Vindictive troll Roger Ailes, who—when he's not busy using corporate security to tail his employees, calling local cops to fish his keys out of his locked car, or overseeing the production of political attack ads disguised as news programming—owns a pair of small-town newspapers in rural Putnam County, N.Y., is an absolute master at real-time reflexive paranoid hysteria. For instance, if you write things about those small-town papers that he doesn't like, he will go through the subscriber rolls, find your name, and cancel your subscription. Attention to detail!

Ailes did just that to New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman, who wrote today about a brewing newspaper war in Putnam County, where a rival is stepping up to challenge Ailes' Putnam County News & Recorder (Sherman is also writing a book about Fox News):

[D]espite the increasing competition, the Aileses don't seem to be worried about keeping subscribers. This week, I learned that my PCN&R subscription had been canceled. When I called the paper to ask about it, Cunningham told me that because of my pending book on Roger Ailes and Fox News, "we don't desire to have a relationship with you."

This is not an isolated incident. When I wrote about Ailes' Putnam County papers a year ago, the News & Recorder pulled the same stunt with me. I wrote at the time:

Indeed, if you had any doubt as to how paranoid the Aileses are, or how seriously they take their country papers, consider this: At 11:52 a.m. today, I purchased a digital subscription to the News and Recorder.... At 12:20 p.m., I sent an e-mail to Elizabeth Ailes seeking comment for this story. At 12:56 p.m., I received an e-mail from the News and Recorder informing that my subscription had been canceled.

Elizabeth Ailes never responded to the e-mail seeking comment.

The Aileses are wily people. When Sherman tried to get around the blockade by signing up for another subscription in his wife's name, the gambit failed. They did have the decency not to charge him for either attempt.

[Image via Getty]