The Roger Ailes scandal is ballooning into something much bigger [View all]

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By JOE POMPEO 08/10/16 06:47 AM EDT
THE DAILY AILES -- The Roger Ailes scandal is ballooning into something much bigger than the initial sexual harassment allegations that ignited the controversy a little over a month ago. And those were big enough: In a little more than two weeks, they drove the longtime Fox News chief out of the cable news channel he spent 20 years molding into a media powerhouse for the right and a cash cow for parent company 21st Century Fox, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his sons.

In the past few days alone, there have been reports of surveillance campaigns against journalists covering Ailes (http://nym.ag/2aDOHsD); Fox News employees who “believe our phones are tapped and that we are monitored” (http://cnnmon.ie/2aXbX4b); and incredulity that top brass at the publicly-traded 21st Century Fox were not until recently aware, as the company has said, of a $3.15 million exit package paid in 2011 to a former Fox News booker who claims Ailes manipulated and sexually harassed her for 20 years (http://on.ft.com/2aNm3Hr).


The question now being tossed around in the private conversations, Twitter exchanges, Gchats and Slack windows of the media-obsessed: How much more dirt is going to come out, and will this sordid affair eventually make the leap from scandalous to criminal? There’s been no smoking gun just yet, but there are specters. The whole thing’s beginning to feel a little Summer 2011, when the U.K. phone-hacking scandal that upended Murdoch’s other conglomerate, News Corp., was starting to catch fire. Here’s the latest that’s come across Morning Media’s desk ...

Dark arts: Ailes’ black ops tactics against New York magazine reporter and Ailes biographer Gabe Sherman were apparently more menacing than just online smears and negative Google ads. A source close to high-level Fox News executives told Morning Media that during a private conversation with Ailes at an event in the period when Sherman was reporting his 2014 book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” Ailes said to this source, “I know where he lives, and I'm gonna send people to beat the shit out of him.” (A second source within the Fox News orbit confirmed hearing the same account and a third said Ailes has said some version of this before.)


Read more: http://www.politico.com/media/tipsheets/morning-media/2016/08/another-ailes-spectacularsecond-amendment-sagaerstwhile-ap-power-duo-reunites-001084