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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Upstairs, in the Fox Sports Suite, the mood was funereal. Ten minutes after calling Florida, the networks named Michigan for Gore, another blow for Bush. Ailes sat in a plush armchair, phone glued to his ear, fielding updates from John Moody. “You could see Roger hanging on every word,” one person in the room recalled. “It was like the old school. He wasn’t even trusting what was going on the screen.” His senior executives—Bill Shine, creative director Richard O’Brien, and director of newsgathering and operations Sharri Berg—stood nearby, gloomily watching the screens. At 9:00 p.m., Hume put Pennsylvania in the Gore column.

  Ellis was now virtually certain that his cousin would lose. W., however, wasn’t ready to concede. “I think Americans oughta wait until all the votes are counted,” he told reporters in Austin. “I don’t believe the projections. In states like Florida, I’m gonna wait for them to call all the votes.”

  On the Fox News decision desk, Ellis scanned the screens and saw the Florida numbers going haywire. “Can you guys take a look at Florida, please? I think we may have to pull down the call,” he said. A message flashed on the VNS monitor. There were irregularities in Duval County, a Republican stronghold on the Atlantic coast, about twenty miles south of the Georgia state line. “We are canceling the vote.… Vote is strange,” the message read. It turned out that a VNS employee had incorrectly entered data into the system, giving Gore 43,023 votes instead of the much lower actual total of 4,301. Ellis huddled with his team and Moody. The VNS screen showed the letters REV, short for “reversal.” They agreed it was time to pull it down. Moody relayed the news to Ryan. Hume declared Florida back up for grabs, as did all the networks. At 10:23, Hume called Gore’s home state of Tennessee for Bush.

  In the Sports Suite upstairs, the vibe around Ailes improved considerably. “It had been kind of a somber mood. Then it became a lot more celebratory,” one executive in the room recalled. “You sensed you could change history here.”

  Ellis later recalled that he became certain his cousin would win Florida—and the presidency—at 1:55 a.m. In a first-person account of his election night activity for Inside magazine, Ellis wrote that he scrutinized the VNS data, which showed Gore failing to win enough of the remaining votes to overtake Bush’s several-thousand-vote lead. Ellis called Bush to give him the remarkable news.

  “What do you think?” Bush asked.

  “I think you’ve got it.”

  After hanging up, Ellis turned to his team. “Any reason not to call Bush in Florida? It’s the whole deal, so if you’re not sure, say so.” The analysts still wanted more time. Ellis told Moody he had confidence in a Bush-Cheney victory. “John, based on these numbers … he can’t lose Florida.”

  The minutes ticked by. Ailes, who had left Fox around midnight for a nearby hotel, received updates from Moody.

  At 2:07 a.m., the VNS screen showed Bush ahead in Florida by 29,000 votes, with 96 percent of the votes counted. Ellis was eager to make the call. Cynthia Talkov, who was sitting next to Ellis, did not observe him studying the statistics on the screen, as Ellis would write for Inside. Nor did he discuss with her Gore’s “need/get” ratios, the projections Ellis would cite as the basis for making the call. Around 2:10 a.m., Talkov observed Ellis conferring with his cousins in Austin. When he hung up the phone, his eyes lit up. “Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it,” he said.

  Ellis was ready to call it. No other network had done so. He went around the room again. This time, no one expressed objections. Fox would be announcing the new president-elect. Talkov would later be haunted by her decision not to disagree with Ellis. “At the time, if you were gonna pick a winner, you’d pick Bush. But you couldn’t. It was too close,” she later said. “I didn’t stand in his way. I should have said, ‘Hey, it’s not a statistically sound call.’ ” She felt powerless to intervene. Even that night, she was chided for her cautious approach. “If you listen to me, you’ll never make a call,” she told Moody. “Let me introduce you to the concept of live television,” Moody responded.

  After conferring with Ellis, Moody called Ailes, who was already asleep.

  “We’re gonna call it Bush,” Moody said. “Roger was like, uh, okay,” a person familiar with the conversation later recalled.

