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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  It had already happened once during the 2004 campaign. In May, Estrich received a call from a Hannity producer who wanted to book her for a segment about an Internet ad produced by the Republican National Committee. The spot mockingly compared Kerry to a cicada, who was trying to shed his liberal shell in time for the general election. “We want you to respond to the merits of the ad,” the producer told her. Estrich lit into him. “How many times has it been shown on television?” The producer stammered. Before hanging up, Estrich warned him she was calling Ailes to complain. When she reached Ailes that afternoon, he “burst out laughing,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I like to think I pioneered that technique.’ ”

  Estrich was in a position to try to defend Kerry on Fox. As it happened, she was booked to fill in for Colmes on August 5, the night after Halpin. Hannity would be interviewing Van O’Dell, a Swift Boat veteran appearing in the ad. When Estrich called the Kerry-Edwards campaign headquarters to get talking points to use on camera, her concerns were confirmed: the campaign did not have any. Instead of cultivating Estrich and capitalizing on her ties to Fox News, Democrats shunned her—it was punishment for collaborating with Ailes. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, she was ostracized. “Wherever I went, I was subjected to criticism,” she said. She was even left off the guest list for a party hosted by Dukakis. “Even if it was a clerical error, that was very hurtful,” she recalled.

  Greta Van Susteren’s husband, the lawyer John Coale, was another Democrat with ties to Ailes who wanted to stave off disaster for Kerry. A few days before Hannity hyped O’Neill’s book on the air, Coale received a frantic phone call from his friend Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian, who had recently authored the lionizing Kerry biography Tour of Duty. Brinkley told Coale he had gotten his hands on O’Neill’s book and was aghast at the distortions and falsehoods. “Shit, you gotta call Kerry,” Brinkley told him. Coale quickly arranged a meeting with Kerry and implored him to sue O’Neill and the Swift Boat group for defamation. “He was all hopped up to do it,” Coale remembered. But like Estrich, Coale was ignored by Kerry’s advisers. Kerry’s campaign manager, Bob Shrum, and others warned the candidate that launching a counterattack would only dignify the allegations and give the scandal legs. Kerry did not personally respond to the Swift Boat vets for nearly three weeks.

  Around-the-clock cable news coverage provided the free promotion. By the time Kerry defended himself, one poll found nearly half the country had heard about the Swift Boat ad or had seen it. In the closing days of the race, Kerry’s camp exploded when Fox painted Kerry as a terrorist favorite. After a tape of Osama bin Laden was released in late October, Fox anchor Neil Cavuto said on-camera that he thought he saw a Kerry “button” in bin Laden’s cave. John Sasso, a veteran Kerry adviser and onetime Dukakis campaign manager, threatened to throw Fox producer Catherine Loper off the campaign plane.

  “Is that the one? Is that her?” Sasso said as he looked at Loper. “I want her off the plane tomorrow. I’m not kidding.”

  On the night of November 2, Ailes and Murdoch watched the returns together at Fox News. Moody fed Ailes updates from the decision desk.

  Fox called Ohio for Bush at 12:40 a.m. The battleground win put Bush a single electoral vote shy of 270, and all but guaranteed him a second term. But hoping to avoid a repeat of 2000, Fox refused to take any gambles. As the minutes ticked by, Bush aides became apoplectic that Fox and the networks refused to declare their man the winner based on the projections in western states that would definitively put him over the top. Rove called Fox analyst Michael Barone.

  “I just got some spin from Rove on New Mexico,” Barone told Moody and the decision team members shortly after 2:00 in the morning.

  “Not yet,” Moody cautioned.

  Dan Bartlett, at Bush high command, frantically tried to reach Ailes, but could not get through. Ailes had been burned after his memo to Rove leaked, and he understandably did not want to be seen coordinating with Bushworld. “You know I wasn’t going to take your call, Bartlett,” Ailes told him a few weeks later. In the end, Kerry made the decision easy for Fox. On Wednesday morning, he conceded.

  After Bush’s victory, “Swift Boating” joined the American political lexicon. Kerry’s failings as a candidate—his Brahmin reserve and deliberative mien—certainly contributed to his defeat. But according to Sean Hannity, Fox News deserved at least some credit. “Sean said he felt he played an important role in taking Kerry down,” Pat Halpin later said, recalling a conversation he had with Hannity not long after the election. Halpin said he felt unsettled at his minor role in promoting the Swift Boaters. “I was one of the props, unfortunately,” he said.

