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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Memos to the staff warned that reaching the state of “fair and balanced” was so arduous that no other organization had ever attempted it. “Maybe the words ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ are more terrifying than we realize,” Ailes said. Fox News, the memos stated, by “reporting stories that competitors don’t cover,” would become a “haven for viewers looking for relief from the one-sided reporting by competition.”

  Fox’s other famous slogan—“We Report. You Decide”—was developed for the channel’s original marketing campaign. Like “fair and balanced,” it communicated a message on multiple levels, with vastly different meanings for people on either side of the Fox divide.

  Though credit for the slogan was often attributed to Ailes, it was in fact the work of veteran Republican advertising consultants from the boutique ad agency Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer. Ailes had hired Tom Messner and his partners to create a series of promotional television spots for Fox about wedge issues, pornography and Israel among them. The ads would make the case that Fox tackled controversial topics differently from the rest of the media and that other television networks were “not trustworthy at all.” In one brainstorming session, Messner’s colleague read through a sample script. The words “we report” and “you decide” jumped off the page to his colleague Bob Schmetterer. “Why don’t you use that as a tagline?” Schmetterer said. Messner and his partners knew instantly it was what they were looking for. “We did no market research whatsoever,” Messner recalled. It was a piercing message, and one of the stickiest slogans ever to come out of Madison Avenue, irrespective of truth value. To wit: Ailes had proclaimed to The New York Times that television was “the most powerful force in the world.” And yet his network’s slogan was built on the premise that “it was up to you to decide if we’re fakers or if we’re telling the truth,” as Messner said. What Ailes was selling, at its heart, was not news, but empowerment. Fox was putting forth the notion that their audience could come to their own conclusions, while “feeling informed,” as Chet Collier said. “Of all the lines our agency was responsible for, this was probably the longest lived,” Messner said.

  As the network hurtled toward its October debut, some staffers were detecting the menacing side to the culture Ailes was creating. Certain colleagues, despite their scant journalism experience, lorded over others and could not be crossed. These friends of Roger, or F.O.R.’s as they were called, were longtime loyalists including Collier, Collier’s assistant, Suzanne Scott, Judy Laterza, and the cadre of political operatives from Ailes Communications.

  The influx of Ailes’s former political operatives rattled staffers. “I was creeped out. I thought it was a strange group,” one senior producer, who left shortly after the launch, recalled. Many believed that Ailes was building a political operation within a television network. It was not the mere fact that people were calling the glass-walled conference space, where John Moody held editorial meetings, the “War Room.” It was the way they were saying it, without irony. What they found even more unnerving was a command center of networked computer terminals behind a locked door in the basement. Entry required a special security badge, which Ailes permitted only a handful of executives to have. The “Brain Room,” as it was dubbed, seemed ominous. After being told it was the “research arm” of Fox News, at least two staffers feared, in earnest, that Ailes had hired ex-CIA and Mossad agents to conduct covert political missions for him. “These guys were researching people Roger wanted to know about. It was like ‘black ops,’ ” a former Fox News executive said. “It was very Nixonian,” a senior producer explained. “There was nothing like it at a news channel.” The fact that F.O.R. Scott Ehrlich oversaw the operation from a glassed-in office only added to staff suspicions that Ailes was planning dirty tricks. One source close to Ailes said the Brain Room provided him with public information—such as political affiliation and real estate records—of his enemies and rivals.

  According to broadcast consultant George Case, who worked at Fox, “the Brain Room existed to keep providing information to the screen.” Ailes wanted his producers to respect and make use of the Brain Room’s research for their programs. It was his theory that information boxes, text banners, factoids, and statistics could fill up the screen without distracting the audience. In memos to staff, he called it taking stories to the “next level of information.” Fox’s creative team developed catchy graphics that would light up the screen like a video game. The flashing and whooshing icons would, in fact, keep the viewers hooked.

