The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country

by Sherman, Gabriel

  In effect, Ailes had maneuvered Rogers into a corner. As the head of NBC Cable, Rogers had just lost control of his division’s biggest asset. “Tom’s role was pushed back, and he had to look out for stuff to do,” Welch later said. Before setting foot on the job, Ailes had already cast aside a formidable rival. He also made sure he maintained powerful allies. “Roger had enemies and friends,” Welch recalled. “Some of the guys who built the cable unit felt he was taking it over. I was well aware of it—I sided with Roger.”

  The impending arrival of Ailes put CNBC staff members on edge. When Wright made the announcement, he recalled that “blood drained” from the faces of his executives. Wright assured them that Ailes had abandoned politics, but Ailes did not inspire confidence when he displayed a picture of George Bush in his expansive office at CNBC’s studios. “A lot of us were leery,” Doug Ramsey, co-host of CNBC’s This Morning’s Business, said. “It never sat well with me that a political hatchet man was coming to run what is basically a down-the-middle business news network.”

  It turned out that Ailes’s self-image as an outsider was an asset in his new job. As Ailes infused the struggling newsroom with his competitive zeal, his employees dwelled less on his political baggage. “Look, there’s one way to do it, and that’s to do it right,” he’d tell his cable producers. These were still the days of broadcast dominance, in which cable was viewed as the minor leagues and CNBC, in particular, as a backwater. In a cost-cutting move to avoid union rules, the channel had been exiled since its 1989 launch to studios across the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey, about ten miles from the NBC headquarters in glittering Rockefeller Center.

  Ailes convinced the staff they were winners. “We’re going to knock down whatever walls we have to turn this into a first-class operation,” he said. He recruited new makeup artists to improve the look of the anchors on camera. He beefed up security at the front desk. “It used to be anyone could walk in. He had construction done to keep people out,” a former senior producer explained. “He was there on Saturdays and sat there in the control room talking to them about lighting, how to change scenes, and camera work,” Wright recalled. Early on, Ailes summoned the channel’s anchors to the office for a weekend communications seminar, where he handed out copies of his book, You Are the Message, and trained the broadcasters in skills that he had previously taught to political candidates and business titans for a hefty fee. “If I’m talking to you, and you don’t understand what I’m saying, well, it’s on me to change,” he told them. His locker room humor was irresistible. “Some said it was vicious, but I thought he had one of the quickest wits I ever heard,” a former CNBC executive said. “So, for a few weeks anyway, I thought he was a hero.”

  Ailes clearly relished his new role as a powerful news executive. As a campaign operative, Ailes had “looked like he was wearing someone else’s suit—but one he’d borrowed years ago (now the guy didn’t want it back),” the author Richard Ben Cramer observed during the 1988 campaign. Since then, Ailes slimmed down, shaved off his graying goatee, and acquired a wardrobe of suits, pocket squares, and ties paired with the presidential tie clip given to him by George H. W. Bush. Ailes became a regular at the NBC executive dining room at 30 Rock, swapping gossip and campaign war stories with Jack Welch and NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol. He attended parties hosted by wealthy Republicans from Henry Kissinger to cosmetics mogul Georgette Mosbacher. At the Four Seasons, he maintained a regular table and dined with media industry players such as Barbara Walters and gossip columnist Liz Smith.

  Positioning himself at the center of CNBC’s social orbit, Ailes launched what one CNBC host termed his “charm offensive.” To celebrate the marriage of his friend and CNBC anchor Mary Matalin to Clinton adviser James Carville, Ailes co-hosted a private dinner at the 21 Club. NBC grandees in attendance included Wright, his wife, Suzanne, Tom Brokaw, and Tim Russert. To mark the fifth anniversary of CNBC, Ailes put on an evening of dinner and dancing in a ballroom at the Sheraton in Manhattan. “My wife called it ‘The Prom,’ ” one CNBC anchor said. “I’ll never forget the big suck-up toast that Roger gave to Bob Wright,” said a CNBC executive. “He’s a master of that game.” Ailes presented the image that he was thriving in the hyper-competitive GE culture fostered by Jack Welch, even though it wasn’t entirely true. At GE budget meetings, for example, executives watched as the master communicator kept his head down, nervously reading from a script of financial reports. “He was awkward and uncomfortable,” one attendee said. “I saw that he wasn’t interested in advertising and affiliate relations,” Wright said. “His focus point was on the programming.”

