Dylan Byers of Politico reported that the new Zev Chafets book on Fox News boss Roger Ailes includes talk of his warm friendship with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Ailes wrote a blurb for Maddow’s first book, “Drift,” and told Chafets he knew praising Maddow would make MSNBC executives think he was trying to bring her over to Fox. “I don’t want to recruit her but they’ll think I do,” Ailes told Chafets. “Hell, they’re paranoid over there.”
“I think Roger’s vision is wrong, but he’s the most important Republican in the country,” Maddow told Chafets. Then she insisted he was so intellectually superior to the Republican rank and file:
“The party is like an old Ford Pinto, a hunk of junk, into which he has installed a jet engine.”
Ailes, meanwhile, said of Maddow, “Rachel is good and she will get even better when she discovers that there are people on earth who don’t share every one of her beliefs.”
