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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Throughout the spring and summer, Collier personally reviewed hundreds of tapes of potential hosts to present to Ailes. To gauge the appeal of possible anchors, Collier watched the screen with the sound off. “I’m not hiring talent for their brain power,” he said to an executive. While news costs were strictly policed, Collier made sure the makeup department was a $1 million line item in the budget. “I didn’t understand why makeup was a big deal,” one skeptical producer said. “Chet would say, ‘You have to get this right.’ He just knew that those women in the makeup department were like psychologists—they had the talent in their hands.” Like Ailes and the Nixon ad men, Collier was a devoted student of Marshall McLuhan. “Viewers don’t want to be informed; they want to feel informed,” Collier often told producers. “He hated anything to do with the news,” a Fox News executive recalled.

  Collier regularly rebuked Emily Rooney and her team of former network producers, condescendingly referring to them as “newsies.” A constant presence at Ailes’s side, Collier, as much as anyone, shaped the emerging talk show culture of the network. “Chet told me every section has to have a payoff,” one Fox producer said, echoing Mike Douglas creator Woody Fraser’s adage. “The segment needs to be produced.”

  John Moody, on the contrary, was a cerebral conservative journalist with a chip on his shoulder. He had spent a decade climbing the masthead at Time as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Rome. But Moody, a devout Catholic who had written a Cold War thriller in his spare time, had topped out as New York bureau chief, and aspired to a more significant position. In the establishment clubhouse of Time Inc., where baby boomer values prevailed, he stuck out. A “first-class journalist,” and a “real pro,” according to two former colleagues, Moody could be a dissenting voice at Time, willing to indicate his displeasure about basic assumptions they made. In 1992, Moody spoke up as editors were discussing a speech in which Vice President Dan Quayle critiqued Murphy Brown, the CBS sitcom. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t think the way we do,” he said, according to Janice Simpson, a former assistant managing editor at Time. “I wish we would take that into consideration.”

  It was an attitude Ailes shared. During a job interview in the spring of 1996, Ailes told Moody, “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we are this network is that most journalists are liberals … and we’ve got to fight that.” Speaking with a reporter later that year, the men discussed the unflattering stories about Christianity often published in national newsmagazines at Eastertime. Moody called certain covers for Time and Newsweek “sacrilegious.” Ailes agreed. “It’s always a story that beats up on Jesus,” Ailes said. “They call him a cult figure of his time, some kind of crazy fool, and it’s as if they go out and try to find evidence to trash him.” As they spoke, Moody found himself “finishing Roger’s sentences.”

  As a television neophyte, Moody could provide journalistic ballast to Collier’s talk show instincts without getting in the way too much. Ailes appointed Moody vice president for news, editorial. Moody freely confessed his ignorance in his new role. “When he first came in, Moody joked he didn’t know broadcasting,” a former senior producer said. Emily Rooney could not believe her eyes when Moody showed her a script he had worked on. “It was like an 8,000-word newspaper article,” she recalled. Moody did not subscribe to Collier’s news-as-entertainment creed. Like clashing campaign advisers with opposing visions for the candidate, they gave rise to competing camps within Fox News. “Collier hated Moody passionately,” a former executive said. And Moody “hated” Collier’s talk show concepts, a founding producer recalled.

  In a certain respect, the animosity was useful to Ailes—it safeguarded his authority. Nixon, Ailes recalled, played his deputies off each other. Instead of conspiring against him, they went after each other. In meetings, Ailes spoke about the Nixon administration. “There were five guys in the inner circle. We all hated each other. And Nixon made sure we all hated each other,” he told his executives. Though grossly inflating his importance to Nixon—he had never been in the inner circle—Ailes was an astute student. “He made sure his executives had to fight for his loyalty,” a person close to Ailes said. “It was the most cutthroat place to be. You constantly had to renew your vow.” These clashing viewpoints also helped restrain Ailes’s right-wing impulses at the beginning. “So much of the success of Fox can be traced to the early years when Chet and John would push back,” a senior executive said.