  Still, to the outside world, his media profile was rising. Eight months into his run, one reporter speculated that Ailes “could become a contender” for Wright’s job to oversee all of NBC.

  Initially, Ailes made cautious programming decisions at CNBC, focusing more on stylistic elements than strategic restructuring, turning news into entertainment. He encouraged his staff to think of business news like a spectator sport. “Markets were becoming a huge story,” one producer explained. “There was this natural liftoff happening in the world of finance and the media that would propel CNBC.” Ailes thought CNBC “looked and sounded too deferential,” so he added “closer shots, more emotion, bolder sound, voice-overs announcing breaks instead of just music.” Jazzing up CNBC’s image with new marketing slogans, Ailes introduced the tagline, “First in Business, First in Talk.” He injected a campaign mentality to the ratings race and seized opportunities to tweak his cable rivals. After the markets plummeted 7 percent in one week during the spring of 1994, Ailes took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal that read: “The Dow plummets in heavy trading. But first, today’s weather. CNN tells you if your shirt will get wet. CNBC tells you if you’ve still got one.”

  Pushing CNBC to amp up its sex appeal and energy level, Ailes placed Maria Bartiromo, a new hire from CNN, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, like a sideline reporter at a football game. Testosterone-fueled traders swooned over her smoky eyes, dark hair, and Brooklynese. She soon picked up the nickname “Money Honey.” Ailes would also approve the redesign of the morning business news show. “We talked about the feel of the NFL Sunday show, and how everything was a build up to the game,” a senior producer said. They conceived a show that would be modeled on a Wall Street trading desk, where guys would swap stock tips and headlines in advance of the opening bell. It would be called Squawk Box.

  His major focus was assembling a loyal team. Ailes brought in Judy Laterza, his assistant from Ailes Communications, and hired his Westinghouse mentor, Chet Collier, to help him launch the new talk channel. In the twenty-five years since Ailes left The Mike Douglas Show he had remained close with his former boss. “Chet was his father in a lot of ways,” America’s Talking producer Glenn Meehan said. “Chet was probably the only man who could say, ‘Roger, cut the shit.’ ”

  He also probed existing CNBC employees. Lingering over a scotch at a restaurant near the studios, Ailes asked Bob Berkowitz, the host of the late-night sex advice show Real Personal, “is there anyone in your staff, anyone you can think of, who you would want with you in a foxhole?” The in-house acolytes Ailes found were ambitious young men and women who were not senior enough to pose a threat to his place in the corporate hierarchy. Politics weren’t a concern. He cultivated Paul Rittenberg, a newly hired thirty-nine-year-old advertising sales executive who had voted for Bill Clinton. Ailes promoted another Democrat, David Zaslav, an excitable thirty-three-year-old lawyer, to head affiliate relations, a position responsible for signing up cable companies to carry their channels. Brian Lewis, a thirty-five-year-old public relations executive, also won over Ailes’s confidence. In many ways, he was a younger version of Ailes, aggressive and street-smart, the son of a cop from Brooklyn, who attended St. John’s University in Queens before working at Howard J. Rubenstein Associates and another PR firm in Manhattan. In the fall of 1993, before Ailes had decided
to keep Lewis in his job, he put him through an initiation rite. In his office, Ailes informed Lewis that a journalist at The New York Observer was working on an article about Ailes allegedly advising Jeanine Pirro, who was running for district attorney of Westchester County. “Kill the story,” Ailes said, pointing to the telephone.

  “Here?”

  As Ailes looked on, Lewis browbeat the journalist into agreeing not to go with the story.

  “Nice job,” Ailes said.

  A made man, Lewis could stay. On his first day on the job, Ailes gave him some advice. “Look, you’re my PR guy, you have to learn one thing: keep your door open in case the bomb goes off, you won’t be dead.” Lewis was captivated by his new boss, who talked of PR as war.

  Then there was CNBC producer Elizabeth Tilson. Blond, divorced, and thirty-two, Beth oversaw the daytime programming of the channel. “She lived and breathed CNBC,” a colleague said. One weekend, Ailes came into the office and found her slogging away.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked. “Come on, let’s have lunch.”