  Months later, Halpin sat in for Colmes and decided to speak up. Before a segment about Bush’s intervention in the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case, Hannity told him to lay off his guests Rick Santorum and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. “Go easy on these guys, they get good ratings,” Hannity said. Halpin ignored the directive. He pressed both men with tough questions. “Sean was pissed off. He was like, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” Halpin remembered. “I never got invited on to guest host again. Bill Shine indicated that Sean didn’t want me.”

  For Democrats, the trauma of losing consecutive presidential elections confirmed the political reality: post-9/11 America was a Republican country. Fox News got much of the credit for this development, of course. But the victory made Fox News and Ailes himself into something they had never been on such a scale: a target.

  Fox News was now a juggernaut, earning more than $200 million per year, and its success changed the gravity of the cable TV world, and the wider culture, too. As MSNBC tried to siphon off Ailes’s viewers by bulking up with conservative commentary, Comedy Central began to prosper with Fox News satire. In July 2004, the progressive documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald released Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Liberal groups like MoveOn.org, which was a producer of the film, aggressively promoted the exposé and turned it into a surprise hit.

  The passion of Roger Ailes’s audience was something that had never before existed in TV news, a consequence of Fox’s hybrid of politics and entertainment. Fox did not have viewers. It had fans. They watched on average 30 percent longer than CNN viewers in prime time. In journalism, it was an achievement without precedent. When Ailes later decided to launch a website to aggregate conservative headlines, it was aptly named Fox Nation. To watch Fox was to belong to a tribe.

  Fox’s gleeful dismembering of Kerry’s campaign forced liberals to acknowledge that Fox had changed politics. “Before Fox News, a lot of stories never would have gotten attention,” Bob Shrum later said. “Take the Swift Boat story: If you had had the old Huntley-Brinkley hour, it would not have appeared on the network.” Conservative passions had exploded into the mainstream, repackaged as prime-time entertainment. The dream of Bob Pauley and Joe Coors had been realized.

  Democrats were in general agreement that something needed to be done to counter Ailes’s influence. Unsurprisingly, they argued bitterly over strategy. The debate over Fox News was, in reality, a proxy war in a much bigger conflict within the Democratic Party. On one side, moderates, led by Bill Clinton and his allies, championed engagement with Fox. They contended it was a matter of basic electoral math. Given Ailes’s audience—which at that point had grown larger than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined—it was folly to ignore him. When Ailes hired Dick Morris in 1998, Clinton told his former adviser that he was happy he would be embedding with the opposition. “It’s stupid to avoid Fox,” Van Susteren’s husband, John Coale, said, echoing the Clinton argument. “What’s the worst case scenario? You get yelled at by Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity? But your base is going to love you for getting yelled at so there’s no downside.”

  But Clintonian pragmatism incited vocal opposition among the party’s ascendant grassroots base. Connecting online through nascent social networks and progressive websites like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, members of t
he so-called Netroots movement espoused a brand of liberal populism that viewed Fox as the enemy. Confrontation, not engagement, was their preferred strategy. The left’s anti-Fox groundswell started in the wake of the 2000 recount. During a 2002 interview with The New York Observer, Al Gore declared that Fox News was “part and parcel of the Republican Party.” Admittedly, it was a partisan analysis. But Gore’s claims had resonance on the left. And throughout the contentious 2004 Democratic primary, his combative stance was picked up by former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean’s implosion in the Iowa caucuses ended his insurgent campaign, but the base’s zeal was unabated.

  Dean’s eventual ascension to chair of the Democratic National Committee propelled his confrontational style toward the mainstream. At a Democratic fundraiser held shortly after Bush’s second inauguration, pro-Fox Democrats from Clinton’s camp attempted to stage an intervention. Dean was the honored guest that night. John Coale was in attendance and decided to confront Dean during the cocktail hour. “Let me talk to you,” he said, pulling him into an empty bedroom. Why are Democrats boycotting Fox?

  “They’re not a real news organization!” Dean snapped.

  “Good, cede it to the goddamn right,” Coale said, angrily. “Let them go on and say anything they want. They have more Democrats watching than CNN does!”

  Both men began shouting over each other in a ten-minute free-for-all.

  Coale’s diplomatic reasoning had merit, along with a self-serving element, given that his wife was a prime-time Fox anchor. But it was a losing argument. The momentum had already shifted in Dean’s favor. Increasingly, Democrats viewed the media as the central front in the country’s ideological struggle.

