Pretty basic Roger Ailes documentary largely focused on his quirks and weird right-wing ideas. As most of this stuff on Roger Ailes it makes him out to be that crazy guy with some genius ideas about how to entice conservatives. So not quite evil nor great. But he is important.
It's a good doc for sure. It's just not really a topic or person I'm that fascinated by. Roger Ailes to me just seems a bit too biased to be a great man. The doc is negative, as predicted, but not over the top initially. At the end it goes into some nasty theories about Fox News STILL being a place of sexual harassment, but that's just mentioned as a proposed guess with zero proof whatsoever. This is after we learned that Rupert Murdoch kicked out Ailes just 2-3 days after finding out there were some fairly legit sexual harassment cases. There was clearly a zero tolerance policy on this from the top and they reacted swiftly. They even initially hired a law firm to carefully investigate all claims and interview a ton of women in the company just to see if the first story from Gretchen Carlson was valid. But then most American docs have this "doomsday" style to them where they exaggerate things somewhat just like Fox News itself did 10 years ago. Still, what I have learned from these docs on bad Republican people is that they are often fairly neutral because most are produced by progressives and Democrats and they already have the story they need so they don't need to invent new rumors. In this case they can just retell the story truthfully. At the end they just have a need to take a jab at Fox News itself as they largely don't hate Roger Ailes anymore. He used to be that "evil guy" in left-wing media. Now they admit he was just that crazy old guy and not some super evil psychopath. I guess biographical docs need to be made after a person has died.
Overall it's quite fine. A critical looks at Roger Ailes. But frankly I think it would be way better if it was about Fox News and how it started and came about. That would be fascinating. Seeing all the shows being created. Looking into the drama. Seeing what aired when and what interviews they did. The interesting story is the one behind the scenes here. Roger Ailes is not Fox News. Fox News today is a very changed news network. Rupert Murdoch's sons are not conservative so they don't like his media companies that they are about to inherit and to a large degree already run. Their plan is to shut down Fox News or sell it. Or maybe push it more to the left still. It has become a news channel with way more varied opinions yet it's still clearly right-wing.