  The entire setup—the excessive secrecy, the security tags—was devised to influence how Fox News producers viewed the information. “Power is best wielded by men who never have to use it, and Roger knew how to do that,” Case recalled. “The fact that it was down in the bowels of the building, and no one had access to it, all of a sudden, it takes on a mythology of its own.” Essentially, Ailes had conceived a sophisticated theater set, another living part of his show, that was meant to evoke a cloak-and-dagger underworld.

  Scott Ehrlich confided to one friend that he took a certain thrill in duping his more senior colleagues who had no clue what his role was. As he imagined it, they suspected he was going through James Carville’s garbage—when in fact he was usually ordering pizza. Over time, the mystique attached to the Brain Room diminished and staffers began to see it for what it was—professional researchers from diverse backgrounds who were given an ample budget to mine the Internet for information and to fact-check the network’s news stories. Fox hosts now routinely refer to information obtained for them by “the geniuses” in the “Brain Room.”

  Ailes also made it clear that employees would be making a grave mistake if they spoke to the news media without authorization. It was left to Ailes’s PR chief, Brian Lewis, to roll out the press strategy. Not everyone adjusted easily to it. Early on, Mike Schneider went to John Moody to complain after being told by Irena Briganti, Lewis’s fresh out of college PR assistant, that all media requests had to be cleared through Lewis’s office. Schneider was surprised when Moody, a fellow journalist, reiterated the policy. Schneider turned around and headed toward Ailes’s office to take it up with the boss. “Don’t do it,” Moody cautioned. Schneider walked in and found Ailes in a meeting with Jack Abernethy and several top executives.

  He told Ailes he did not like being muzzled in the press. “Why would you want to talk to them?” Ailes said. “They’re the enemy.”

  “They’re not the enemy. They’re us,” Schneider returned. Ailes’s next comment set him off.

  “I’m glad I didn’t serve in a foxhole with you in Vietnam,” Ailes said.

  “Fuck you, Ailes! I’ve been nothing but loyal to you,” he said, walking out of the office. Later Schneider apologized.

  Although Ailes never served in the military, he recognized that his new job would put him on the front lines of a culture war. Because he was an exponent of revolutionary ideas—“I consider myself a freedom fighter,” he once declared—Ailes’s concern about his physical safety accordingly became more acute. According to Dan Cooper, an early Fox executive, Ailes called him into a meeting one day before the launch and declared he wanted bombproof glass windows installed in his executive suite. When he asked why, Ailes told him that after the launch, “homosexual activists are going to be down there every day protesting.… And who knows what the hell they’ll do.” Rudy Nazath, the architect designing the studios, told Cooper that there was no such thing as “bombproof glass” and suggested using polycarbonate glass, the strongest version of which can stop a .357 bullet. Ailes selected the sturdiest grade for his office. The original windows stayed in place as a weather shield and a layer of bulletproof glass was installed behind it, supported with steel.

  As the launch approached, they were still looking for the “Liberal to Be Determined” to partner with Sean Hannity. Ailes finally found Alan Colmes, a liberal talk radio host and onetime stand-up comic. “We hired Alan as a last resort,” a former Fox producer said. Visually, Co
lmes, with his bony cheeks and beady eyes, presented producers with a challenge. They gave him cosmetic glasses to wear on set. “We thought he looked better,” one producer recalled.

  Bill O’Reilly was also causing problems. Three staffers quit after O’Reilly’s fiery first meeting. “Look, Roger, this is like Marine boot camp here,” O’Reilly told Ailes. “I can’t have namby-pamby people getting their feelings hurt about this bullshit, all right?” A little while later, O’Reilly erupted again, this time at his executive producer, Amy Sohnen.

  Ailes was not pleased. “Now your producer hates you,” he told O’Reilly.