  Tilson soon became a regular presence at Ailes’s side. “Roger demanded loyalty, and Beth was someone who wanted to be loyal,” a colleague said. Her boss, Peter Sturtevant, CNBC’s vice president of business news, had recently told her she had risen as high as she could go at the channel, but Ailes believed he could take her further. In December, he made her vice president of programming for America’s Talking. Producers would often see her going to lunch with Ailes and Chet Collier near the Fort Lee studios. “You could see them walking across the street going to the pizza joint. Everyone got a kick out of that,” a former producer said. When she didn’t eat with Ailes, she gushed to her colleagues about him over lunch. “I used to have lunch with her all the time, she was always so enamored of Roger,” a close colleague remembered.

  With his team in place, Ailes insisted that he run CNBC’s affairs without any encroachments on his turf. The simmering rivalry with Tom Rogers showed no signs of cooling off. Within months, Ailes began clashing with CNBC’s programming chiefs for daytime and prime time, Peter Sturtevant and Andy Friendly, who had been promoted by Rogers. Under Barber, Friendly was free to run his programs without interference. But Ailes signaled publicly he planned to intervene in Friendly’s decisions. “As someone with a background in producing and writing, it’s impossible for me to watch the screen and not see things that drive me nuts,” Ailes told the Los Angeles Times a month into the job. “So, for better or worse, I’ll be involved in all of the programming.”

  Although running CNBC was arguably a more visible platform, Ailes spent most of his time preparing America’s Talking, the all-talk cable channel, for its summer 1994 launch. His concept for A-T, as the start-up became known around the office, was essentially talk radio translated into television. Eschewing the tabloid vulgarities of popular daytime television—with its chair throwing and messy paternity disputes—Ailes geared his dozen hours of daily talk shows to the staid tastes of the heartland—the long tail of the Mike Douglas audience. “I figure there are 18 shows for freaks,” Ailes told a reporter. “If there’s one network for normal people it’ll balance out.” “His idea was Queen for a Day,” said Bob Wright. “He was looking for shows that had a happy ending and moments of excitement. It was supposed to be uplifting.”

  As producers interviewed for assignments, Ailes gave them few specifics. In May 1994, once his staff had been assembled, Ailes called his new employees into a meeting in a conference room where he unveiled the lineup with a flourish. “The first day we’re sitting in a conference room in Fort Lee and music from Mission: Impossible starts playing. We all got an envelope of what our assignments were,” former CNBC executive producer Renata Joy recalled.

  The lineup began with a morning chat show, hosted by Steve Doocy, a former host of the syndicated show House Party, and former New Haven local television anchor Kai Kim. Afterward, a call-in program called Am I Nuts? adjudicated viewers’ interpersonal conflicts. Another phone-in program, Bugged!, provided a comedic forum for viewers to discuss whatever was bothering them. Have a Heart showcased acts of random kindness from Good Samaritans. Pork, with an oversize pig mascot onstage, exposed government waste. Ailes planned a two-hour evening political show, A-T in Depth, hosted by Chris Matthews, then a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and former CBS reporter Terry Anzur. In late June 1994, Ailes signed an additional $125,000-a-year contract to host his own celebrity interview show called Straight Forward, a sort of middlebrow Charlie Rose. “He very much believed in the lineup of America’s Talking,” Dennis Sullivan, an A-T executive producer, said. “He knew you had to have an evening news show, that was more or less an investment in Chris Matthews. The other stuff—Am I Nuts? What’s New? Break a Leg, Alive and Wellness—it represented what he thought that every human being was concerned about: ‘Am I nuts?,’ ‘What’s new?,’ ‘How do I feel?’ And ‘What can I do for my fellow man? Who needs my help today?’ Pork was not part of that scheme, Pork responded to his anger.”

  Much of A-T’s staff had little experience in television. Ailes shaped the novice producers in his mold. “When you work with Roger, you quote Roger,” one assistant producer said. “You say lines like, ‘Don’t get caught in your head, don’t get caught in your ego.’ ” His passion inspired his charges. “He’s very good relating to a group of people, which made him a popular boss,” Dennis Sullivan said. “The kids who worked there didn’t think of Roger being a right-wing, nefarious person. They thought of him as a father figure.”

