Fox News CEO Roger Ailes said in an interview with Esquire magazine that he met with Bill Clinton about producing a talk show, and that he still wants the former president to do a special for him.
Ailes was speaking to Esquire's Tom Junod for what turned out to be a scathing, phantasmagorical 8,000-word profile of the head of Fox News. The magazine posted a transcript of Junod's interview on its website.
Ailes said that he met with Clinton in his Harlem office for about an hour and a half. Clinton has often been mentioned as a potentially good talk show host, but Ailes said he thinks the president has a fatal flaw.
"The problem with Bill is he won't be as good on a talk show as you'd think," he said. "Because, first of all, he never shuts up. I mean he cannot hit time cues...I asked him to do a special, which he's still thinking about. I'd like to have it."
He said that a Clinton show would get low ratings because Clinton is too much of a policy wonk. "If he would stick with current affairs and stick with the clock, he'd be one of the great talk-show people in the world," he said.
Ailes also talked about NPR, the network whose executives he famously called Nazis.
"We have Maura Liasson, but after what they did to Juan [Williams] she's laying in the weeds praying that they don't get her," he said. "They are absolutely allergic to any other opinion but their own. They're still demanding an apology from me. Did you see that? That's all right. I told them I'll apologize, absolutely, as soon as they apologize to Juan Williams for what they did and how they did it."