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 suffered from hemophilia and was often hospitalized as a youth. He attended the Warren city schools, and later was inducted into Warren G. Harding High School’s Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame. His father was abusive, and his parents divorced in 1960.

In 1962, Ailes graduated from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he majored in radio and television and served as the student station manager for WOUB for two years.

Ailes’s career in television began in Cleveland and Philadelphia, where he started as Production Assistant (1961), 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 1967 and 1968 he won Emmy Awards for it.

In 1967, Ailes had a spirited discussion about television in politics with one of the show’s guests, Richard Nixon, who took the view that television was a gimmick. Later, Nixon called on Ailes to serve as his Executive Producer for television. Nixon’s successful presidential campaign was Ailes’s first venture into the political spotlight. His pioneering work in framing national campaign issues, capitalizing on the race-based Southern Strategy and making the stiff Nixon more likable and accessible to voters was later chronicled in The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss.

In 1984, Ailes worked on the campaign to reelect Ronald Reagan. In 1987 and 1988, Ailes was credited (along with Lee Atwater) with guiding George H. W. Bush to victory in the Republican primaries and the victory over Michael Dukakis.

In 1988, Ailes wrote a book with long-time aide Jon Kraushar entitled You Are the Message: Secrets of the Master Communicators.

Ailes’ last campaign was the unsuccessful effort of Richard Thornburgh for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in November 1991. He announced his withdrawal from political consulting in 1991.

Ailes eventually made his way back to television, this time focusing on cable news. In 1993, he became president of CNBC and later created the “America’s Talking” channel, which would eventually become MSNBC. He hosted an interview program on America’s Talking. In 1995, NBC hired a law firm to conduct an internal investigation after Roger Ailes allegedly called David Zaslav a “little fucking Jew prick.”

Ailes majored in radio and television while at Ohio University and served two years as manager of the school’s radio station. Starting in 1994, he funded scholarships for Ohio University students in the school’s telecommunications programs.

Ailes was hired by Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to become the CEO of Fox News, effective on October 7.

He married his third wife Elizabeth Tilson (born 1960) on February 14, 1998. Formerly a television executive, she was the owner and publisher of local New York state newspapers The Putnam County News & Recorder and The Putnam County Courier. Roger Ailes had one son, named Zachary, with Elizabeth. The family resided in Garrison, New York, on a hilltop parcel in a home constructed of Adirondack river stone across the Hudson River from United States Military Academy at West Point. Ailes also had residences in Cresskill, New Jersey, and Palm Beach, Florida.

After the departure of Lachlan Murdoch from News Corporation, Ailes was named Chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group on August 15, 2005. Following his newest assignment, one of his first acts was canceling A Current Affair in September 2005 and replacing it with a new Geraldo Rivera show, Geraldo at Large, which debuted on Halloween, 2005. Rivera’s show drew about the same ratings as A Current Affair in January 2007.

Ailes hired former Viacom executive Dennis Swanson in October 2005 to be president of the Fox Television Stations Group. Additionally, there were changes in affiliates’ news programs with the standardization of Fox News Channel-like graphics, redesigned studios, news-format changes, and the announcement of a new morning television show called The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet to be produced by Fox News Channel.

In October 2007, Ailes gave a sizeable donation to Ohio University for a renovated student newsroom.

In January 2011, 400 rabbis, including leaders from various branches of Judaism in the United States, published an open letter in The Wall Street Journal on the UN-designated Holocaust Remembrance Day. They called on Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp, to sanction Fox News commentator Glenn Beck for his use of the Holocaust to “discredit any individual or organization you disagree with.” An executive at Fox News rejected the letter, calling it the work of a “George Soros-backed left wing political organization.” Ailes is also said to have once referred to Jewish critics of his as “left-wing rabbis.”

Also in 2011, Ailes was criticized for referring to executives of the public radio network NPR as “Nazis” for firing a news analyst, Juan Williams, after Williams had made remarks considered by NPR to be offensive. Ailes apologized to a Jewish group, but not to NPR, for using the expression, writing to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL): “I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word, but I was angry at the time because of NPR’s willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough … My now considered opinion ‘nasty, inflexible bigot’ would have worked better.”

