The Loudest Voice Finale: Truth

The Loudest Voice concluded tonight with John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth," played under postscripts that tell us what happened to major characters after the story portrayed in the series ends.  In many ways, that combo - Lennon's song and the postscripts - were the most compelling part of the series, which was plenty compelling, already.

For example, why does Beth Ailes maintain her husband's innocence after we see her in the series finally disbelieving him, after being told that Gretchen Carlson has tapes of what Roger said to her?  Since there's no public record of what Beth said to Roger privately, let alone her private facial expressions, the most likely conclusion is: Beth's coming to believe the charges against Roger may be artistic license on the part of the The Loudest Voice. As I often say, docu-dramas are not documentaries, and even documentaries, though they don't fabricate scenes, may not tell the whole story.

Along the same lines, why did Ailes's assistant, Judy Laterza, first support Roger in the testimony she gave which she knew Roger was seeing on one of his cameras, and then, after Roger's death, continue to be silent on everything?  How much of the scene in which Roger invited her to join Beth and him for dinner, and Judy was delighted, until Beth nixed it, actually happened?

I raise these points not because I disbelieve Gretchen Carlson and the other women who brought charges against Roger, but because I think we need to keep reminding ourselves that the rendition of this that we saw in The Loudest Voice may be, at the very least, a narrative of truth embellished, in one way or another.  And this, in turn, is important to keep in mind when we consider Trump and the political part of the story, and Roger's view, depicted in The Loudest Voice, that he was more responsible than anyone or anything else for Trump's 2016 victory.   That may or may not be true, even though it's certainly a powerful story.

And there actually are at least two related questions here:  One, did Ailes believe that he was responsible for Trump's becoming President?  And, two, was Ailes indeed responsible for Trump's becoming President?  As I've said before in these reviews, I certainly don't think the answer to the second question is yes.  And I'm just not sure about the first.

But such questions only add to the power of The Loudest Voice, and, indeed, everything about The Loudest Voice was powerful, especially Russell Crowe's performance as Aisles, which abundantly deserves an Emmy.   Kudos to everyone who put together this little series for creating an excruciatingly timely and unnerving masterpiece.

See also:  The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch ... The Loudest Voice 1.2: September 11 and After ... The Loudest Voice 1.3: Prelude to Trump ... The Loudest Voice 1.4: "We Create the News" ... The Loudest Voice 1.5: Was Ailes Really All That Powerful? ... The Loudest Voice 1.7: "Television Has Replaced the Political Party"

The Loudest Voice 1.6: "Television Has Replaced the Political Party"

That's what Roger Ailes says in The Loudest Voice 1.6 - "television has replaced the political party." I'm not so sure.  I mean, I believe Roger Ailes certainly thought that and likely said that.  But I'd say Twitter more than television is the most significant political medium in this Trumpian age.  Maybe 2016 was a little too soon for anyone, even Ailes, to recognize that.  Maybe Ailes was constitutionally incapable of recognizing the Twitter revolution, given his running the engines of television for politics, going back to Nixon.

As I've been saying all along, I don't quite buy a lot of what we're seeing in The Loudest Voice about Ailes and politics.   Most especially that he made Donald Trump.  What he made was Fox News as such a behemoth of cable news.  That part, I believe.  As for the womanizing, I wasn't there so I don't know any of that for a fact.  But I have no problem believing that, either.

But not the Trump part.  The limited series will end next week, and will leave us with the message that Trump was an Ailes creation.  The 2020 election is still more than a year away.  If Trump loses, that will support the thesis of this series.  Trump lost because he lost his diabolically powerful media booster.  If Trump wins, that would mean that Ailes was not so crucial to Trump after all.

You know what?  I usually like to be proven right in my media criticism.   But there are some things more important than proof of professional acumen.  As a human being, I deeply hope that Trump loses, and therein lends support to the claim that Ailes got Trump in office the first time, and Trump lost the second time he ran for President because Ailes was no longer around (as in, not on this Earth).

The series ends next week.  I'll say a little more about this then.  As for that welcome ultimate disproof, we'll have to wait until November 2020.

See also:  The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch ... The Loudest Voice 1.2: September 11 and After ... The Loudest Voice 1.3: Prelude to Trump ... The Loudest Voice 1.4: "We Create the News" ... The Loudest Voice 1.5: Was Ailes Really All That Powerful?

The Loudest Voice 1.4: "We Create the News"

Another powerful episode of The Loudest Voice tonight - 1.4 - in which Roger Ailes lays bare the basis of fake news: "we create the news'.  I should say, the basis of real fake news - that is, news that is fake.  We need to make this distinction because Trump now daily bashes our legitimate news media as fake news - which would be fake fake news -  a tactic that comes right out of Hitler's denunciation of the press in 1930s Germany as the Lügenpresse (the lying press).  When you're trying to replace democracy with a totalitarian regime, it's wise to discredit and get rid of the people who can call you out on that and let the rest of the country know - the press.  (See my short book, Fake News in Real Context, for more.)

Speaking of Trump, we also hear on The Loudest Voice tonight that it was Aisles and Fox who gave the Trump the idea that Obama was not really born in America.  I have no idea if Trump got that paranoid right-wing notion from Fox or not.  And here it might be a good idea to mention, as I always do, that there's a big difference between documentaries and docu-dramas.   Even documentaries are not necessarily entirely truthful - they may leave out important facts.  But docu-dramas go even further - they actually make conversations up, conflate events, etc, to tell a more effective narrative.  (The excellent docu-drama Chernobyl, which I reviewed here in May-June, did a lot of that.)

