Yesterday, it was reported that Fox News chief Roger Ailes calls his biggest rated host, Bill O'Reilly, a "book salesman with a TV show." Today, in a lapdog interview that Ailes could have scripted himself, Ailes said he wants to start a history channel with O'Reilly. Let the jokes begin!
Apparently, the Fox News empire is striking back at Gabriel Sherman's unauthorized biography of Ailes - from which the "book salesman" quote came. In its PR piece interview with Ailes today, The Hollywood Reporter just happened to ask Ailes:
Do you have any interest to work with Bill on other projects, like the assassination histories he's done with National Geographic?
And it just so happens Ailes does.
I do. I would like News Corp to form a history channel and let Bill work with me. I'd run it for him because I'd like history done correctly for a change. They're not teaching the kids the real stuff. I think there is room for another channel, and I would love to do it.
Can't you see it now? Blonde babes in short skirts "revealing" how President George W. Bush was really responsible for the capturing Osama Bin Laden? How slavery was not as bad as the liberal media has portrayed it? How the Founding Fathers would have made ObamaCare unconstitutional if they could ever have imagined such a terrible thing could befall the republic?
Share your programming premonitions in our comments section!
(H/T Gawker)
In other words, just like the books they were based on.
If Ailes and BillO do start a history channel, Truth in Advertising laws should force them to name it The Fiction Channel . . .
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Just more trolling for appreciation…O’Reilly style!
As for O’Reilly’s ventures with NatGeo, about the only good things I’ve ever heard about them have come from right-wing groups. Most real historians have generally called those shows absurd and laughable with only the most minimal of actual history being presented. And NatGeo’s also become a trash heap of reality programming (Border Wars, Alaska State Troopers, Wild Justice, Doomsday Preppers, Yukon Gold) and programs you’d just as likely see on Discovery’s Science Channel.
It is kind of funny though that Ailes would want to do a “Fox History Channel” (more properly, it should be “Faux History Channel”) since Fox already owns NatGeo (gee—maybe that’s why the channel’s worked with O’Reilly?).