The Executive and the Smear: How and why my father was trashed in a book on Roger Ailes, or the poisonous farce of progressive "journalism"

In 1973 – before FOX and CNN -- former president of ABC Radio Bob Pauley secured financing for his long-held vision of a fourth TV network. This was Television News Inc. (TVN). Because it was primarily funded by conservative beer titan Joe Coors, and later employed a young Roger Ailes as consultant and executive, TVN was attacked by the liberal media establishment. By 1975 Coors had pulled his funding and TVN was gone. In his 2014 best-selling unauthorized biography of Fox News chief Ailes, progressive journalist Gabriel Sherman twisted the legacy of TVN into a failed right-wing media crusade which led to the emergence of Fox, smearing Pauley in the process. In “The Executive and the Smear,” Pauley’s son corrects the record about both TVN and his iconoclastic father and his belief in the civic responsibility of the broadcaster and his dream of a truly impartial and more diversely-sourced news service for the American public ("fair and balanced" was Bob Pauley's original coinage). The author, a screenwriter in Hollywood, also makes a larger statement about the degeneration of modern journalism into an ideological guild of defamation and the Progressive elite’s corruption of the liberal ideals of fairness, truth and compassion.