  As announced, Murdoch invested some $100 million to launch Fox News. A stable of twenty news anchors had been hired, including former Current Affair correspondents Louis Aguirre, Jon Scott, and Shepard Smith. Associated Press White House correspondent Wendell Goler had been recruited to report from Washington. Camera crews in Europe, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, and Moscow would cover foreign news. In addition, the network had a deal with Reuters and would make use of raw footage from News Corp’s Sky Television in Europe as well as the staffing resources of Murdoch-owned papers around the globe.

  But the network was, at this embryonic stage, an unfocused hodgepodge. Ailes’s anchors had little ideological or stylistic relation to each other. Neil Cavuto, late of CNBC, would lead with The Cavuto Business Report, a financial news wrap-up, at 5:00 p.m. Bill O’Reilly, a network correspondent turned tabloid anchor, would host The O’Reilly Report, an interview show, at 6:00. Traditional news anchors would hold court the following two hours. Mike Schneider, a former NBC weekend Today co-anchor, would present The Schneider Report, Fox’s 7:00 p.m. newscast. Catherine Crier, a former Dallas County prosecutor and Texas state judge turned television journalist, would interview newsmakers on The Crier Report, at 8:00, the channel’s answer to CNN’s Larry King Live and MSNBC’s InterNight. Rounding out the weeknight schedule, Sean Hannity, an Atlanta-based conservative talk radio host, would host a Crossfire-style debate show at 9:00 provisionally titled Hannity and LTBD—in other words, a “Liberal to Be Determined.” Ailes had not yet decided on a suitable sparring partner, but was in talks with three candidates, including the political writer Joe Conason, who was then executive editor of The New York Observer. He was also considering casting different liberals every week. The weeknight slate would include two news-breaks of at least five minutes every hour. Starting at 10:00 p.m., the prime-time lineup, excluding Mike Schneider’s newscast, would reair, interspersed by live newscasts. Weekend coverage would include a handful of original shows, curated reruns from the previous week, and Fox News Now updates every half hour.

  It was, to be sure, a ragtag lineup, comprised of overlooked, over-the-hill, and passed-over personalities. Hannity had never held a full-time job in television. O’Reilly had flamed out of more jobs than people could remember. “He had been in the business twenty-five years, and he was never a star,” Ailes later recalled. Cavuto, the most visible of the bunch, was hardly a face on which to build a network, despite being a mature interviewer and having anchored CNBC’s popular program Market Wrap. Schneider, probably the biggest name, joked around the studio that they were using his name to convince cable operators to carry the channel.

  Perhaps that was how Ailes wanted it. At a press conference in September 1996, Ailes criticized the famous correspondents of rival networks for being more into “hair spray” than fact finding. He claimed he could have landed big names, but considered it a waste of money. “There isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that star power has the kind of draw in cable that it does in broadcast news,” he told one reporter a few weeks later. “If we weren’t paying $10 per subscriber, we could have spent plenty on hiring talent.” Established talent were difficult and could claim credit for their success. As Ailes once said, “most television people are idiots.” Ailes valued authenticity over talent. He knew viewers made snap judgments about likability in the first seven seconds. Plus, besides relating to the audience, newcomers and rehabilitated personalities were more likely to be loyal. From his earliest days with Mike Douglas and Nixon, A
iles excelled when he created his own talent, molding and shaping them in his image. “If I have any ability,” he later remarked, “it’s probably to find talented people and set up a structure that they can work in.”

  With the rank and file in the newsroom, Ailes recruited men and women who preferably lacked news experience. “None of us were news people,” one founding producer said. “We were entertainment people. I can’t tell you how many people were on Xanax, trying to adapt.” Those with more experience included young producers such as Sharri Berg of A Current Affair, Janet Alshouse of News 12 Long Island, and Bill Shine, who had recently jumped from the PBS affiliate WLIW to NewsTalk Television, an early cable channel. Ailes especially favored young people, often irrespective of ideology. “I was not a fan of the right wing at all,” Jordan Kurzweil recalled. Fox News hired him in the summer of 1996 to launch the network’s website. “We need $5 million,” Kurzweil told Ailes in a meeting in his office. It was a small figure relative to Fox’s competition. “I don’t know much about this web stuff, but it sounds fine. Go do it,” Ailes replied. Thrilled by the responsibility he was given, Kurzweil poured all his energy into the website. “This was not the A-team. It really did look like kids were going out to the garage to put on a show,” a Fox News producer, who was present for launch, recalled. Catherine Crier agreed. “All these kids were running the shop,” she said. “It was hysterical.”

