Roger Ailes must be in a snit over the kind of publicity that's coming down the pike toward him. In the works is a biography by Gabriel Sherman, author of the exhaustive NY Magazine article about Ailes last year. You may recall that Ailes was so unnerved by Sherman's forthcoming book that he canceled Sherman's subscription to a suburban newspaper Ailes' wife owns. Now comes word that HBO is planning a movie based on Sherman's book. It sounds like the Roger Ailes edition of Game Change. But there's even more to ruin Ailes' day, if not his year. UPDATED: HBO has nixed the film.
The forthcoming movie is to be produced by MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Anyone who watches Fox News for more than a minute knows how much they love to trash MSNBC. One can only imagine how the paranoid Ailes is worrying about the ways the hosts will take their revenge.
UPDATE: 10:46 PM Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke, who broke the news yesterday that the film was in the works writes that HBO notified her that they have decided not to go forward with the film because "due to our company’s CNN affiliation the film could never be seen as objective.” Finke adds: "Interesting, because today I’ve confirmed that none of the dealmakers have yet been informed by HBO that the project isn’t going forward. “HBO was trying hard to keep the project under wraps,” one of the dealmakers tells me. My reporting blew that."
Here’s what we found most interesting: MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were producing it. MSNBC didn’t mind having their employees work with their competitor Time-Warner, parent company of CNN.
It sounds like we have a corporate broadcasting war brewing between News Corporation, Time-Warner and Comcast-Universal.
Our media partners-not associated with any of these networks-needs to look into this.
Does that sound strange to anyone else?