‘I Made a Fortune’: Rudy Giuliani Bizarrely Takes Credit For Fox News’s Success, Reminisces About Roger Ailes
Rudy Giuliani took some “credit” for Fox News’s success in the wake of chairman of Fox and News Corp. Rupert Murdoch resigning this week.
Murdoch announced his departure from the company on Thursday morning naming his son Lachlan Murdoch as his replacement.
The ever-humble Giuliani reacted to the news on the Friday edition of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and took some credit for the network’s success.
The network began in 1996, the same time Giuliani was the Mayor of New York City. While speaking with Bannon, Giuliani first boasted about his relationship with disgraced former CEO of Fox News, the late Roger Ailes.
“I had a very, very close relationship with Roger. So that kind of superseded. Roger was my first campaign consultant when I ran in 1989. And Roger was a lot more than a campaign consultant. He was the campaign dictator. He ran it,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani, who was recently indicted related to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, boasted, “Roger taught me how to be taught me the transition from lawyer to politician.”
The former mayor then explained his direct connection to Fox News.
“I actually put Fox on television in New York. They came to me, Roger and Rupert while I was mayor and begged me to get the New York City station because Turner would not let them on in New York,” Giuliani said.
According to the New York Times, in 1996 Giuliani’s involvement with both Fox News and Time Warner dispute came into question when he advocated for the channel to be carried by Warner.
Murdoch had been a supporter of Giuliani’s campaign and the entanglement became questionable when Rupert wanted to put Fox News on a public-access cable channel the city controlled and Giuliani advocated for it.
“They paid me an enormous amount of money to rent one of our cable outlets. We had four, and I was renting that one to international broadcasting, getting relatively little money,” Giuliani explained. In reality, the battle over who would carry Fox in NYC at the time ended with Time Warner, the second-largest cable company at the time, carrying the new network. Time Warner tried to get out of a deal to carry Fox in an apparent effort to protect its cable news network, CNN, reported the LA Times at the time.
“And I made, for one year — I made a fortune on it, but that got them on in New York and it forced them in. Big lawsuit. Turner sued me. They sued them. We sued them back. So I take some credit from Fox getting a chance to live,” Giuliani added.
Watch above via Bannon’s War Room.
