FNC’s Roger Ailes On Success in Cable News: ‘You Have to Love to Win and Hate to Lose’

Fox News Channel’s 15th birthday celebration continues this week with live specials across America  — Neil Cavuto will host his show from Chicago today and Sean Hannity will be in Atlanta Thursday — and a fresh round of press for FNC president Roger Ailes.

The New York Daily News talked with Ailes about the challenge of holding the top-rated cable news slot:

“The toughest part of my job,” he says, “is not only maintaining the intensity but maintaining everybody’s intensity.”

To succeed in journalism, he says, you have to be curious, love the news and have an internal drive to be great. “You have to love to win and hate to lose,” he says.

Over at Adweek, Michael Wolff wonders if Ailes is “having more fun than anybody else in news and television,” ultimately concluding that the Fox News president is “what a media executive ought to be”:

His accomplishment over the course of Fox’s 15 years is to have rolled the stuffed shirts (part of that accomplishment is to have turned the liberals into the stuffed shirts), to have gone, on the strength of the counterintuitive, from mere rump outfit to paradigm shift and category killer. The people who were sitting pretty have been flattened; he’s now on top. And gloating.

This happened wholly on the basis of doing the opposite of what convention proscribed you to do. Of paying for carriage when nobody did that, of catering to an audience that was largely unserved, of shattering the mood and manners of cool and oracular stuffed-shirt news.

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