  Moody passed the word along to Marty Ryan. At 2:16 a.m. EST on November 8, 2000, Brit Hume looked into the camera and said, “Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida and thus, it appears, the winner of the presidency of the United States.” Whooshing graphics filled the screen: “BUSH WINS PRESIDENCY.”

  The Fox call brought the political world to a halt. Confusion reigned at Bush campaign headquarters in downtown Austin. “It’s just Fox,” Karl Rove cautioned.

  “Is this going to be a bandwagon?” another staffer ventured.

  The networks waited. At NBC News, Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections, was on the phone with Murray Edelman of VNS, discussing the numbers. Gawiser had been under pressure to end the uncertainty. Around midnight, Jack Welch stalked into the newsroom and was overhead barking, “Okay, how much do I have to pay you assholes to call this thing for Bush!” Edelman was telling Gawiser to keep Florida undecided. But Gawiser cut him off. “Gotta go, Fox just called it.” Tom Brokaw made the announcement moments later.

  Twenty-two seconds after Brokaw, Dan Rather took to the air at CBS. “That’s it. Sip it. Savor it. Cup it. Photostat it. Underline it in red. Press it in a book. Put it in an album. Hang it on a wall. George Bush is the next president of the United States.” CNN called it at 2:18, and ABC followed at 2:20. Only the AP held back.

  Bush reveled in the triumphal news with his cousin. “Gore called and conceded. He was good, very gracious. What a night for him.”

  “Congratulations,” Ellis said into the phone, “when are you going to speak?”

  The electoral reality beneath this cheerful picture was beyond chaotic. The VNS system was as erratic as a loose garden hose, spraying bad information in all directions. At 2:48 a.m., Gore’s numbers in coastal Volusia County, home to Daytona Beach, shot up by nearly 25,000 votes. Twenty minutes later, the Florida secretary of state’s website had Bush with a razor-thin lead of 569 votes, based on 99.8 percent of the votes counted.

  Gore was already in the motorcade on his way to deliver his concession speech when AP political reporter Ron Fournier got Gore’s spokesman Chris Lehane on the line in Nashville to tell him the race was actually a toss-up. Campaign aides frantically tried to head Gore off before he stepped onstage.

  It took nearly an hour for the AP’s conclusion to reach John Ellis at Fox News. At 3:27 a.m., an urgent message popped onto his VNS screen. “Florida—the Sec of State Web site has a much narrower margin for Bush. We are comparing county by county trying to determine discrepancies.” The VNS alert indicated the service could not vouch for the accuracy of its results. Ellis called Moody over to tell him the numbers were shifting.

  “You said they couldn’t,” Moody said.

  “I was wrong,” Ellis said.

  Ellis quickly called Bush to relay the disappointing news. “You gotta be kidding me,” Bush said.

  A few minutes later, Bush called back. “Gore unconceded.”

  At 3:57 a.m., for the second time, the networks began reversing their Florida call. CBS/CNN went first, then ABC at 4:00 and NBC/MSNBC at 4:02. Fox News, the first to declare Bush president, was the last to walk it back. Brit Hume made the announcement at 4:05 a.m. Talkov was concerned about Ellis’s conduct that night, and what role it played in shifting the dynamic in Bush’s favor, but decided to remain silent. “I was afraid to speak,” she later said. “The reality was, I felt intimidated. It was a big network.… I naively thought eventually they’re going to count the vote and there will be a winner.”

  For the next thirty-three days, from the contested network calls to the Supreme Court’s decision to halt a statewide recount, Fox News largely stuck to the story line the channel authored on election night: George Bush was the president; Al Gore
and the Democrats were sore losers, trying to steal it from him. Millions of Americans on election night watched television news anchors declare Bush the victor. The media reality had created its own reality. The Democrats were left with a hopelessly confusing argument. Just what the hell was a butterfly ballot, anyway?

