He hired Bert Solivan, former general manager of the Fox News website, to run the Black Room on the 14th floor of the News Corp building at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, sources told the magazine.
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According to three highly-placed sources, part of the answer is that there were few checks on Ailes when it came to the Fox News budget. Now, the allegations are spreading to his handling of the company’s finances and the shady way in which Ailes may have been using his budget. “You didn’t ask questions, and Roger wouldn’t entertain questions”.
Ailes maintained what the NY magazine report described as a “Black Room” unit at Fox News’ midtown Manhattan headquarters where consultants and detectives worked on various campaigns at his behest. According to Sherman’s sources at Fox, Ailes spent millions on these endeavors, but because Fox was bringing in more than a billion dollars in yearly profits, the amounts used personally by Ailes were nearly negligible.
Among his surveillance targets were Sherman and Gawker journalists John Cook and Hamilton Nolan, all of whom covered Ailes in their reporting. In 2011, Cook and fellow Gawker staffer Hamilton Nolan reported that security officers for Fox’s former parent company, News Corporation, had been caught spying on employees of Ailes’ hometown paper, the Putnam County News & Recorder, after Ailes began to believe that they were complaining about his and his wife’s management style in private.
According to Sherman, Fox News operatives also “prepared a report on [Cook] with information they meant to leak to blogs”, including accusations that Cook is anti-Semitic. He also asked Fox host Andrea Tantaros, whom Ailes had once seated next to Lindsley at a dinner party at Ailes’s home, to contact Lindsley and report back on his whereabouts, two sources said.
Sherman also says that Fox contributor Bo Dietl – a former NYPD cop who runs a private investigation firm – sent detectives to follow Sherman’s wife. I love Roger Ailes.
“The only online campaign I’m aware of is yours attempting to create a truth from a fiction with this account”, he said, according to Sherman.
Fox News CFO Mark Kranz, who approved budget expenditures during the “Black Room” period, and general counsel Dianne Brandi who approved contracts, have both denied all knowledge of the alleged surveillance and online attacks. The same report says that more staffers will be let go in the coming days for similar reasons.
Ailes, through attorney Susan Estrich, called the allegations “totally false”, New York Magazine reported.
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But will she confirm or deny the allegation?
