Actor Russell Crowe plays Roger Ailes, explains the ironic reason Fox News exists and dominates

(Image: screenshot)

Actor Russell Crowe, like his liberal Hollywood cohorts, has no fondness for Fox News Channel but recently gave a sober assessment of the network’s success.

The 55-year-old “Gladiator” star discussed the reason for the existence of Fox News and its success during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on Thursday.

(Video: YouTube/The Late Show)

Crowe was promoting his latest role in the upcoming Showtime series about the late Fox News founder, Roger Ailes, called “The Loudest Voice,” as he shared anecdotes with the audience about what he learned of the media executive who died in 2017.

“A lot of the things you learn about Roger you have to take with a grain of salt because he was a very theatrical man, you know? And he would see things from that type of perspective,” Crowe said at one point, prompting Colbert to offer the obligatory dig at Fox News, public enemy number one for the left.

“Well, that’s a lot of what he’s putting together in the episode that I saw of him putting on the Fox News. It’s a little less about what is the news here and what will look good on television,” he said, suggesting that Ailes created Fox News for entertainment purposes. “What will make people turn it on. Exactly, truth be damned.”

“Well, not truth be damned, necessarily, but truth has its place,” Crowe interjected.

Praising Fox News’ Brett Baier, Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace, Colbert went on to argue that Ailes wanted to create something that looked and sounded good and to “make it something that people will turn on regardless of the what the message necessarily is.”

Crowe weighed in with a different take, surprisingly acknowledging the network’s success and the telling reason for its very existence.

“Yeah, well, what he was saying, though, is that people don’t really want to be informed. They don’t want all of the details. They just want to feel informed. They want to think at some point in time in their mind that they’ve got that covered, you know? So he was playing into that,” the actor explained.

“But also, you’ve got to know that, you know, Roger, many, many times over the years, said if he hadn’t have seen a certain bias in media, then Fox News could have been the exact opposite,” he noted.

“Because he was looking for the open area of the market. And it was in his estimation that CNN, that MSNBC, CNBC, you know, C-SPAN, ABC, NBC, CBS, The ‘Times,’ ‘The Post,’ everybody had a left-leaning bent,” Crowe continued. “So to him, what was available was a conservative audience that was being under served. And that proved to be very true because now you have one single news network which dominates half of the available audience.”

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