  With the launch just days away, Ailes decided his troops needed a dose of fear, and he began issuing a series of directives about the network’s visuals with a take-no-prisoners tone. “I arrived in the control room at 5:50 a.m. today,” he wrote in a memo to his senior staff on Monday, September 30. Over four single-spaced pages, he harangued his employees for the “total chaos” he saw around him. “There is too much orange in our promos and graphics. I don’t want to look like the Halloween network,” he wrote. And in spite of “a million dollars” spent, “the set behind the anchors in studio A looks like a housing project.” Ailes savaged the way his anchors looked. “Everybody on camera looks greasy and hot,” he complained. He pressed his staff to work harder, at least twelve-hour days for the first month following launch. “If you wanted some other line of work, you could get a job across the street in a shoe store,” he wrote. “I think they’re on 8-hour shifts.”

  The next morning, things were still going terribly. Ailes was dismayed as technical glitches derailed a run-through of the opening day’s schedule. That evening, the channel would host a glitzy launch party for the city’s political and media elite under a soaring tent outside News Corp’s headquarters. But Ailes was not ready to let his staff toast themselves. He called a meeting of fifteen senior executives the morning after the party at 4:00 a.m., when he knew they would be hungover and in need of sleep. After they filed into headquarters before dawn, they watched Ailes calmly reading a newspaper at the head of the conference table. When he finished reading, Ailes lit into his team for a litany of mistakes. “We can either drop the ball for Rupert and be embarrassed, or we can make history,” he told them. They sat there quietly taking it.

  The hazing ritual would get Ailes’s team to October 7. But not without being dealt a major setback. Throughout the summer, Time Warner executives had led Murdoch to believe that they would distribute Fox News along with MSNBC in New York. The arrangement called for Time Warner to carry Fox News in millions of homes at the outset, including the 1.1 million homes in New York. In return, News Corp would pay Time Warner $125 million. The contract, according to one Fox executive, was “within a half hour” of being signed. (A Time Warner spokesperson later denied that CEO Gerald Levin had given his word.) But now, Time Warner’s executives had decided to table the talks with News Corp and postpone deciding whether they would carry Fox News in the crucial New York market. What was worse, they had already agreed to carry MSNBC. David Zaslav negotiated the deal. Time Warner’s chief negotiator, Fred Dressler, suggested to his boss, Levin, that he should break the news to Murdoch.

  It was pouring rain on the afternoon of September 17, as Levin hustled across Sixth Avenue from Time Warner’s headquarters at Rockefeller Center to News Corp. Ushered into Murdoch’s office, Levin informed him that his cable division had decided not to distribute Fox News in New York City. He left open the possibility for a future deal but the news was devastating. Without New York, it was unlikely that Fox News could survive as a business long-term. Given the grave news he had just shared with the News Corp chief, Levin was surprised by Murdoch’s calm response. Murdoch even managed to thank Levin for venturing out in such unpleasant weather.

  Murdoch’s mood changed immediately. He made numerous angry calls that night and the next day, including one to Ailes, raging against Levin’s decision. “Murdoch thought he had been lied to,” Ailes recalled. Talks with Time Warner had advanced far enough that in August, News Corp sent a draft of a written contract to Time Warner for final review. Murdoch insisted that Levin had promised him they had a “done deal.” “If these guys want to go to war, let’s go to war,” Ailes told Murdoch.

  THIRTEEN

  THE RIGHT KIND OF FRIENDS

  NEWS CORP’S ASSAULT began the next morning when Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey placed calls to their counterparts at Time Warner. Picking up the phone, Gerald Levin listened to an Australian voice unrecognizable in timbre to the one he had heard the previous evening. Time Warner’s decision not to carry Fox News on its New York system was an outrage, Murdoch told him. News Corp would “let loose the heavy artillery” if necessary. “You are immoral,” Carey raged at Fred Dressler, Time Warner’s cable programming chief. “You are unethical. How could you have done this?”

  “He called me a lot of names I don’t want to see in print,” Dressler recalled.

