WASHINGTON: A new biography of Roger Ailes, the architect of Fox News Channel, portrays Ailes as the son of abusive parents whose difficult childhood experiences may have helped fuel the drive and aggression that went into the creation of his polarising news network.

In The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — and Divided a Country, author Gabriel Sherman recounts Ailes’s early, troubled years in Warren, Ohio, a small, middle-class manufacturing town, and his rise as a Republican media strategist and TV executive.

Sherman describes Ailes’s father, Robert Sr., as a man with “a cruel edge” who meted out serial beatings to Roger and his older brother, Robert Jr. If the boys ignored their father’s demands for quiet around the house, “he pulled out his belt, whipping them not until they began to cry, although they did wail, but until they fell silent,” Sherman writes.

Sherman also cites an incident in which the senior Ailes, who worked in blue-collar jobs for an automotive manufacturer in Warren, took his son to a running track to help him regain his mobility after he was injured in a minor auto accident. One day, when Roger fell into some manure by the track, his father snapped, “Don’t fall down and you won’t get that crap on you!”

He describes Ailes’ mother, Donna, as a "competitive [and] overbearing" woman who demanded perfection in the classroom. Ailes has told interviewers that she hugged him sparingly, perhaps because he suffered from childhood hemophilia. His parents divorced after Ailes left for college.

Although Ailes had been told by his family that his paternal grandfather had died in World War I, Ailes discovered that he was living 45 miles away in Akron, Ohio. He was a prominent official in the city’s health department with a degree from Harvard who had abandoned his first wife, married another woman and severed connections with Ailes’s father.

Sherman spent almost three years researching his book and spoke with hundreds of Ailes’ associates, friends and family members. He concludes in his prologue that Ailes “has the power, more than any single person in American public life, to define the president” through his manipulation of Fox News.

Among the revelations and assertions scattered throughout Sherman’s book: Ailes was behind a four-minute anti-Obama news video that aired on Fox News’ morning show, Fox & Friends, just after Mitt Romney clinched the Republican nomination in 2012 to challenge President Barack Obama. The video, which included dire headlines, drew widespread criticism when it aired. Ailes denied any knowledge of the video through Fox’s public relations department. In fact, Sherman asserts, Ailes laid out the idea for it and was shown clips of it by a Fox executive, Bill Shine, before it aired.

At the age of 27, Ailes used his position as executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show to convince a prominent guest, Richard M Nixon, that he should hire Ailes as his media adviser. Nixon did so in 1968, and Ailes helped him polish his TV appearances, which had gone disastrously wrong during his unsuccessful 1960 presidential bid, particularly during his televised debate with John F. Kennedy.

As late as 1972, Ailes did media consulting for Democratic candidates. But his most attention-getting work was his attack ads for a series of Republican candidates, including Sens. Dan Quayle, Mitch McConnell, and Phil Gramm.

When News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch named Ailes to launch the Fox Business Channel in 2007, Ailes opposed the idea. “The world doesn’t need another business network,” he told executives involved in its founding. He took the job, anyway.

Fox dropped its sponsorship of a Republican candidate debate in 2011 after Ailes feuded with Google, a co-sponsor of the debate. Ailes was upset that one of the most prominent Google search listings for his name was an unflattering blog, rogerailes.blogspot.com. Ailes wanted Google to remove the listing or downgrade it. Google declined. Fox never co-sponsored another debate with Google.

—By arrangement with the Washington Post