Fat dick Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News channel when he's not busy spying on his employees, threatening old men, or trying to destroy people who take photographs of his bathrooms, made some waves last week when he called the New York Times "lying scum" for writing about him. What made fewer waves was the fact that the thing that had him so exercised about the Times never happened, and his accusation was itself a lie.

At a talk at Ohio University last week, Ailes lashed out at the Times' coverage of him and Fox News, using the epithet "lying scum." Fox's go-to damage control reporter, the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz, quickly wrote an anonymously sourced item reporting that Ailes "regrets" the attack and spoke in haste. What Kurtz neglected to mention was that Ailes' scum line was in reference to a report that appeared on some random blog, not the Times.

According to a fuller transcript of the talk published by the New York Observer yesterday, Ailes complained that the Times had falsely reported that he was on the verge of being indicted by a federal grand jury last year:

Let me give you an example. What if you got up on a Thursday morning and the front page of the New York Times said you were going to be indicted on Monday. How would you feel about that? Let's assume you hadn't done anything and don't know anything about it. That happened to me. I got up on a Thursday morning and it said Roger will be indicted on Monday.

What Ailes described above absolutely never happened. The New York Times never reported on its front page—or anywhere else, for that matter—that Ailes was going to be indicted. It did publish a front page story last year reporting that Ailes had urged his former News Corp. colleague Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators vetting Bernard Kerik for his nomination to run the Department of Homeland Security. That story noted that such a conversation "could possibly rise to the level of conspiring to lie to federal officials, a federal crime," but reported that such prosecutions are rare. It didn't even come close to mentioning a pending indictment.

There was a web site that falsely claimed Ailes was on the verge of indicment: The blog of Wall Street money manager Barry Ritholz.

Ailes' paranoid, narcissistic sense of his own victimhood is so gargantuan that he conflates the New York Times and some random blogger into a giant malevolent cloud of undifferentiated enemies. Also he has literally no concern for the truth-value of the statements he makes. Whatever works. Lying scum.

[Image via Getty]