes were a Democrat, James Carville says, the Democrats would control 67 seats in the Senate.

David Carr and Tim Arango of the NYT provide a snapshot of News Corp's most valuable asset. Here's the money shot:

Mr. Ailes, the son of a foreman at the Packard Electric plant in Warren, Ohio, described his upbringing with three words: “God, country, family” and said that credo was responsible for the success of Fox News.

“I built this channel from my life experience,” Mr. Ailes, 69, said. “My first qualification is I didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School. There are no parties in this town that I want to go to.”

Members of Rupert Murdoch's extended family, meanwhile, are appalled by what Ailes and FOX are doing:

“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” said Matthew Freud, who is married to Ms. Murdoch and whom PR Week magazine says is the most influential public relations executive in London.

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