  Meanwhile, Ailes began to sideline executives and producers who had arrived before him. The tribalism he fostered at CNBC became just as fierce at Fox News. After triggering Joe Peyronnin’s resignation in February 1996, Ailes targeted his rump core of loyalists. “We became the enemy of the news channel,” Emily Rooney said. “For one, we were making a lot of money. I was making at least $250,000.” In the second-floor executive suite, stark divisions emerged between the old regime and the new. “It became very clear, it was Roger’s guys, and everyone else,” one producer recalled. “Joe had an open-door policy,” remembered Jay Ringelstein, a production accountant for Fox News at the time. “Roger went in with an idea, so no one’s ideas were welcome or needed, unless they were solicited.”

  At CNBC, Ailes’s ruthlessness had become a liability. At News Corp, with its piratical office culture, it turned out to be an asset. Long before the world would learn about News Corp’s practice of phone hacking, Murdoch was encouraging his executives to push boundaries, and to carve out their terrain and defend it, ignoring reputational concerns that normally bred caution. “At most organizations, there’s a lot of low-level people who want to take risks,” a former News Corp executive explained. “The further up it gets, more people say, ‘No, we can’t do that.’ News Corp is the opposite. People at the top are like, ‘What are you doing? Go out there and start something.’ ”

  As long as they produced profits or news scoops, Murdoch tolerated, even appreciated, volcanic personalities. Once at a News Corp seminar, Murdoch’s Australian chairman Richard Searby described the company’s management style as “one of extreme devolution punctuated by periods of episodic autocracy. Most company boards meet to make decisions. Ours meets to ratify yours.” (Murdoch was in the audience.)

  Ailes’s legendary temper and gyrating moods made him stand out, even by News Corp standards. He said things that other executives just did not say. But Murdoch’s company was proving to be the place where, finally, Ailes could be Ailes. The corporate Darwinism Murdoch fostered was in practice no different from the brutal environment of a political campaign. Campaigns did not have HR departments to police office behavior or middle managers to appease. Come Election Day, all that mattered was results. “If you’re good, you get to live. If you’re bad, you don’t,” Ailes explained to a reporter not long after he joined News Corp. “It’s somewhat primitive, but that’s the way life is. In a capitalistic society, success is determined by whether you can pay the bills.”

  At a September 4 news conference, just five weeks before the network’s launch, Ailes introduced Fox’s famous slogan “fair and balanced.” All stories, Ailes insisted, would be “told in context” and everyone appearing on his network would be given a “fair shot.” He proclaimed that “it’s important to be first, but even more important to be fair.” It was a play off an old slogan he had once developed for a hypothetical local news channel: “We may not always be first. But we will always be fair.” He vowed Fox would “unblur” the “lines between opinion and news.” Graphics on the screen would clearly label what was “commentary” and “opinion.” In a feat of messaging jiujitsu, he was suggesting the idea that only his rival networks practiced partisan spin. In an interview that fall, Ailes wondered why reporters were so quick to label Republicans “right-wing” but never called Teddy Kennedy “the left-wing senator from Massachusetts.” Ailes’s own analysis echoed the theories of media bias advanced by Bruce Herschensohn at TVN. The networks, Ailes contended, had “a hundred ways to spin the news.” Television reporters used “hot words, or code words.” They could broadcast “shortened sound bites” and elevate a favorable quote to “the front of a piece” or give preferred sources “more time.” They could also frame their quotes “with spin from one side or the other side.” “Journalists are by and large intelligent, well-read individuals who come at every story with a bias,” Ailes said. It was a brazen gambit. Roger Ailes, the highly partisan fighter, was proclaiming himself the referee.

