Roger Ailes says he's not going anywhere, and News Corp.'s Chase Carey concurs

Roger Ailes says he's not going anywhere, and News Corp.'s Chase Carey concurs

Reports of Fox News impresario Roger Ailes' demise, to paraphrase Mark Twain, may be greatly exaggerated.

"News Corp. is 100% behind Roger Ailes," News Corp. President Chase Carey said, adding, "we hope and expect he will continue to lead Fox News well into the future." Ailes' current contract runs until 2013.

Although he oversees one of the most important units of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and is coming off a year of huge ratings and profits, Internet speculation about Ailes being a short-timer at the company led Carey to get on the phone with us and douse water on the brush fire. Besides Fox News and Fox Business, Ailes also oversees the Fox TV stations and is one of a handful of News Corp. executives who report directly to Rupert Murdoch.

The rumors about Ailes were fueled by a quote from Matthew Freud, the husband of Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth and a PR guru, whose clients include Fox News rival CNN, according to his website. Freud criticized Ailes and Fox News in an otherwise fairly flattering New York Times story about the executive on Sunday.

“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” Freud said.

We were curious about the brouhaha and reached out to Ailes. He said Freud's remarks "didn't make sense to me," and added that stories that "I'm a dead man" are "being manufactured." Ailes said he's sure he has met Freud but, "I couldn't pick him out of a lineup ... most people who have a problem at least walk up to me and talk to me about it." (But Ailes has cameras around his office and a driver, so the casual approach might be difficult.)

Company Town has learned that Ailes has communicated with both Elisabeth Murdoch and James Murdoch -- the latter the only Murdoch sibling currently working at the company -- since Freud's remarks were published. "There is nothing to the idea that I have any problem with the children. The entire Murdoch family has been nothing but supportive."

Being diligent reporters, we called the family company to see what they would have to say. A News Corp. spokeswoman said in a statement that "Matthew Freud's opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News."

On occasion, Ailes has bumped up against the Murdoch kin. Several years ago, he clashed with Lachlan Murdoch over the operation of the TV stations. Lachlan Murdoch has since left the company and now runs his own media investment company in Australia.

Although he's received votes of confidence from both Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey, Ailes knows that, ultimately, "everybody who works here is a hired hand, you go to work, you do your job." Even hands like Ailes, who made more than $20 million last year. 

As for Freud, Ailes isn't expecting to bump into him anytime soon. "I'm obviously not going to be invited to his house ... with him home anyway." Ailes cracked that the PR man, who is a descendant of Sigmund Freud, "needs to see a psychiatrist."  

-- Joe Flint

Photo: Roger Ailes. Credit: Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times.

Reality check: What NBC needs to do after Conan leaves
It'd be nice to think that the era of magical thinking may be ending at NBC.

Conan O'Brien delivered a much-needed reality check to the network on Tuesday, telling his corporate overlords that he would not host "The Tonight Show" at 12:05 a.m. ET. Moving the show back to that hour (which, as many observers pointed out, would technically make it "The Tomorrow Show") would harm the show irreparably, and O'Brien refused to "participate in its destruction."

Whether or not you like O'Brien's brand of comedy, one thing is clear: He has more respect and affection for NBC's most storied institution than the network's executives do.

This is no surprise to viewers, who've watched the network destroy itself for the last 10 years. NBC hasn't just been a bystander in all this, a victim of the many changes affecting all segments of the television industry. The network has helped bring about its own destruction by putting on dozens of schlocky, half-baked shows over the years.

There have been a few gems amid the muck, but NBC has often managed to screw things up even with the shows that weren't outright flops. The day that O'Brien made his announcement, "Southland" -- a respected show from an "ER" creator -- premiered on TNT, where it fled when NBC trashed its 10 p.m. ET lineup to install Leno at that hour. One of NBC's rare hit shows, "Heroes," has drifted from bad to worse over the last few seasons. That's a show that could have been NBC's "CSI," but its ratings have fallen, it has creatively stagnated and it may not survive to next season.

I could go on, but do I need to? The late-night situation is just one of a long string of NBC disasters. As Conan said on Tuesday, "Welcome to NBC. Where our new slogan is, 'No longer just screwing up prime-time.'"

Under NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker and the succession of flunkies he's put into place to take the fall for him when things go wrong, the network has gone from bad to worse. I'm waiting for Zucker's next genius innovation, which will probably involve 22 straight hours of "The Today Show" every day, with breaks for a couple of game shows and local news.

During Zucker's regime, NBC has had a habit of stretching franchises well beyond their breaking points and announcing grand initiatives that end up going nowhere. NBC was going to reinvent upfronts, the yearly ritual in which networks peddle their wares to advertisers. NBC brought in upstart Ben Silverman to reinvent the network -- and he brought us a new, not-improved "Knight Rider" and left after two years of chaos. NBC was going to reinvent broadcast television by putting Jay Leno in prime-time, etc.

All those initiatives died because they were smoke and mirrors. Yes, the environment for broadcast networks is challenging and only going get more difficult to navigate in coming years. But content is still king. If a restaurant started replacing its ground beef with dog food, would its customers keep coming back? No, they would quite rightly reject the inferior product they were given.

And that may be the lesson of NBC's late-night debacle. Reinventing the broadcast television model is a grand idea and it's not a bad overall goal to have, but CBS, ABC and Fox seem to have done OK despite just tinkering around the margins. They merely put on programs that people want to watch, and attempt to reap the resulting financial rewards in a variety of mediums and venues. That seems to have worked out pretty well for them (and if, as Fox did, they can wring higher carriage rates from cable companies, they may stave off extinction for another decade or two).

So will things change at NBC? I doubt it. Zucker's reign of condescending mediocrity has lasted for a long time, and all the network's current executives come from NBC Universal's dysfunctional culture, where spin, denial and magical thinking are a way of life. (It's hard to believe that Comcast, the network's new owners, will be OK with that approach, but stranger things have happened in corporate America -- after all, Zucker was repeatedly promoted by GE despite the alarming decline of NBC on his watch.)

It took O'Brien's impassioned statement to point out that NBC entertainment president Jeff Gaspin's new plan -- an abridged Leno at 11:35 p.m. ET followed by "The Tonight Show" -- was not just a dumb idea but one that would deeply harm a network institution.

"'The Tonight Show' at 12:05 simply isn’t the 'Tonight Show,'" O'Brien wrote.

That seems obvious to everyone but NBC executives, who for years have operated on the assumption that, when it comes to unpleasant truths, they can simply wish them away, ignore them or deflect them with spin. Given their penchant for avoidance tactics, they no doubt have their lawyers working on ways to avoid paying out a substantial settlement to O'Brien, who says he has no "offers" but is reportedly considering a move to Fox.

As I wrote yesterday, NBC has a chance to hang on to one shred of dignity in all this. They could set Conan free with a minimum of fuss. They could arrive a quiet settlement and let him go, the sooner the better.

Then executives could begin working on a much bigger and more important task: Rebuilding the network's credibility in the eyes of the viewing public, not with reinventions and radical innovations, but with well-crafted, entertaining television.

That approach wouldn't end NBC's troubles, but it would be a start. And it would be preferable to everything else the network has tried in the last decade. 

Los Angeles prosecutors charge woman in celebrity burglaries
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T-Bone Burnett: Zen And The Art Of Music

The singer, songwriter and producer says his approach is simple: "Just listen until it sounds right." Burnett has been getting it right for a long time, and his latest project is the film Crazy Heart, for which he wrote several songs for the main character, a broken-down musician played by Jeff Bridges. Burnett talks to Terry Gross about the film and about his storied career.