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

by Sherman, Gabriel

As the attacks on Fox’s election night conduct persisted, Ailes displayed his gifts as a crisis manager. On Valentine’s Day 2001, Ailes was in Washington to testify alongside network news presidents before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Prior to the hearing, Ailes was furious that he would be forced to take an oath in front of the cameras. The visual of the network chiefs holding up their right hands would make them seem like criminals. When it was Ailes’s turn to speak, he turned in a valiant performance. As only Ailes could do, he took his critics’ fiercest attacks and appropriated them as strengths. Ellis’s newsroom presence was not a conflict of interest. It was smart journalism. “Obviously, through his family connections, Mr. Ellis has very good sources,” Ailes’s prepared statement read. “I do not see this as a fault or shortcoming of Mr. Ellis. Quite the contrary, I see this as a good journalist talking to his very high level sources on election night.” Ellis resigned around this time. (He rejoined the network as a vice president of programming at Fox Business News in 2013.)

  It was not long before Ailes and his troops would see just how consequential the results of the 2000 election would be. “That one little moment actually determined not just the course of the news channel, but of the country,” a senior Fox producer said. “God knows what would have happened if Al Gore was elected.”

  SIXTEEN

  HOLY WAR

  AILES ARRIVED AT WORK on the morning of September 11, 2001, ready for a crusade. In a few hours, he was scheduled to meet with Greta Van Susteren, the veteran CNN anchor and legal analyst, who was flying up from Washington to talk to Ailes about a job. The sit-down, however, had far greater significance than a job interview. It represented a counter-strike in Ailes’s intensifying battle with CNN for ratings supremacy and control of the American news agenda. Six days before, CNN had poached Paula Zahn to host a revamped morning program. Her departure came at a critical juncture for Ailes. Before she left, he told her he saw it as part of a “holy war,” one he intended not to lose. In the wake of the Florida recount drama, Fox News had pulled even with CNN in the ratings. Bill O’Reilly was turning into a national phenomenon. Fox was even beginning to turn a profit, several years ahead of initial projections. In June, Ailes had been the subject of a New York Times Magazine article for the second time in six years.

  Meanwhile, CNN’s ratings were slipping. In March 2001, seeking to reverse the trend, Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin put Jamie Kellner, a brash entertainment executive and onetime protégé of Fox Inc. CEO Barry Diller, in charge of Turner Broadcasting. Kellner’s explicit assignment was to halt Fox’s gains by injecting CNN with buzz. “Give us six months to a year. We will be ahead of Fox,” Kellner told the press. Ailes used Kellner’s boast as fuel to sustain his forward advance. “Roger printed that quote out on a twenty-foot-long banner, which he hung in the newsroom,” a senior producer recalled. “We were neck and neck with CNN, and every day I walked under that banner.” Ailes’s competitive drive knit Fox employees together. “Who wouldn’t want to be part of a family, even a dysfunctional family? I loved who I worked with. What I most look back on is the scrappiness,” former Fox producer Anne Hartmayer said.

  Kellner, whom The New York Times once dubbed “one of the great poachers in the television industry,” offered Zahn $2 million per year—triple her Fox News salary—to leave for CNN. Like Catherine Crier and other Fox News journalists, Zahn had found herself increasingly turned off by Ailes’s partisan agenda. “She thought her career would be ruined if she got tainted as a Fox person,” an executive said. On Tuesday, August 28, Zahn’s agent, the self-described “b.s. artist” Richard Leibner, faxed Ailes a letter informing him of CNN’s terms. Ailes exploded. He had already complained to colleagues that Kellner and his handpicked news chief, former Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson, were copycats, stealing Fox’s swooping graphics and bright, candy-colored set designs. Now they were stealing his people.

  After getting Zahn’s letter, Ailes called an emergency meeting of his top executives to inveigh against Zahn’s disloyalty and CNN’s underhanded hiring practices. “Why don’t we fire her?” Brian Lewis mused.

  Ailes stopped to consider it. Zahn’s contract was set to expire in February 2002. Dianne Brandi, Fox’s general counsel, gave her imprimatur, suggesting that Zahn could be dismissed for cause for negotiating with a competitor while under contract. Later that week, Lewis followed up with a memo to Ailes about the merits of his idea. Preemptively firing Zahn “looks sincere” and “sends message thru ranks and to industry,” he wrote, noting an “outnumbered army must have surprise on its side.”

  Over the Labor Day weekend, Ailes called Lewis several times to hash out his options. “I can’t look like a bully,” he said more than once. On Tuesday, Ailes gave Zahn a chance to answer for herself. “I just want to look you in the eye and ask what you’re doing,” he said during a meeting in his office.

  “You’ll have to speak to my agent,” Zahn replied, coolly.

  The nonanswer sealed her fate. “He made it very clear to me that he was not going to make life easy for me,” Zahn later recalled.

  The following morning, Ailes plunked himself down in a chair across from Lewis’s desk. “I hope you’re right about this,” Ailes said. “You know, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and they ended up losing. Isaacson controls a lot of the press. They all love him.”