  Large staff meetings were electric, with Ailes playing the role of the coach firing up his team. “They were like a pep rally,” one producer recalled. “He would say, this is what’s working, this is what isn’t. It would be a Kool-Aid meeting. Everyone’s eyes would be glazed over and they’d be cheering.” Ailes made his staff feel like he’d run through fire for them, and in one instance, he did. At around 4:30 on the afternoon of May 10, 1994, batteries for A-T’s backup power supply exploded and caused a studio fire. The fire department rushed to the scene and evacuated the Fort Lee building. “Roger went back into the building and got all the commercial reels,” a producer said. “He was the last one out of the building, and he made sure everyone was out.”

  But Ailes’s motivational rhetoric was not always literal. In one early session around the time of A-T’s launch, he told his staff that his door was always open and he believed in transparency. After the meeting, a fresh-out-of-college production assistant named Aaron Spielberg wandered up to Ailes’s office and knocked on the door. “He got in terrible trouble,” a senior producer recalled. “Official orders came down: tell Aaron Spielberg not to come back. It was like ‘what are you, an idiot?’ ”

  The staff clearly knew Ailes’s politics, but he refrained in the early days of A-T from pressing a discernible ideological agenda. He simply reminded A-T staffers to appeal to viewers beyond the East Coast. “He called it the NASCAR audience,” one former producer said. “We’d get newspapers from all over the place,” producer Glenn Meehan said. “Let’s remember the flyover states, we’d say a lot.” More than politics, A-T was supposed to tap into the spirit of the early 1990s, when the idea of the “Information Superhighway” was in vogue. The network signed a deal with Prodigy, the pioneering Internet service, to showcase viewer emails and chat room comments on-air in real time. In this regard, A-T was ahead of its time. The concept of social media was still in its infancy, and the idea for a cable news channel that would allow viewers to engage with one another on-air was novel.

  The weeks leading up to the launch were a frenzy of preparation as studios were built out, and shows were thrown together. It was a dizzying feat to create a dozen hours of shows in just ten months. But the elation was tempered by the sense among the staff that when A-T launched on Independence Day 1994, Ailes’s experiment had flopped. Many felt that the network had a downmarket, public access feel. In the ensuing months, most of Ailes’s program concepts also fiz
zled or were revamped. “They were struggling with the programming,” junior producer Tony Morelli said. “There were a lot of awkward silences. It was very Wayne’s World–ish.”

  While A-T bumbled along, Ailes was well on his way to making a success of CNBC. During his first year on the job, CNBC’s revenues climbed 50 percent and profits tripled. He was benefiting from the 1990s boom. But from the beginning, Ailes had refused to comport himself according to journalistic standards. Even after he arrived at NBC to run a business news network, he drew a $5,000-a-month consulting salary from Philip Morris to “be available,” according to an internal email written by Philip Morris’s vice president of corporate affairs, Thomas Collamore. In 1994, a group of tobacco companies turned to Ailes to roll out a PR campaign to promote their efforts to curb youth smoking. The goal, according to an internal memo, was “to protect the ability of tobacco companies to continue to compete for the business of adult smokers.” In a section of the memo titled “Roll Out, Day One,” the memo stated: “Ask Ailes to try to prime Limbaugh to go after the antis for complaining.”

  Ailes also behaved as if he never left the campaign war room. He went after Time magazine writer Kurt Andersen, who was at work on a cover story about Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Convinced the story was going to be a hatchet job about Limbaugh, Ailes called Andersen to brush him back.

  “How would you like it if a CNBC camera crew followed your children home from school?” Ailes said.

  “I wonder how Jack Welch would like it if he knew that GE resources were being used to stalk small children,” Andersen fired back.

  “Are you threatening me?” Ailes bellowed. He never sent the camera crew.

  It wasn’t the only instance of Ailes attempting to use CNBC’s journalism to hustle his enemies. One day Peter Sturtevant got an irate phone call from Ailes about a “nasty” newspaper article. Ailes told Sturtevant that he had to “get back” at the reporter, an executive remembered. Sturtevant talked with Ailes for ten minutes until he cooled off and dropped it, but the episode was chilling. At home, Sturtevant’s wife implored him to quit and take a job at the Columbia Journalism School, but Sturtevant, who had hired more than 150 people in the CNBC newsroom, wanted to stick it out.