Chris Matthews on His Friendship With Roger Ailes, and Whether He Would Work at Fox News

Forbes‘ Jeff Bercovici chatted with MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently, and asked him about his unusual friendship with Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and whether he would ever re-join his former boss at Fox News:

He started there when it was America’s Talking and Roger Ailes was running it. Then Ailes left to start Fox News. “I’m a friend of Roger’s,” Matthews says. “I know all the attitudes people have about him, and I’ll tell you, I’m loyal as hell to this guy because he brought me in.” Still, he’s turned down two offers to follow Ailes to Fox.

“I’m so glad I did, because I think over at Fox it would have been hard to maintain. It’s always hard to be entirely yourself, but it would be harder there. It would be a hard fit. I look at Greta [Van Susteren], I look at a lot of people who went over there like Chris Wallace — don’t you notice what happens? They become part of it. It’s very hard to resist it. It’s not that [Ailes] puts you under orders, but I just sense that you become part of Fox.

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