  At 2:30, Lewis sent out a press release announcing Zahn’s ouster. Around the same time, Fox filed a lawsuit against Zahn’s agent alleging “intentional interference.” (The suit was later dismissed by the New York Supreme Court, whose decision was affirmed the following year by the Appellate Division.) In the press, Ailes savaged Zahn’s reputation. “I don’t pay for disloyalty. And I’m not worried about her going to CNN,” he declared to the Times’s Bill Carter. Ailes said he was “the victim of a ‘Pearl Harbor attack’ ” by Leibner, whom he called a “liar.” During the interview, Ailes delivered one of his most viciously descriptive explanations for a television personality’s success. “I could have put a dead raccoon on the air this year and got a better rating than last year. That’s all just the growth of the network,” he said, speaking of a woman who, until that morning, worked for him. “All our shows are up.”

  Stealing Van Susteren would be a way to settle the score. “The key to the whole thing was hiring Greta,” a senior Fox executive said. Like Zahn, she was a household name with crossover appeal, someone who could balance the hard-right partisanship of Fox’s prime-time male pundits. Van Susteren had become a star at CNN during the O. J. Simpson trial. Her constant on-air dissection of the case helped make her CNN show the second-highest rated behind Larry King’s. Ailes heard she felt unappreciated by Kellner’s regime and was exploring her options.

  But, of course, the September 11 meeting never took place. Ailes would have to wait three and a half months to hire her. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., Van Susteren and her husband, John Coale, a prominent Washington attorney and her agent, were sitting on the tarmac at Ronald Reagan National Airport waiting for their US Air Shuttle flight to take off when Van Susteren’s BlackBerry started lighting up with emails.

  “Oh my God, turn on CNN,” Sharon Fain, Fox’s Atlanta bureau chief, gasped into the speakerphone. It was just after 8:49 in the morning, and Fain was calling in to John Moody’s editorial meeting. As she listened to a colleague propose a segment about embattled Democratic congressman Gary Condit, an image on the monitor near her desk caught her eye. “There’s a live shot of a plane that hit the tower.”

  Moody, sitting in the glass-walled War Room of the basement newsroom, looked at his screen, which seemed to be showing a scene from a Hollywood disaster epic. The North Tower of the World Trade Center was on fire, spewing thick plumes of smoke. The producers sitting around the table watched in stunned disbelief. Why didn’t the pilot ditch in the East River? one thought. Was it a tourist plane? another wondered.

  It took four minutes from the time CNN went live with the news for Fox to mentio
n it on the air. Fox & Friends, nearing the end of its three-hour slot, did not yet have live video of the unfolding calamity. “Welcome back to Fox News, we have a very tragic alert for you right now. An incredible plane crash into the World Trade Center here at the lower tip of Manhattan,” E. D. Donahey, the blond host, gravely announced. Donahey’s co-hosts, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, struggled to make sense of the calamity. Kilmeade, a former sportscaster from Long Island, had little hard news experience. He speculated that the plane was a 737 narrow-body jet and “at least three floors were taken out.” Owen Moogan, a Fox producer who lived five blocks from the towers, narrated the scene by phone. His uneven voice crackled over the cell line.

  Two minutes later, Fox aired its first visual. “That is it,” Donahey said.

  Jon Scott, a seasoned anchor with experience at NBC News, took over from the Fox & Friends trio. Over the phone, Scott interviewed Vernon Gross, a veteran former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board. Scott raised the specter of terrorism as a dark object streaked into the frame, quickly followed by an orange fireball. “There was another one! We just saw,” he said haltingly, as if his eyes had betrayed him. “We just saw another one apparently go—another plane just flew into the second tower. This raises—this has to be deliberate, folks.”

  “I would begin to say that,” Gross replied.

  Just thirty seconds after the second explosion, Scott introduced Fox viewers to their archvillain. “Now given what has been going on around the world,” he said, “some of the key suspects come to mind: Osama bin Laden.”

  Ailes watched the horrifying scene from his office televisions. “That means the second tower is coming down,” he said to an executive as the first smoldered and crumbled. Ailes descended to the basement War Room. He sat at the head of the conference table surrounded by his top deputies. There was Bill Shine from programming; Moody from the news department; Richard O’Brien from graphics. “The country is at war, but I want my people to be safe,” he told them. “I don’t want this building hurt or this newsroom harmed. We’re going to meet every hour today in this War Room.” Ailes’s confidence was inspiring. “Roger rallied the troops,” one person in the room recalled.

  While CNN had broken the news, Fox’s coverage in the opening hours of 9/11 demonstrated how Ailes would master the biggest story of the decade. He took personal charge of the programming. Barely twenty minutes after the towers’ collapse, Ailes introduced an innovation, known as “the crawl,” that would soon be copied by Fox’s competitors. “Day of Terror in the United States … Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York … wtc towers collapsed … manhattan is sealed off … all train and bus service halted.” The line of text streamed across the bottom of the screen like a stock ticker.

