Roger Ailes was the founder and CEO of Fox News, that bastion of pro-right American TV journalism, until his resignation in 2016 following a spate of sexual harassment allegations. The documentary Divide and Conquer covers how he went from a Republican Party advisor and media consultant, to TV executive, to establishing his all-conquering Fox News before his fall from grace and death in 2017.
This riveting piece of work is easily one of the best documentaries I've seen in years. Like the finest investigative journalism, director Alexis Bloom treats her subject here with consistent objectivity, balance and impartiality and the result is all the more credible and informative for it. In other words, it shows all the traits his network's programs don't. As it digs deeper into how Ailes ran Fox News, it ultimately also offers a lucid snapshot (pun intended) into how journalism in general actually works, beyond what we see on our screens at home, and just how closely it can intersect with politics. Ailes was a GOP king-maker who used his network to influence Bill Clinton' impeachment, among other things. It isn't one-sided either; Bloom prominently features interviews with FN presenters like Kimberley Guilfoyle, Glenn Beck and Sandra Smith, and she keeps Ailes' family out of it for discretion.
Bloom also shows admirable restraint in covering the numerous sexual misconduct allegations which ended Ailes' career; rather than interviewing the complainants themselves, she invokes actual news reports of those allegations before depicting how the FN team coped with them and his subsequent resignation, before he died under a year later. This does not mean, however, that Bloom now asks us to sympathise with him, although nor does it become judgmental. Instead, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes becomes a powerful expose on corruption and bias in our mass media, and one that's just as fast-paced as any typical day in a newsroom.
But perhaps its greatest strength
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