Of course, in running a news organization that intentionally tweaks the sensitivities of the competition, Ailes sometimes brings those punches on himself. But while Fox, like any large corporation, has its share of disgruntled former employees, Ailes seems to be the kind of leader who inspires real loyalty. Many members of his management team have been with him for decades, and 82 employees joined him when he left NBC's cable operation to start FNC in 1996. "I like happy people," Ailes says, "and I can't stand negative people. This place depends on happy people doing their job happily, and we have, I would argue, pretty high morale and pretty low turnover here." Hiring the right people is an important part of building employee satisfaction, Ailes says. But even more important, he says, "morale depends on leadership. If leaders lead for high morale, they'll get high morale."

Fear factor. Perhaps not surprisingly for a man who ran a communications company, Ailes says that keeping information flowing is a crucial part of his success. "The more open the operation, the better I think in general," Ailes says. "I go down and put a podium in the newsroom every quarter and I bring them up to date and answer questions for as long as they want to ask them." Employees feel more connected to the group enterprise, Ailes says, and he often gets good ideas from their point of view. "I'm always surprised when leaders don't do that," Ailes says. "When I was down in those pits I used to assume the suits were sitting up there all the time trying to figure out some way to screw me. And that's a natural reaction if you're cut off from management." The problem with leaders who aren't open to dialogue with their staff, Ailes says, is fear. "A leader who does not fear making a decision naturally has no fear of openness. I might make a countercall, because I'm relying on my own experience, or because there are factors they don't know about, but I'll listen to everybody and then I'll say 'No, let's do it this way and I'll take the consequences of that.' "

Ailes's aggressive strategy has been paying off in spades for FNC's owner, News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch. When Murdoch first brought Ailes on board in 1996, the News Corp. chairman assumed it would take more than a year to get FNC up and running. "I told Rupert we could launch in six months, and he thought I was nuts," Ailes says. But General Electric and Microsoft were planning to launch MSNBC that July and Ailes, always the competitor, couldn't let that go unanswered. Ailes went into overdrive--hiring a staff, building studios, arranging licensing deals, and generally convincing everyone that if they all pulled together, they could not just launch within six months but give CNN a run for its money within a decade.

And what about those who thought Ailes was nuts? He proved them all wrong. FNC launched on schedule, on Oct. 7, 1996, and by January 2002 was besting CNN's ratings on a regular basis. For Ailes, it's all about leadership. "You want everybody to be able to perform over their head whenever they have to," he says. "It's a matter of once you know you have a mission and you have a date to deliver it, then it really has to be an act of God to stop you. That's my view of leadership."

BORN: May 15, 1940 EDUCATION: B.A., Ohio University FAMILY: Three marriages, one child DEFINING MOMENT: When he was beaten by a bully at age 9, his father taught him how to fight. CAREER PATH: Trained candidates Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush for TV; produced New York plays and award-winning TV shows and specials