  “A lot of guidance came down from the second floor,” one senior producer recalled, referring to Ailes’s executive suite. “We wanted to know, what is an act of terror? Are we at war? The word came through Moody, ‘Yeah, we’re at war. And it’s a religious war and it’s a Muslim war and they want to bring back the Caliphate.’ ”

  Fox News’s programming aimed to amplify the intense emotions of the event. Graphics in blood-red and white declared: “TERRORISM HITS AMERICA.” Fox anchors in the studio were rarely visible. Their voices played over the day’s surreal images, which repeated on a constant loop, as if the towers fell and were resurrected, only to fall again. It was on Fox that day that viewers saw some of the first, haunting photos of the tower jumpers.

  The anchors delivered not just dire news, but patriotic spirit. “Folks, it just bears repeating. This is a tremendous tragedy, yes. But we are still the most powerful nation on earth,” Jon Scott said. “It bears repeating, America is still standing. We are united, we are strong, and we will find out who did this,” he later said. At another moment, he promised, “There will be a great uniting of America.” On Fox, the defining tenets of the Bush years were coming quickly into relief: the with-us-or-against-us defiance; the battering of political opponents as unpatriotic; and an unmistakable undercurrent of Christian messianism.

  And the politics. Though the Bush administration was in power, blame was cast on the Democrats: E. D. Donahey criticized the Clinton administration for allowing Al Qaeda to flourish. “They had this problem with Warren Christopher and with Madeleine Albright,” she told viewers. “You know what? You come after us, we come back … you attack us here at home, on our turf, and it changes things.”

  That afternoon, as images of Palestinian children dancing in the streets played on the screen, anchor John Gibson talked with Oklahoma’s Republican senator James Inhofe. “So what happens? I mean, do we sit here and say, ‘Okay, we got to investigate this, and figure out who it is, and then we’ll send FBI agents around the world and gather up the suspects and have a two-year trial?’ … Or do we launch our military might?”

  “No, we launch immediately,” Inhofe said. “I think you’re gonna see that we have a president who’s on his way back to Washington as we speak who is gonna be very decisive.”

  In the evening, Reverend Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham prepared Fox viewers for the long battle ahead. “We need to be strong,” he said on camera. “This, I’m afraid, is the beginning of a long and difficult process.… I’ve seen for myself these terrorists, these Islamic militants. They hate the United States. They hate us because they see us as the defender of Israel. They hate us because they see us as a Christian nation. They see our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and there are these militants that want to do everything they can to bring down this nation.”

  “It’s extraordinary to hear a man of God such as Franklin Graham speaking in that way,” Brit Hume told the audience.

  The voice of Newt Gingrich, who made three appearances on September 11, stood out vividly in Fox’s chorus. “This is a twenty-first-century Pearl Harbor. This is a twenty-first-century kind of war … it deserves a complete and total American response to ensure that it never happens again,” he said an hour after the second tower fell. He soon remarked, “The administration has to reach out around the world and make quite clear that we are going to go after whoever did this, and that people can decide either to be with the terrorists or be with Americans, but there will be no middle ground. There’s not going to be any neutrality in the process of getting even.”

  On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …”

  Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike.

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed.

  “Bill—”

  “They—it was an act of war.”

  “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.”

  “Mr. Husseini, this is war.”

  “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.”

  “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.”

  “Who declared w
ar on us?”

  “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!”

  “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said.

  “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.”

  Everyone, from politicians to news anchors, wrapped themselves in flags after 9/11. Not long after the attacks, “it was like a World War Two mentality and we were fighting an evil empire,” said a senior producer. “I remember running to Times Square to buy a fistful of flag pins off a vendor.” Anchors began wearing the pins on-set. Ailes’s creative director, Richard O’Brien, came up with a design for a waving American flag to be displayed on the screen.

  In those opening days, all of the networks necessarily adjusted their coverage to reflect the country’s wounded, angry patriotism, but Fox’s rhetoric was hotter and louder. The anchors referred to bin Laden as “a dirtbag,” and “a monster” who ran a “web of hate” made up of “terror goons.” “What we say is terrorists, terrorism, is evil, and America doesn’t engage in it, and these guys do,” Ailes told The New York Times in December. “We understand the enemy. They’ve made themselves clear: they want to murder us.… We don’t sit around and get all gooey and wonder if these people have been misunderstood in their childhood.”

  Ailes expressed the self-justifying belief that Fox’s approach was not only the right thing to do but also great television, bigger than any good-versus-evil Hollywood blockbuster. Ailes had once dreamed of producing a feature film. Now he had one. At first, it was Batman. Mayhem broke out in the heart of Gotham. Then, it was High Noon. A cowboy president vowed to “smoke out” the bad guys and to find them “dead or alive.” “I don’t believe that democracy and terrorism are relative things you can talk about, and I don’t think there’s any moral equivalence in those two positions,” Ailes said. He went on: “If that makes me a bad guy, tough luck. I’m still getting the ratings.” And it was true—Fox’s voice was very much in keeping with the views of much of America. In January 2002, Fox passed CNN in the cable news race, and never turned back.