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Dear Readers,

If the following article, which first appeared at gawker.com is true, then maybe Mr. Ailes would hire me to be the editor of both his locally owned, extreme right-wing newspapers. Imagine what I could do with those? Boost readership for one. Make them legitimate, for another. Bring Truth, Justice and the American Way to mainstream local media! But alas, it's a dream too good to be true.

Anyway, read on!

exclusive

Roger Ailes Caught Spying on the Reporters at His Small-Town Newspaper

John Cook and Hamilton Nolan — The small-town newspapers in New York's Hudson Valley that Fox News chief Roger Ailes owns with his wife Elizabeth are in a staff revolt after employees caught Ailes spying on them with News Corp. security goons.

In 2008, Roger Ailes purchased the Putnam County News and Recorder in rustic Putnam County, New York to start feathering his retirement nest. The idea was that he and Elizabeth would retire to their 9,000-square-foot redoubt in nearby Garrison, N.Y., and Roger would live out his days as the gentleman publisher of a sleepy small-town newspaper. (He bought another paper, the Putnam County Courier, a year later.)

But it was not to be. Ailes—who installed Elizabeth as the day-to-day manager of the papers while he finishes his tenure at Fox News Channel—has run the papers with the singularly paranoid and abusive management style he brings to all his projects, resulting in the defection of his hand-picked editor and two top reporters earlier this month after Ailes told them he'd had them followed, and their private conversations surveilled, to catch them saying mean things about him. The spying followed years of intense weirdness between the editor and the Aileses, who once asked him to personally stop a break-in at their home and who implied that, after Roger's death, he'd be expected to replace him in their marriage.

Roger Ailes Caught Spying on the Reporters at His Small-Town Newspaper

Roger and Elizabeth Ailes at a Fox News event in 2009 (Getty); Joe Lindsley (inset)

Earlier this month, the News and Recorder quietly published a note announcing the departure of Joe Lindsley, the 27-year-old combative former Weekly Standard editorial assistant that Ailes had hired in 2009 to revitalize the papers and yank them firmly rightward. The note was odd because Lindsley had been prominently featured just weeks earlier in a February New Yorker story about the Aileses Putnam County adventure, and the story portrayed Lindsley as a mini-Ailes gleefully carrying out his boss' orders and delighting Roger and Elizabeth with his muscular brand of journalism. What's even odder is that Lindsley had actually resigned from the papers in January, before the New Yorker story came out, for reasons that remain unclear but following years of what his associates describe as intense psychodrama in his relationship with the Aileses. Lindsley agreed to stay on through the end of April for a lengthy transition period, and Roger's behavior during that transition—including having him followed—suggests that a deep rift had emerged. At some point during the first week of April, Lindsley abruptly cut his transition short and quit outright, as did two of his young reporters, T.J. Haley and Carli-Rae Panny.

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