The ADL welcomed and accepted the apology through its National Director, Abraham Foxman; in a subsequent letter to The Wall Street Journal Foxman said that both Ailes and Beck were “pro-Israel stalwarts.” In October 2012, his contract with the network was renewed for four years, through 2016. If completed, he would have served as head of Fox News Channel for 20 years. Salary terms were not made public, although his earnings for the 2012 fiscal year were $21 million inclusive of bonuses. In addition to heading Fox News and chairing Fox Television Stations, Ailes also chaired 20th Television, MyNetworkTV and Fox Business Network.

In a 2013 book excerpt from Roger Ailes: Off Camera, Ailes spoke about facing death, saying, “Because of my hemophilia, I’ve been prepared to face death all of my life. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family.”

In a book published in 2014, Gabriel Sherman alleged that, in the 1980s, Ailes offered a television producer a raise if he would sleep with him. Fox News denied the allegation and rejected the authenticity of Sherman’s book.

On July 6, 2016, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes; Carlson’s allegation were the impetus for more than a dozen female employees at 21st Century Fox to step forward regarding their own experiences with Ailes’ behaviour. Carlson alleged that she had been fired for rebuffing Ailes’ advances. Ailes, through his attorney, Susan Estrich, denied the charges. Three days later, Gabriel Sherman reported accounts from six women (two publicly and four anonymously) who alleged sexual harassment by Ailes. In response, Ailes’ counsel released a statement: “It has become obvious that Ms. Carlson and her lawyer are desperately attempting to litigate this in the press because they have no legal case to argue. The latest allegations, all 30 to 50 years old, are false.”

On July 21, 2016, Ailes resigned from Fox News, receiving $40 million from 21st Century Fox (the then-parent company of 20th Century Fox and Fox News) in an exit agreement. Rupert Murdoch succeeded him as chairman, and as interim CEO until the naming of a permanent replacement. In a letter to Murdoch, Ailes wrote: “I will not allow my presence to become a distraction from the work that must be done every day to ensure that Fox News and Fox Business continue to lead our industry.” Ailes was thanked for his work, without mention of the allegations. He continued to advise Murdoch and 21st Century Fox through 2017 until his death.

Following Ailes’s resignation, Andrea Tantaros claimed in August 2016 that she approached Fox News executives about Ailes’s behavior towards her in 2015. She stated that her allegations resulted first in her being demoted, and then in her being taken off the air in April 2016. Tantaros filed a lawsuit against Fox News in August 2016 for sexual harassment, also accusing Bill O’Reilly and Scott Brown.

On August 8, 2016, Shelley Ross, writing for The Daily Beast, described her encounter of sexual harassment with Ailes in 1981. She claimed that at a lunch meeting Ailes asked her, “When did you first discover you were sexy?” When Ross explained to Ailes that she found the conversation “very embarrassing,” he responded that “the best expression of loyalty comes in the form of a sexual alliance.” The next month, 21st Century Fox announced it had settled a lawsuit with Carlson over her allegations of harassment against Ailes. 21st Century Fox was also reported to have made separate settlements with at least two other women who made complaints about Ailes.

In November 2016, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly wrote in her book about the details of her sexual abuse allegations against Ailes. According to Kelly, when she first joined Fox News, Ailes would have meetings with her, during which he would make sexual remarks. Kelly alleges that he also tried to kiss her several times during a closed-door meeting, but she was able to get away and leave the office. After that incident in 2006, Kelly says that Ailes did not sexually harass her again. Then, in 2016, when Gretchen Carlson first made her sexual abuse allegations, 21st Century Fox pressured Kelly to defend Ailes, which she refused to do.

In 2016, after he left Fox News, he became an adviser to the Donald Trump campaign, where he assisted with debate preparation.

On May 10, 2017, Ailes fell and hit his head at his Palm Beach, Florida home. He died on May 18, three days after his 77th birthday. The Palm Beach County Medical Examiner attributed his death to a subdural hematoma, aggravated by hemophilia. His wife, Elizabeth, announced his death in a statement on the Drudge Report.

In 2019, Russell Crowe portrayed Roger Ailes in Showtime’s Limited Series The Loudest Voice alongside Naomi Watts as Gretchen Carlson. Crowe won a Golden Globe for the performance.

Also in 2019, John Lithgow won great critical acclaim playing Ailes in Jay Roach’s film Bombshell, also starring Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson.