by Les Hinton
I was, I agreed.
‘That show is a complete disgrace,’ he said.
A Current Affair was a daily half-hour news show, and the pioneer of ‘tabloid TV’ in America. The sober establishment of American network news hated it. To them, A Current Affair was the creation of a demolition squad sent from the underbelly of journalism to swing a wrecking ball through their high ethics and fine taste. This was not an entirely invalid point of view.
The show provided an unabating diet of celebrity gossip, salacious trials, messy divorces, gruesome murders, state executions, and evil cults. It ran strange small-town stories: a sheriff who videoed himself and his wife having sex had carelessly handed the tape into his rental store; a high school principal was suspended for showing his pupils pornographic films; the annual Fainting Goat Festival in Marshall County, Tennessee (the goats were a local amusement because they fell over when startled due to a congenital disorder).
Above all, A Current Affair liked tales about famous people in deep trouble. For its producers, the emergence of a young, handsome, and wayward head of state was the perfect running story.
‘Fox should be ashamed of itself,’ Stephanopoulos said, and stared at me, waiting for a response. One of his short legs was crossed high over the other, so I faced the slightly worn sole of his new left shoe.
‘Please explain to me why we should be ashamed?’ I said, and Stephanopoulos duly obliged, pouring out his grief over the ‘scurrilous, gratuitous, ridiculous’ lies he claimed A Current Affair had told about his boss, William Jefferson Clinton.
‘The president is not happy. None of it’s true, and your people know it’s not true.’
‘An awful lot of Americans are not so sure about that,’ I countered. ‘This is a legitimate story and they are entitled to cover it.’ I knew I sounded sanctimonious; I meant to.
Clinton had astonished most of us by riding to the White House through the storm of accusations that began in early 1992 when Gennifer Flowers, a government worker from his home state of Arkansas, claimed she had been his lover for 12 years. Other allegations added to a persuasive body of evidence that the would-be president might not be a model husband in an ideal marriage. The scandal was in a lull by the time I went to the White House, but A Current Affair had not gone quiet enough for the energetic new communications director.
‘You cannot expect this administration to take seriously a media company that broadcasts this kind of garbage,’ he said.
I didn’t respond to that, but felt chastened as I walked from the White House. Had the programme gone too far? Had we made an unnecessary enemy of a new and popular president?
Some of the Fox political team had been with me at the meeting, including the relentless and famously well-connected reporter Niles Lathem. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Lathem told me. ‘He’s still doing it. He sneaks out of the White House at night to see women.’
I couldn’t believe it. ‘How could he still be seeing other women after his entire life almost came to ruins over Gennifer Flowers?’ I asked. ‘He would have to be completely mad to still carry on like that.’
Lathem smiled at me, and raised his arms in mock surrender. ‘Ok,’ he said.
Taking flak for A Current Affair’s wild ways was a small part of my job. The Fox-owned stations I managed were in big cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Washington. I flew so often among them that American Airlines gave me a medal: a Million Mile card.
We also had a tiny station in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the programme director was an energetic young woman named Elisabeth Murdoch. Rupert wanted his kids in the business, and while they progressed disproportionately quickly, they started at the bottom.
Almost all programming created by the television stations was local news. The Fox network provided evening primetime; programmes like The Simpsons, X Files, and Beverly Hills 90210 had driven the network’s success and made it a serious challenger to the long-established big three — ABC, NBC, and CBS. Syndicated programmes purchased from outside production companies filled most other time slots. These were daytime talk shows, and old sitcoms and dramas sold as repeats at the end of their network runs.
A Current Affair was a Fox-produced show for sale to any buyer — at its most popular it was broadcast five days a week in 150 cities. It was handed to me to oversee because it qualified as a news show. I also suspect no one else at Fox wanted anything to do with it.
When I arrived in Los Angeles, News Corp was growing its reputation as a colonising multinational, seizing properties across the world. Fox was still a restive new territory, and News Corp’s wild streak worried people. In particular, they disliked the tabloid antics of the New York Post and The Star. When my appointment was announced, trade publication headlines called me an ‘Ex-Tabloid Editor’. The Fox people hated that.
News Corp didn’t entirely deserve its rowdy reputation. It also owned the publisher HarperCollins, as well as more staid titles like TV Guide, The Times of London, and the Times Literary Supplement. But A Current Affair was regarded as a tabloid Trojan horse, and, for all its success, Fox treated it like the delinquent child in the family.
The show was produced by transplants from Rupert’s tabloid print operation; cheerful subversives who saw it as their mission to teach American journalism how to touch the masses with torrid scandal and heart-warming ‘human interest’ stories. Many were Australians and they hung their national flag on the office wall, like a territorial claim.
When he was still at Fox, Barry Diller stood at a management conference in Aspen, Colorado, and complained that A Current Affair and the company tabloids were contaminating 20th Century Fox. He claimed box office stars would think twice about working for a studio associated with newspapers that trashed the lives of their friends, and might one day trash them.
But Rupert liked the show. He had always thought American journalists were self-absorbed and elitist, and A Current Affair was his television antidote, another of his attempts to cater for a neglected market.
His favourite line to queasy journalists was: ‘You worry too much about what your next-door neighbours think.’ I knew what he meant. As editor-in-chief of The Star, living in a Westchester County enclave of lawyers and bankers, groups at house parties ignored me when I told them what I did. Later, when I ran more ‘respectable’ magazines and newspapers, and my name appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, I ignored their eager dinner invitations.
When Rupert had an instinct about something, it was hard to change his mind and risky to try. In Britain, when a singing contest called Pop Idol was a hit, Fox stonewalled his efforts to create a US version, convinced that a reheat of out-of-date talent shows would never work. When Rupert got his way, American Idol became one of the most successful shows in history and ran for 15 years.
Prone to gloating, Rupert called the network president after American Idol’s huge opening. The president was sitting triumphantly in his office, surrounded by bouquets and gifts of champagne, soaking up the praise for a success he had resisted. Rupert’s call upset him so much, it was said he went home unwell.
Developing TV shows is a risky and expensive business. There was high anxiety every year in the spring when the new season was planned. In those days, before the upheaval of cable and online streaming, networks presented almost all their new shows in the autumn.
Each new season was a casino bet. Networks spent hundreds of millions of dollars every year developing and testing new shows. The hit-to-flop ratio was high, but when one worked — as it so spectacularly did with The Simpsons and American Idol — Fox would make a fortune, and the network president would become a hero. But network presidents are like football managers — too many missed goals and bad calls will get them fired.
I displayed no gift for spotting good shows. New pilots were shown each year to a panel of insiders. We spent days watching them in a
darkened room. I once saw a pilot with a preposterous storyline about UFOs, aliens, and mad government conspiracies. It looked like a sure-fire flop to me, and I was foolish enough to say so, but The X Files was a worldwide hit and ran for 10 years.
When we watched the opening of a new late-night chat show starring Chevy Chase, I told Rupert and the others how much I enjoyed it. They gazed at me in silence, as if I were crazy. The show was a flop and cancelled after five weeks.
Decisions on films were difficult, too. At a management conference in 1986, we saw a preview of a James Cameron film, a grisly thriller in which disagreeable extra-terrestrials slaughter the crew of a spacecraft. It was not a good choice for an audience composed significantly of elderly board directors and their wives. There were shouts of horror, and people fled the room at the sight of an alien dismembering an astronaut. Barry Diller feared he had a disaster on his hands, but he had chosen the wrong audience — Aliens was one of the year’s biggest grossing films.
Diller told me later: ‘You can do all the market research you like, but the only truth is at the box office.’
I was in a meeting when Peter Chernin, then head of the 20th Century Fox film studio, was enthusiastically telling Rupert about a new James Cameron creation; yet another film about the sinking of the Titanic. Rupert was sceptical. ‘That doesn’t sound much good. Everyone knows how it ends.’
Chernin persisted. ‘It’s more than that. It’s a great love story,’ he said.
Titanic became the highest-grossing film of all time, the love story between the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet at its heart. It remained number one for 12 years until another Fox-backed James Cameron film, Avatar, was released in 2009.
One challenge for me was raising Fox’s profile in news. Long before it happened, Rupert was determined to challenge the monopoly of CNN with a Fox news channel. Others at the company, convinced CNN was unbeatable, kept managing to talk him out of it.
In 1993, he told me to prepare a business plan for a news channel, and I put together a team of news and business development executives. A couple of weeks later, he called me at home one Saturday. ‘Ease up on that for now until you hear from me again,’ he said. Three years later, Roger Ailes created Fox News. I didn’t have Ailes’ vision of what a news channel should be; his gold dust idea for stridently right-wing programmes didn’t occur to me. Even if it had, I could never have brought Roger’s heartfelt verve to the task.
Rupert also wanted to challenge CBS’s 60 Minutes with a weekly network news magazine. I worked on this project with Van Gordon Sauter, one of the great characters of television news. He had a billowing white beard and loved bow ties, broad braces, tweed, and telling old jokes in his booming baritone.
Rupert liked Sauter because he had the right kind of enemies. He was forced out as president of CBS News after crusty veterans like Andy Rooney and Bill Moyers complained he was too down-market. According to Moyers: ‘Tax policy had to compete with stories about three-legged sheep, and three-legged sheep won.’
In reality, Sauter was a serious journalist who understood the importance of mixing light and heavy news. He had also become convinced that traditional network news shows were dull, indistinguishable from each other, and therefore doomed. Rupert agreed: ‘They look like they were produced by journalists from the same dumb journalism class.’
But we found it impossible to hire the best news talent away from the established networks. They thought moving to Fox was too much of a risk, and they were probably right. They agreed to meet us all the same, of course — then leaked the meetings to their bosses to leverage better contracts and higher salaries. Katie Couric was a star at NBC when she agreed to have breakfast with us. She told us where to meet and was waiting for us, beaming over a cup of coffee. The diner was directly beneath the NBC offices and the place was full of her colleagues. Her bosses knew about the meeting before our eggs arrived.