  Not that it was an easy transition for Fox. “The day after the election, we woke up and it was like, ‘Oh shit, what do we do now?’ ” a senior producer recalled. “Before Bush, there had been such an attack dog mentality toward Clinton. It went on for so long, it was kind of like getting a marathon runner to change strides.” Fox’s coverage, in both news programming and prime-time punditry, championed the Bush campaign’s line. Only hours after declaring Florida too close to call, Hume was questioning Gore’s motives. “It won’t be easy to get the Democrats to accept the result if it goes against them,” he told viewers on Special Report. On The O’Reilly Factor that night, the whole notion of screwy voting practices went out the window. “There is a minor brouhaha in Palm Beach County about a confusing ballot. Now I’ve seen this ballot. It’s not very confusing,” O’Reilly assured his audience. “There are little arrows everywhere. Come on. Nothing will happen there. There are reports of voting irregularities across the country. That always happens.”

  The theme of Democrats’ duplicity popped up routinely. “I think what’s going on is the Democratic lawyers have flooded Florida … they are afraid of George W. Bush becoming president and instituting tort reform and their gravy train will be over,” anchor John Gibson declared in one segment, hammering the popular line that Democrats were bankrolled by rich trial lawyers who wanted to sue corporations freely. On November 26, Fox was the sole television news organization that took Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris’s certification as gospel. “FLORIDA DECISION” blared the on-screen caption. Republicans were grateful. “If it hadn’t been for Fox, I don’t know what I’d have done for the news,” Senate majority leader Trent Lott would tell The Washington Post. Ratings soared. In November 2000, Fox zoomed past MSNBC, with average daily viewership climbing to one million. CNN, which enjoyed a twenty-year monopoly on cable news, was now within target range. Those who wavered from the pro-Bush narrative at Fox quickly learned painful lessons.

  David Shuster was one casualty. At dawn on November 8, shortly after Hume walked back Fox’s call, he was on a flight to Tallahassee. Shuster was eager to cover the recount drama as aggressively as he had dug into Whitewater. But from the moment he landed in the Sunshine State, he was given strict marching orders from Moody and Hume. “It became clear early on what their agenda was,” he said. Moody criticized Shuster’s coverage of press conferences with Jim Baker, the Bush campaign’s chief negotiator. “We think you’re being impolite to Baker,” Moody would tell him. “Shuster, you gotta ratchet down your tone with Baker,” he ventured on another occasion. Shuster told Moody he was putting the same questions to Baker that he was asking Warren Christopher, the Gore negotiator.

  Moody’s protectiveness of the Bush camp confirmed Shuster’s earlier suspicions. During the primaries, when he was covering Arizona senator John McCain’s run for the GOP presidential nomination, he was assigned to do reports on how McCain was “unstable” and how he was “a moderate in conservative clothing.” Shuster saw Bush getting lighter treatment. It concerned him that the wife of Fox’s Bush correspondent, Carl Cameron, was campaigning for Bush. Shuster complained about it during a meeting with Moody. “Isn’t that an ethical problem?” Shuster asked.

  “Mind your business,” Moody said.

  Shuster tried lobbying David Rhodes, a fast-rising young news executive who ran Fox’s political desk. “He was like, ‘Look, I hear you. I know it’s not fair. Do your thing,’ ” Shuster recalled.

  Two weekends before the general election, Shuster joined Cameron on the Bush beat. After he discussed on camera the fact that Bush had spoken at Bob Jones University, the South Carolina Christian school that did not enroll black students until 1971 and prohibited interracial dating until March 2000, Moody called him to complain. “You’ve reported it twice, don’t mention it the rest of today,” Moody said.

  In the days leading up to the election, Shuster watched how Fox expertly managed a potential bombshell crisis for Bush. On Thursday, November 2, a young reporter for WPXT-TV, the Fox affiliate in Portland, Maine, received a tip that Bush had on his record an unreported arrest from 1976 for drunk driving near the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport. Carl Cameron broke it on Special Report that night. Later, Ailes would tout it as evidence of Fox’s objectivity. “I knew it would hurt him,” Ailes told The New Yorker. “They said we should hold it. We ran it. We’re in the news business and we do what’s news.” But it was also true that the story was about to break whether Fox reported it or not. And by reporting it first, Fox successfully shifted the story from an embarrassing reminder of Bush’s frat boy past to a case of dirty politics (the reporter’s source was a Democrat). On air, Tony Snow told viewers that “questions are being raised about how the story came to light, and whether it was leaked to make a political point.” The next day, Bush appeared on Fox News and gave his only interview about the subject. “I don’t know whether my opponent’s campaign is involved, but I do know that the person who admitted doing this at the last minute is a Democrat in Maine, a partisan in Maine,” he said.

