Monica Lewinsky says the late Roger Ailes’ success in building Fox News was directly related to his capitalizing on the affair involving the former White House intern and then-President Bill Clinton.
Ailes, the former head of Fox News forced out under the cloud of a sexual harassment scandal, died last week at 77.
“This is not another obituary for Roger Ailes,” Lewinsky writes in an op-ed in The New York Times. “It is, I hope, instead an obituary for the culture he purveyed — a culture that affected me profoundly and personally.”
Monica Lewinsky during a TED talk in 2015. (CC-BY 2.0 Wikimedia/Jurveston)
Ailes, Lewinsky charges, took the story of her affair with Clinton and the subsequent trial and “made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day.”
She qualified her accusation: “Let’s not pretend that Fox News was the only network to cover this story in the gutter. Mr. Ailes’s station may have pioneered this new style of television reportage, but the other cable news channels didn’t hesitate to join the race to the bottom.” The internet also contributed, she added, pointing out that The Drudge Report first broke the story of the affair.
Lewinsky is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and leads the #BeStrong initiative to combat cyber-bullying.
— JTA
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