Ailes 'Feared Bombing' by Gays

(Newser) – Roger Ailes has made huge profits by selling fear, but he has a few fears of his own, Rolling Stone finds in a detailed—and deeply unflattering—profile of the Fox News chairman. Ailes, whose resumé includes repackaging Richard Nixon for TV in 1968 and helping derail health care reform on behalf of Big Tobacco in 1993, insisted on having bombproof glass installed in his office after Rupert Murdoch hired him to create the Fox News Channel. The precautions were apparently intended to protect him from a bomb attack by activists. "They’ll be down there protesting," he told an aide. "Those gays."

Ailes—who Rolling Stone says has "built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc"—is escorted to work by a security detail described as "straight out of 24." He has bought the houses surrounding his New Jersey home to create a wider security perimeter. Inside his bombproof office at Fox, he views the goings-on outside through security monitors, and once put Fox News on lockdown after seeing a dark-skinned man in what he believed was Muslim garb. The man turned out to be a janitor. "Roger tore up the whole floor,” a source says. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim—which is consistent with the ideology of his network."