Occasionally, Sauter and I went on the road together, chasing big stories. This didn’t always work out well. In 1993, when Michael Jackson was first accused of child abuse, we drove to his Neverland ranch, north of Los Angeles. It was a French-style chateau in the middle of a fun fair, with a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a petting zoo, and eerie statues of children.
Jackson’s father, Joe, met us in a shrine-like room with walls plastered with framed gold discs and photos of his son. He wasn’t convinced when we told him it would be a good idea for Michael to tell his story on our Fox news show.
We were invited to talk more over lunch by a man with a colossal girth bursting out of his bright and vast Hawaiian shirt. Beautiful young women were attending to him, placing a napkin across his lap, pouring his wine, and putting food on his plate with great care. They took no notice of us. The man told us he was one of Michael’s closest friends and when I made a remark that indicated a shred of doubt about his friend’s innocence, he exploded in a wild rage about the injustice and the cruelty of the world. He then produced a huge knife and waved it close to my face, before plunging it with both hands into his food-stacked plate, showering us with crockery pieces and his chicken enchilada. Van and I bolted from Michael Jackson’s Neverland without our interview.
We called our news programme Front Page, which didn’t seem such a retrograde title in 1993. It was aimed at younger viewers, with hyperactive graphics and zippy editing that turned out to be ahead of their time. On-air reporters were young enough to be children of the 60 Minutes anchors. One was Ronald Reagan Junior, the ex-president’s son.
The show did not flourish, however, and David Corvo, the executive producer, was convinced the Fox hierarchy was killing it by neglect. ‘No one is going to watch a news show on a Saturday night,’ he said. ‘And the promotions people are ignoring it. We don’t have a chance.’
Everyone knew a news programme was a hard sell — even big successes took time to develop an audience. The problem was that entertainment experts, with no understanding of news, led the network. They didn’t have the interest to give Front Page enough time and support. Entertainment programmes offered quicker rewards; successful sitcoms and dramas won ratings quickly, delivered instant revenue, and provided job security for people at the top.
Andrew Neil, an abrasive Scot who had recently been a successful editor of The Sunday Times, led our second attempt at a news magazine. Rupert regarded Neil with a mixture of admiration and irritation. Neil had developed a high profile, and Rupert never liked his executives getting too much publicity. Once, when the Financial Times interviewed me and the paper filled an entire section front with my headshot, a sharp phone call followed. Neil was good on television and radio, and appeared a lot — to the point at which his fame as a talking head was competing with his reputation as editor of The Sunday Times.
‘He should stay in the office and edit the bloody newspaper,’ Rupert would grumble. But what Rupert saw as a failing made Neil a good choice for Fox: he was a successful British editor, enjoyed being on television, and was free of what Rupert thought of as hidebound traditions of American journalism.
Neil would be the show’s executive producer and principal talent on-air, but it was agreed he needed a co-anchor. American viewers, or at least producers who pick the talent, care more than Brits about the appearance of their presenters. No one doubted Neil’s commanding presence and quick mind, but he was not going to make an impact with striking good looks. A female co-anchor would enhance the show.
The choice for this job was book publisher Judith Regan. Regan had her own imprint at HarperCollins, but she wanted to be on television, and Rupert agreed to give her a chance.
I had never met anyone like Judith Regan because there can’t possibly be anyone else like her. Regan would talk to anyone, even people she hardly knew, about the excruciating personal details of her life. It felt sometimes like she was dictating her own scandalous memoirs right there in my office. But she was an oddball wi
th a gift for picking books that would sell millions in the mass market. I thought Neil and Regan were a bright and edgy couple, both clever and driven, but with different approaches to news. Neil was more serious and Regan a little racy; she once worked on the National Enquirer.
The first hint of trouble for the show came early. A couple of LA executives met Neil in his midtown Manhattan offices and were concerned about his accent. ‘We’ll need subtitles if he goes on air,’ one of them told me. ‘In Oklahoma, they’ll think he’s talking another language.’
‘They’ll get used to it,’ I said. ‘America is full of immigrants. Foreign accents are everywhere.’
‘Not on nationwide television delivering the news,’ he retorted.
In the autumn of 1994, Neil and his team brought the pilot of their show to Los Angeles. It was called Full Disclosure, and the pilot had a strong mix of stories: a celebrity interview, a piece on the intrigues of international money laundering, and a compelling murder case. It was rough — they knew that — but it was a promising audition of what they could do.
Rupert said he liked it, and, as impatient as ever, asked about a quick launch. No one among the retinue of network chiefs in the room echoed his praise. No one openly disapproved, but they all knew — as did I — that it was more effective to argue in private if Rupert was about to make a mistake.
His parting words to Neil were encouraging: ‘Congratulations, and thanks to everyone for their hard work.’
Neil and his team were triumphant as we walked away down the long corridor from Rupert’s office, past the film posters marking Fox’s past triumphs. He took me by the arm. ‘Let’s find somewhere to celebrate,’ he said.
‘Slow down, Andrew. We didn’t get the green light,’ I told him.
‘Sure we did. Rupert loved it. He’s told us he wants a quick launch.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t be so certain. This isn’t Fleet Street. It’s not as simple here as being thanked and congratulated by Rupert.’