  Ailes delighted in the anger and confusion this line of argument produced in his interlocutors. “I have noticed that the words fair and balanced are terrorizing people in the news business,” he told the journalists. “Somewhere between 56 and 82 percent of American people think news is biased, negative and boring. So let’s take 60 percent as the number—it looks like a marketing niche to me.”

  All his talk of Fox News’s hard news cred artfully shaded the reality that, as compared to its competitors, his network’s newsgathering capabilities were minuscule. Fox’s three foreign bureaus could not hold a candle to CNN’s twenty. The projected staff of five hundred was half the size of Ailes’s competitors. Although Ailes was positioning Fox News as a serious news network, the channel he was actually building was essentially a reboot of America’s Talking. Two chairs and a plant were far cheaper than staffing dozens of foreign bureaus in far-flung capitals. Even O’Reilly was disappointed to find that none of his staff that Ailes had hired understood how to do news. And distribution remained a thorny problem. Talks with Time Warner Cable for access to the New York market had so far not yielded a deal. In the end, Fox would launch with 17 million subscribers, at a time when MSNBC reached 25 million and CNN reached 60.

  With Murdoch spending hundreds of millions to buy distribution, not staff bureaus, Ailes rallied his journalists with outsider fervor. The indoctrination began in earnest on Tuesday morning, September 3, about a month before the launch. Hundreds of newly hired Fox News employees packed into a conference room at the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue, six blocks north of News Corp’s headquarters. They were told the meeting was a company-wide orientation, but the charged atmosphere in the room made them feel like attendees of a political rally. As they milled about, loud music blared. Ailes was nowhere in sight. When the lights finally dimmed, forty-five minutes after the scheduled start time, a pair of giant monitors on the stage played short videos, styled like the ones screened at presidential nominating conventions. One, which concluded with the tagline Fox Can, catalogued Murdoch’s impressive broadcasting accomplishments to date. Another, a video montage, showcased the faces of Fox anchors while “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story played.

  Ailes took the stage. His absence had only heightened the sense of anticipation. “You guys are at the beginning of history here,” Ailes said. “Fox News is gonna be around for decades.” The crowd cheered. “He put it out there that we were going to take down CNN,” one former producer recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘This guy is no joke, he’s impressive.’ ” Ailes was in a riotous mood. He introduced a female lawyer
with a gag. “You know the difference between lawyers and prostitutes?” Ailes asked. “Lawyers keep doing you even after you’re dead.” Some laughed, others cringed. Fox News was unlike any other place they had worked.

  At the orientation, employees received copies of You Are the Message, which became the channel’s sacred text. “He made sure we read his book, and he’d refer back to it,” Jay Ringelstein recalled. “You learned how to be a better person.” Ailes’s teachings were filling his mind. Negative people make positive people sick.… If you think you’re a victim, you are a victim. But if you can stand on your own two feet, you’re okay.… If you make a mistake, and you tell me you did the best you could, I know you didn’t do the best you could. Staffers, if they hadn’t realized it already, were now fully aware of their status. They were charter members of a new movement. “There was almost a sense of a cause, a political cause,” Mike Schneider recalled, “a fervor that we were going to go out and slowly but surely achieve our goals.”

  “Fair and balanced,” a precept formally introduced at the orientation, was put forth as a kind of spiritual goal. “I don’t expect you not to be biased in your lives; you’ll be too damn boring at the dinner table if you don’t have opinions,” Ailes told his staffers. “But when you walk into this newsroom, recognize your position or your bias and be fair to people who don’t share that position.” To reinforce the message, Ailes had John Moody host seminars in the basement newsroom for new hires. In one early session, Moody passed around packets of New York Times articles he had marked up with a pen to highlight its liberal bias. Pointing to an article about a book fair in Zimbabwe with a gay and lesbian booth, Moody grumbled, “How is this news? Why does anyone care about this?” Adam Sank, a young producer who was gay, remembered being offended. It was an early sign that Ailes’s channel would not always be an easy place for a gay man like him. “I was more bewildered than anything,” he said. “There would be a lot more homophobia that’d come my way later on.” (Sank would later switch careers, leaving Fox to become a stand-up comedian.)