  “What the hell happened?” Levin asked Dressler later that day. “Everything was fine. Then Rupert called, and he went crazy on me.” Dressler had tried unsuccessfully to reason with Carey. “Chase, calm down, we can still do a deal,” he said, reminding him that Time Warner would be able to accommodate Fox News as soon as its cable systems went digital and expanded capacity. The barrage of insults blindsided the men, but was in keeping with Murdoch’s well-earned reputation for ruthlessness in the face of intransigence.

  Time Warner’s rejection was a serious provocation. The launch of Fox News was just weeks away, and without a slot on Time Warner Cable, Ailes’s fledgling network would only reach seventeen million homes—about two-thirds the number required to break even.

  The first intimation of serious turbulence came on August 30, the day Time Warner lawyers advised Dressler to postpone the deal with Fox. In Washington, regulators at the Federal Trade Commission were wrapping up an eleven-month review of the Time Warner–Turner Broadcasting merger. All signs pointed to its approval, but Time Warner’s lawyers decided to play a dubious Washington game. They directed Dressler to delay announcing a deal with Fox News until after the FTC announced that Time Warner Cable needed to make a competitor to CNN available to half of its subscribers within three to five years. It was a move designed to make it appear as though Time Warner was responding to the rigorous new regulation (even though the company had already decided on carrying two CNN rivals: MSNBC and Fox). In effect, Time Warner wanted to let the regulators look tough and claim credit for busting CNN’s cable news monopoly.

  On September 12, the FTC approved the merger as expected. But instead of moving ahead on the Fox News contract, Dressler suddenly reversed course. There were those inside the company who had been against a Fox deal from the beginning, and the postponement gave the anti-Fox faction momentum. Richard Aurelio, the president of Time Warner’s New York City Cable Group, was among the naysayers. He harbored bad memories of Ailes’s show on America’s Talking, Straight Forward. “It was awful,” Aurelio said. “It was produced badly. He had a terrible on-air personality. That was one of the factors when the decision had to be made.” In a meeting with Levin in his office, Aurelio made the case against carrying Fox News at its launch.

  Dressler had similar concerns. In his negotiations with Fox, Ailes refused to “discuss anything” about his programming plans even after Dressler explained it would influence whether they carried it or not. The financial terms of the deal were also problematic. While Murdoch’s cash offer was enticing, the contract stipulated that Time Warner would begin paying News Corp some 20 cents per subscriber in the first year, a fee that would be subject to adjustment based on the Consumer Price Index. The unknown future cost of these so-called backend payments worried him. Of more immediate concern, Dressler feared a potential “public-relations disaster.” He realized that Time Warner could only take Fox News if it turned down MSNBC or bumped an existing channel. After John Malone’s TCI announced in August 1996 that it was dropping Lifetime
, the channel programmed for women, from 300,000 homes in order to make room for Fox, the company received a deluge of angry phone calls and letters. Viewers even staged protests in Eugene, Oregon, and Houston, Texas.

  Rejecting MSNBC would be worse. During Dressler’s negotiations with Time Warner that summer, David Zaslav said he would sue if Time Warner did not replace America’s Talking with MSNBC. He also threatened to pull NBC’s highly rated broadcast programming off Time Warner cable. “Then we’re in a war over whether your subscribers get to see Seinfeld and football,” Zaslav warned, “and we’re in a major pigfuck.” Dressler lobbied Levin to postpone signing Fox for the time being.

  On the day that Murdoch called Levin, Murdoch huddled with Ailes and his general counsel and longtime confidant, Arthur Siskind, to weigh his options. Time Warner’s refusal to carry Fox News was not about prosaic business matters like “channel capacity” or “public relations.” Their view, which was partly a theory of the case and partly a PR strategy, was that Ted Turner was a killer. In the mid-1980s, Turner successfully crushed an early effort by NBC to launch a cable news channel. Now, having sold CNN to Time Warner, Turner was trying to do the same to Fox. It was a compelling story line—Ted Turner was the villainous monopolist; News Corp was the justice seeker.