I guess if you want to talk about your boss on TV you’d better say nice things – particularly if your boss is Roger Ailes. Therefore it’s probably no surprise that when Greta Van Susteren interviewed Zev Chafets, who wrote the “authorized” biography of Fox News’ chief, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, both of them brimmed over with praise.

“I’m a Fox watcher and I have been for years,” said Chafets, “… but I was very surprised to see what kind of a leader Roger has been for this network.” “Roger built Fox News into a #1 channel,” Van Susteren agreed as pictures of the book's subject  appeared on the screen (including a baby picture – he was a baby once, like everyone else, I guess). Why did Chafets think he’d been so successful? she asked. Because he knows more about TV than most people, Chafets replied, and because he has an eye for talent – “you’re an example of that” - and he can look at things holistically and see the network as a kind of organic whole (Really? Is that another way of saying he makes sure the whole network echoes his talking points?).

Chafets didn’t discuss any of the more unsavory passages (like Ailes calling Obama “lazy” and Newt Gingrich a “prick”) that appeared in the excerpt published in Vogue earlier this month. He did treat viewers to a discussion of Ailes’ relationship with Rupert Murdoch – he says the two have very friendly exchanges and kid each other but, “Roger says to me…. every three months I have to go upstairs and show him my numbers and if there are bad numbers then I’m dead.” He also told an anecdote about Ailes giving advice to Ronald Reagan during the 1984 presidential debate.

 “It’s a great book,” concluded Van Susteren, adding that everyone thinks people know so much about him inside the organization but she learned a lot from that book.

New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani didn’t think it was a great book. She wrote that it “read like a long, soft-focus, poorly edited magazine article” and noted that Chafets “doesn't ask his subject many tough questions about Fox News's incestuous relationship with the Republican Party, its role in accelerating partisanship in our increasingly polarized society or the consequences of its often tabloidy blurring of the lines between news and entertainment.” But we all know what a bastion of Obama-worshipping liberalism the Times is, don’t we? 

PS: The other, unauthorized Ailes biography, by Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine, is due out in May.