Roger Ailes

Roger Eugene Ailes (born May 15, 1940) is an American television executive. He is the Chairman and CEO of Fox News and the Fox Television Stations Group. Ailes was a media consultant for Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, and for Rudy Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign (1989).

Early life

Ailes was born and grew up in the factory town of Warren, Ohio, the son of Donna Marie (née Cunningham) and Robert Eugene Ailes, a factory maintenance foreman. Ailes suffers from hemophilia and was often hospitalized as a youth. He attended the Warren city schools, and later was inducted into Warren High School's Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame. His father was abusive, and his parents divorced in 1960. In 1962, Ailes received a bachelor's degree from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

Career

Early television

Ailes' career in television began in Cleveland and Philadelphia, where he started as Property Assistant (1962), Producer (1965), and Executive Producer (1967–68) for KYW-TV, for a then-locally produced talk-variety show, The Mike Douglas Show. He continued as Executive Producer for the show when it was syndicated nationally, and in 1968 was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for it.

Fox News Channel

Fox News Channel (FNC), also known as Fox News, is an American basic cable and satellite news television channel that is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group subsidiary of 21st Century Fox. As of February 2015, approximately 94,700,000 American households (81.4% of cable, satellite & telco customers) receive the Fox News Channel. The channel broadcasts primarily from studios at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York City, New York. .

The channel was created by Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who hired former Republican Party media consultant and NBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO. It launched on October 7, 1996, to 17 million cable subscribers. It grew during the late 1990s and 2000s to become the dominant cable news network in the United States.

Fox News Channel has been accused of biased reporting and promoting the Republican Party. The channel has also been cited as detrimental to the integrity of news overall. Fox News Channel employees have responded that news reporting operates independently of its opinion and entertainment, and have denied bias in news reporting.

Cenk Uygur

Cenk Kadir Uygur (/ˈdʒɛŋk ˈjuːɡər/, Turkish pronunciation: [ˈdʒɛɲc ˈujɡur]; born March 21, 1970) is an American columnist, political commentator and activist. Uygur is the main host and co-founder of the American liberal/progressive political and social internet commentary program, The Young Turks (TYT) and the co-founder of the associated TYT Network. He worked as an attorney in Washington, D.C. and New York before beginning his career as a political commentator. As a young man, Uygur espoused socially conservative views, criticizing feminism, abortion, and affirmative action. He is now a progressive.

In addition to hosting TYT, Uygur appeared on MSNBC as a political commentator in 2010, later hosting a weeknight commentary show on the channel for nearly six months until being replaced by Al Sharpton. Shortly after leaving MSNBC, Uygur secured a show on Current TV that aired from December 5, 2011 to August 15, 2013. Uygur was from 2012 to 2013 the chief news officer of Current TV, succeeding Keith Olbermann following his departure from the cable television network until Current was acquired by Al Jazeera Media Network.

Megyn Kelly

Megyn Marie Kelly (born November 18, 1970), formerly known as Megyn Kendall, is a journalist, former attorney, news pundit, and political commentator on the Fox News Channel. As of 2014, Kelly hosts The Kelly File weekday evenings from the network's New York City headquarters. She previously hosted America Live. Prior to that, Kelly co-hosted America's Newsroom along with Bill Hemmer. From 2007 to 2012, the two also hosted Fox News Channel's New Year's Eve specials, All American New Year. She was included in the 2014 Time list of the 100 most influential people.

Early life

Kelly was born in Syracuse, New York, to Edward Kelly, who taught education at the State University of New York at Albany, and Linda, a homemaker. She is of Italian descent on her mother's side and Irish descent on her father's. Kelly's father died when she was 15 years old.

Kelly attended Tecumseh Elementary School, in DeWitt, New York. At age 9, her family moved to the Albany, New York suburb of Delmar, where she attended Bethlehem Central High School. After high school, she obtained an undergraduate degree in political science at Syracuse University and earned a J.D. from Albany Law School in 1995. Kelly is Roman Catholic.

The Young Turks

The Young Turks (TYT) is an online American liberal/progressive political and social commentary program hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian; the show has an associated network of online shows and is owned by a company of the same name (The Young Turks LLC). TYT was founded in 2002 by Uygur as a talkshow on Sirius Satellite Radio.

The Young Turks claims to be "the world's largest online news show"; YouTube video views for the TYT Network stood at a total of 2 billion as of July 2014. The show offers internet-only video content via their YouTube channel, which in April 2012 averaged 750,000 views a day, and by November 2014 over 1,400,000 views a day. The Young Turks also have a network of other affiliated shows on separate YouTube channels, known collectively as the TYT Network.

From 2011 to 2013 a second show, called The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur aired on Current TV. After Current TV was acquired by Al Jazeera America, the TV show was discontinued.

History

The Young Turks as a show began when Cenk Uygur started a talk show similar to a public-access television cable-TV show he had done previously called The Young Turk. With the help of friend Ben Mankiewicz (with whom he had previously worked), his childhood friend Dave Koller, and Jill Pike, he began The Young Turks as a radio show in 2002 on Sirius Satellite Radio. The show's name derives from the English-language phrase "Young Turk", meaning a reformist or rebellious member of an institution, movement, or political party.