  The coverage reflected a broader trend Shuster observed in the three years since he joined Fox. When he pursued Clinton, Ailes personally congratulated him. When he pursued Bush, his bosses questioned not only his objectivity, but his loyalty. He tried commiserating with a colleague, White House correspondent Jim Angle, but it was no use. “Jim said to me, ‘Look, I always start with an argument from the Republican side. If you do that, you’ll be fine.’ ”

  As the recount stalemated in Florida, Shuster’s disillusionment intensified. He challenged Cameron and Hume on a conference call to cover the butterfly ballot controversy in Palm Beach County. “Carl was arguing, there’s no way the butterfly ballot is a story,” Shuster recalled. “Brit became convinced that Gore’s people were trying to steal the election. I think he got conditioned to think like Roger.”

  Shuster also clashed with Bret Baier, a thirty-year-old reporter from the Fox News Atlanta bureau. Baier and a camera crew had gone to the Panhandle to interview Republican voters who felt disenfranchised when the networks called the state for Gore before the polls closed in the Central Time Zone. On Fox, Brit Hume had cited claims by the libertarian economist John Lott, who estimated Bush lost as many as “10,000 votes in Florida” because of it. But Baier said he could not find any such disenfranchised Republican voters. Moody let Baier know that Fox would not air a story that poked holes in the claim. Shuster recalled: “I was arguing with Bret at the time, ‘This is a canard, it’s bullshit. You should at least send an internal memo and get pundits to stop saying that.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ ” During Bush’s first term, Baier was promoted to cover the Pentagon in Washington.

  Shuster’s time was running out. He later realized he had done himself in shortly after the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision that gave Bush the presidency. Waiting for Bush to emerge at a press conference in Washington, Shuster chatted with CBS News correspondent Bill Plante, who told him Bush would not take questions. “This is crazy,” Shuster told him. “Sure enough, Bush comes out. He talks for like a minute and a half,” Shuster recalled. “I said, Mr. President why are you in such a rush to leave? He glared at me.” As soon as he walked offstage, Bush turned to his press secretary, Ari Fleischer. “Who’s that asshole?”

  Afterward, Shuster was called into a meeting with Brit Hume. “Roger doesn’t think you’re loyal to him,” Hume said. “It was never the same for me after that,” Shuster recalled. He would leave the network in February 2002.

  Bush’s victory at the Supreme Court did not end Ailes’s election night problems. On November 9, John Ellis invited New Yorker writer Jane Mayer to his home in Westche
ster County, and gave a wide-ranging interview in which he boasted about his frequent election night conversations with his cousins. “Jebbie’ll be calling me like eight thousand times a day,” Ellis said. Recounting what it was like after Fox called W. the winner, he said, “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth—me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the President-elect. Now that was cool.”

  Ellis had seemingly admitted sharing confidential Voter News Service exit poll numbers with a campaign. Gore’s campaign manager later told a reporter that if Gore’s first cousin had done what Ellis did, “they would indict him!” There were congressional hearings into the networks’ botched calls scheduled for February, and members wanted to subpoena the decision desk employees. Ailes and the networks protested, citing First Amendment grounds. Instead, the networks offered to conduct their own investigations. Ailes dispatched Fox’s general counsel, Dianne Brandi, to interview the Fox decision team.

  Cynthia Talkov had become increasingly incensed at Ellis’s election night behavior and the spin he put on it afterward. Not only was his article in Inside magazine a sanitized history that bore no relation to what actually happened inside Fox News, but Ellis described her in the article as a “passionate Democrat,” a move that seemed designed to make her into a bipartisan prop to maintain the “fair and balanced” mantra.

  With her lawyer at her side during a conference call with Brandi, she detailed for Brandi everything she observed on election night. “I told them my truth 100 percent,” she said. Talkov’s attorney remembered that when Talkov repeated Ellis’s declaration “Jebbie says we got it!” Brandi responded with a “pregnant pause.” Talkov never worked for Fox again.