The Loudest Voice certainly focuses only on selected Fox News luminaries - selected for whatever reason.   Tonight we saw a lot of attention to Glenn Beck.  A few weeks ago, it was Sean Hannity.  Both of these Fox News hosts are portrayed in detail by actors.  In contrast, Bill O'Reilly, who had Fox New's leading show for years, is mentioned as such, and shown (the real O'Reilly) briefly on the The Loudest Voice, but no actor portrays him and we see nothing of his back story.  Why not?

I guess all of this adds up to taking The Loudest Voice with a grain of salt, as we should with any docu-drama.  It tells a crucially important story, and is therefore worth watching, even if something less than the complete truth and only the truth shows up on our screens.

See also:  The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch ... The Loudest Voice 1.2: September 11 and After ... The Loudest Voice 1.3: Prelude to Trump


 

The Loudest Voice 1.3: Prelude to Trump

The most chilling part of The Loudest Voice 1.3 tonight on Showtime is Roger Ailes, in his speech in Warren, Ohio after Barack Obama's victory, saying we need to "make America great again".  That, combined with the talk about immigrants ruining America, on the day that our ICE gestapo began rounding up immigrants for deportation, is an eerily prescient voicing of the worst instincts in America in 2008 and shortly after - when Obama won and became President.

Before that, we see Ailes struggling to stop that from happening.  But he's hampered by his boss Rupert Murdock, who genuinely wants Fox News to live up to its "fair and balanced" moniker.  And he's hampered by the sheer dumbness of Sarah Palin.  And by David Axelrod, who stands up to Ailes and his political abuses.

On being dumb, we also get an eerie glance at our present day when Ailes says Biden, the VP candidate, is "dumb as an ash tray".  Again, our modern day fascist in the White House has said much the same about Biden today.  Trump has not originated much.  He's good at borrowing insults from Ailes and the cunning intelligentsia of the new right in America.

We also see more of the ways that Ailes preys on women.  All of this is leading up to what happened with Gretchen Carlson, which we saw the beginnings of in this episode.   We've yet to see what Ailes did to get Trump in office - in addition to giving him phrases - and get the disaffected in the midwest to leave the Democratic Party.  The Loudest Voice continues to be one of the best accountings of how fascism has managed to get such a grip in America.  In laying that bare, it may also show some pathways for rooting it out.

See also:  The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch ... The Loudest Voice 1.2: September 11 and After

The Loudest Voice 1.2: September 11 and After

The Loudest Voice continued to make history in its second episode, depicting September 11 and its aftermath in way that's never been done before.

That way is the reaction and the role played by Roger Ailes.  As a disclaimer, I should say that I have no idea if what Ailes is depicted as saying is 100% true.  I was on Fox Magazine for a 10-minute interview on October 20, 2001 about propaganda in wartime, but that's the closest I got to Fox News in this crucial period.   Ailes is shown to be shocked by the twin towers attacks - as was every American, especially those of us living and working in New York - and then quickly turning to his seeing how this could be an advantage for Fox News, and then close to calling some of the shots with Dick Cheney and through him Bush and the White House in the subsequent attack on Iraq.

What is undeniable is that this was the period of time in which Fox surpasses CNN to first place in cable news.  MSNBC was so far behind in third place that it's rarely seen or mentioned.  Ailes got Fox to this commanding place by both supporting the US attack on Saddam Hussein and to a degree making it happen.  In that sense, Ailes is like William Randolph Hearst, who at the end of the 19th century leveraged the U. S. into the Spanish-American War over Cuba with his newspaper's reporting.

That war set up America for the 20th century, just as the war in Iraq, based on the fiction that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - a fiction promoted by Fox News - set up America for the 21st century.  Given the current war of words with Iran, which grew far stronger when we crushed Iraq, we clearly are still experiencing the effects of that war in Iraq today.

If nothing else, The Loudest Voice is a vivid tableau on the media determinism of television news.  But it is much more than that, and I'll be back with a report on what I see next week.

See also:  The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch

The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch

The Loudest Voice just launched on Showtime tonight, with an episode about the launch of Fox News.  Or, more specifically, about how Roger Ailes (stunningly portrayed by Russell Crowe) launched Fox News, and with just about everyone else on the screen (the screen of The Loudest Voice) kicking and screaming.  That includes owner Rupert Murdock, and just about everyone else in Ailes's orbit.

First, a few words from me about Fox News.  Although I've strongly disagreed from the outset with its politics, I've admired their green rooms (I've been a guest on O'Reilly, etc), and, more importantly, the savvy they've shown in how to present a news opinion show.  It wasn't the least bit surprising to me when they jumped to first place in cable news, leaving CNN and MSNBC in the dust.  This state continued until Trump and his awful Presidency drove up viewership of both Fox competitors, especially MSNBC.

But I digress.  I was never on the inside of Fox News.  I knew Fox News just as a viewer and as an occasional guest on one of its prime time shows.  So I have no idea how truthful or not this story of Ailes and the begetting of Fox News is.  But it certainly conforms to what I do know.

Not only did the green rooms have a great assortment of bagels, juices, and teas, but the corridors were buzzing with an energy I never saw when I was a guest on CNN or MSNBC.  You could tell when you got a peek at the control rooms that the people who worked on Fox knew they were part of a revolution in news presentation, and loved it.

Of course, as we'll see in weeks ahead, not everyone at Fox continued to love it or had reason to love it.   But that's a different part of the story, and there's no denying that Fox utterly dominated cable news in the first decades of its existence, in an age right between the hegemony of network television and the rise of social media.   The Loudest Voice offers a crucial and compelling picture of just how this came to be.

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FYI, here's a list of my television appearances.

And here's an example of me and O'Reilly: