DIANE REHM (HOST): Carlson is only suing Roger Ailes, but she also named Fox News coworkers who she says harassed her as well. David mentioned, Steve Doocy, what do we know?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: Well Steve Doocy, as David pointed out, was her co-host for many years, and he still is the co-host of the Fox & Friends morning show. It's important to note that Steve Doocy is one of the ultimate Roger Ailes loyalists. As I've reported, multiple times, Steve Doocy will take direct dictation from Roger Ailes and repeat talking points on the air to inject his political point of view into the program. So, by bringing Doocy into this, really Gretchen Carlson is showing how Roger Ailes created a culture, both a political culture but also a culture towards women, that people who -- men who were promoted to very high levels of the network sort of understood that this culture was acceptable and took part in it.
REHM: And how far back does that culture go? Give us some Roger Ailes history.
SHERMAN: Well, I wrote a biography in 2014 of Roger Ailes, and really his whole life traces the arc of the growth of the television industry. He got his start in the early 1960's on the set of The Mike Douglas Show, a very popular daytime talk show, as a young producer and he very quickly rose through the ranks to become the executive producer at the age of 26 or 27 years old. He then had the chance to meet Richard Nixon on the set and talked his way into a job as Richard Nixon's chief television adviser, and he quit The Mike Douglas Show to travel on the campaign trail in 1968, coaching Richard Nixon on how to appear on television. And from really that moment on, Roger Ailes has gone back and forth between the worlds of Republican politics and national television, and with Fox News, which he started in 1996, he really brought those two worlds together, and he created a megaphone for Republican politics that masqueraded as a news channel.
