Pussy masala & paranoia: Is Roger Ailes "exposé" the Tabloid Baby of the Fox News generation?

This site is an offshoot of the book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns' landmark exposé and history of the tabloid television era launched twenty years ago by Rupert Murdoch and his brilliant Aussie pirates.  Burt was a lieutenant to the genius television journo, producer and A Current Affair creator Peter Brennan and wrote brutally but affectionately about his mentors as he took readers through the genre's (and his own) highs and lows on its way to being appropriated by the networks.

The genre was also politicized when Republican party operative Roger Ailes got onboard the Fox bandwagon and twisted many of Brennan's tabloid television principles and innovations for blatant political means with Fox News. Now one of Ailes' lieutenants is spreading his own expose. Dan Cooper has written a poison pen letter to his former leader, and posted its rambling "prologue" on the Internet.

Naked Launch is the name of the proposed book, the contents of which seem intended less to inform and expose than to embarrass.

Sure he's got the political blather we've heard time and again:

"Lots of people have dissected the Fox News Channel for evidence of bias. They're all missing the point. Of course it's biased. As you read ahead, you'll understand that in a manner never before understood. This is the point: Fox News is about indoctrination, not bias. The indoctrination was always hidden, as it is in the best advertising. Roger Ailes spent much of his life running political campaigns. He was never a journalist, and in fact he despised journalists. Fox News is not journalism, it’s a political campaign..."

But the guts try to make Ailes look like a demented monster-- a demented, politically incorrect monster!:

"One day during the launch, Roger and I had a huge blowup. It was one of many, but this one shook the building. The tongue-lashing I took from Roger was so personal, and so degrading, and it was done in front of so many of my subordinates, that afterward I stormed into a Fox attorney's office and charged him with abuse... subsequently, several News Corporation lawyers apologized to me for Roger's conduct, and made him apologize to me... Finally I agreed. I walked into Roger's office. He sat me down and told me, with a shocking display of warmth, that I should understand, and this is, like everything else in this story, a word-for-word quote: "I'm a diagnosed paranoid".

...Let me share with you a story about a typical boy's club meeting on a typical day during launch. Roger liked boy's club meetings, five guys at the most, because we could all talk macho and compare the anatomies of women in the office. I was not macho. These meetings made me very nervous. I had no feats of daring to boast about. Roger had parachuted out of airplanes and injured one of those spit-shined leather-clad tootsies. I was too scared to make salacious comments about women in the office. Like everyone, I had taken classes in workplace behavior. Not Roger. 'How about those bazookas on that Indian girl, or whatever the hell she is!' Squirm squirm. 'Pussy masala on the menu today?'...

"News Corporation was full of Australians. Rupert Murdoch was born in Australia. When you worked at News Corporation in those days, wherever you went people were talking that Ozzie way, calling you 'myte' and getting 'aggro' if you pissed them off.

"So, naturally, at News Corporation, you got used to hearing these Ozzies talking. Roger got used to it too, but not like the rest of us. Roger got used to mocking the Australians, because it never occurred to him that he couldn't bully his way out of any sort of offensive behavior..."

Not only was Ailes sexist and insane, but he made fun of the Aussies! Aah, too much...

So is Naked Launch the Tabloid Baby of the Fox News generation? Well, it does take readers inside meetings and behind closed doors, it does not always speak well of the author, and there's an unneccesary shot at legendary and respected Fox News executive Ian Rae (who received an apology from Burt for his depiction in Tabloid Baby).

But from what we've been able to gather, Cooper's tenure with Ailes ended back in 1996-- predating the end of Tabloid Baby's timeline. There's also no documentation for his words, the anguished tone has already led some commentators to suspect that portions may be bullshit, and what we've scanned through seems built more on revenge than confession.

With more than a decade to think about it, we'd venture that Cooper should have thought about doing what Burt did. "First I wrote the angry version. Then I rewrote it."

And he would have been better served had he whipped the raw material into a hot book proposal rather than vomiting it onto the web. For now, Cooper's soliciting donations-- "If you enjoyed the Prologue, please consider paying as little or as much as you'd like"-- like Radiohead did with their new album.

And he's looking less like Burt Kearns and more like Stuart Goldman (look it up).