Ailes: Clinton Wouldn't Work as Talk Show Host

Fox News chief Roger Ailes was the subject of an Esquire profile out last week, and the magazine today released some of excerpts from the three interviews with Ailes conducted for the story.

In them, Ailes reveals that he met with former President Bill Clinton about doing a special on Fox News - a prospect he says Mr. Clinton is considering. He also discusses why, in his opinion, the former president wouldn't "be as good on a talk show as you'd think."

"Because, first of all, he never shuts up," Ailes says. "I mean he cannot hit time cues. But I went up to Harlem, I met with him for an hour, an hour and a half, I asked him to do a special, which he's still thinking about. I'd like to have it; I'd like to have him do a special for us."

"The problem with him in a talk-show mode is not that he's not charming, good, smart, and glib. He is," Ailes continues. "But he loves to talk about policy. He's actually a policy wonk. So if you really want eighteen minutes on ethanol, he'll give it to you. But it won't get ratings. So you have to be able to produce him and say, 'Most people are not that interested in ethanol, Mr. President. What we'd like you to talk about is this.' And if he would stick with current affairs and stick with the clock, he'd be one of the great talk-show people in the world."

Ailes is also quoted discussing the fallout for having said that executives at NPR "are, of course, Nazis"in the wake of the firing of Juan Williams. He says the fact that he won over the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman by apologizing to him for the remark was important, since it stopped Democrats from calling for his resignation. (Foxman said at the time he accepted Ailes' "sincere and heartfelt" apology.) When that happened, Ailes says, "the whole plot against me crumbled."

There are more excerpts over at Esquire, including this on Glenn Beck:

"I don't think that he's nuts. I think that what he's doing is, he's half history professor and half Shakespearean actor. And he's an emotional guy, who after 9/11 I think got scared about terrorism, so he started to look at the country and how we were founded and started reading history and became pretty good. And I think because he's a recovering alcoholic, drug addict, and so on, he admits that. He admits that he's kind of off-the-wall. If he didn't, that would be a problem for that show. But because he's willing to say, 'Don't listen to me, look it up, I'm a rodeo clown, I'm just saying this is what it looks like.' And because there's a lot of truth in what he says and it probably mirrors what over than half of the country believes, he's successful."