  One morning in the summer of 2003, David Brock arrived for a private meeting with a small group of liberal senators on Capitol Hill. Leo Hindery, the Manhattan media entrepreneur and Democratic fundraiser, had set up a gathering in South Dakota senator Tom Daschle’s office to discuss a shared goal: taking down Fox News and conservative radio. If there was one man who knew how the right-wing media machine worked from the inside, it was David Brock, the former conservative muckraker. In the 1990s, Brock wrote for the right-wing magazine The American Spectator and was hailed as the Bob Woodward of the Clinton scandals. In 2002, he published a caustic tell-all memoir, Blinded by the Right, that detailed his years as a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

  Brock told Daschle and his colleagues that they needed to build a media arsenal of their own. Brock had helped draw up plans for a liberal talk radio network and proposed launching a watchdog organization that would expose right-wing media bias. It was a stratagem conservatives had pioneered. Over the years, the right established a phalanx of activist groups that tarred newspapers and broadcast news as liberal mouthpieces. The tactic became known as “working the refs.” Brock wanted to do the same for the left. He named his group Media Matters.

  Like the groundbreaking conservative organizations Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center, Media Matters’ base of operations would be a war room. Instead of hounding The New York Times and CBS News with press releases, its targets would be Fox News and talk radio. Brock’s operatives would instantly post incendiary comments made by a Fox pundit or Rush Limbaugh on the Media Matters website. Peter Lewis, the billionaire owner of the Progressive Insurance Corporation, invested $1 million. Other liberals, including hedge fund manager George Soros, would chip in $1 million more.

  Media Matters launched in May 2004. A few months earlier, Democracy Radio went on the air. Its debut program was The Ed Schultz Show. Both projects were the first salvos in the liberals’ counteroffensive against Ailes. But to effectively match Ailes, the left needed to alchemize entertainment and politics. Since the 1980s, conservatives had created a parallel media culture that had ended the left’s monopoly on comedy. Right-wing celebrities had vast followings. It was a remarkable achievement given that Ailes came of age during the fractious 1960s, a time when fame became synonymous with fashionable New Left politics. But with the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and conservative book publishers, Republicans were able to build a self-contained thought system that made mocking liberals fun. Comedy motivated people to vote. Liberals were finally realizing they needed personalities of their own who were capable of performing at the same decibel level as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly. Al Franken had been rehearsing for the part for almost a decade.

  A member of the comedy elite from his time as a Saturday Night Live writer and performer, Franken was also a diligent student of the culture and a political junkie. He figured out there was an untapped market on the left for a style of argument that could simulate conservative outrage while at the same time delivering a sophisticated critique of it. In 1996, he published the bestselling Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. For his follow-up, Franken set his sights on the entire conservative-media-industrial-complex itself. He assembled a team of fourteen Harvard students to research his new book, which he titled Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The book, published in September 2003, featured chapters devoted to slaying conservative giants with titles such as “Ann Coulter: Nutcase.” Fox News came in for particular scorn. And one Fox pundit in particular wound up in Franken’s crosshairs. Chapter Thirteen was titled “Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully.” Unexpectedly, Franken’s transformation from improv comedian to muckraking polemicist was about to trigger a chain reaction that threatened to destroy Ailes’s most valuable star.

  By the spring of 2003, Bill O’Reilly was a booming national industry. On camera, he aspired to be a kind of cultural vigilante. Every night he went out to defend the little guy against the depredations of corrupt elites. Often his targets were Democrats. Or Hollywood celebrities. But O’Reilly could also aim his weaponized commentaries at less expected marks. He hammered the Red Cross and United Way for mismanaging restitution for 9/11 victims. “We’ve changed the country,” he proudly declared. “Bad guys get it. They’ll pay a price for doing bad things.” O’Reilly’s ambition was seemingly bottomless, and he continually found new ways to monetize his brand. Through his various ventures, O’Reilly was earning roughly $10 million a year. Ailes grumbled to his executives that O’Reilly shamelessly plugged his wares on his network. In a sense, they were competitive with each other. “He sees O’Reilly and says, ‘If he can write a shitty book that’s a bestseller, I want to do my own,’ ” an executive recalled. But there was little Ailes could do about it. O’Reilly delivered the eyeballs night after night. He was the linchpin of Ailes’s prime-time lineup.

  As O’Reilly’s fame grew, his fuse shortened. More powerful than ever, he increasingly found himself consumed with petty feuds. One night, he called New York Times columnist Frank Rich a “weasel.” On another program, he commanded his audience to boycott Pepsi because the company had hired the rapper Ludacris as its celebrity pitchman. His worldview became increasingly conspiratorial even as his grandiosity reached new heights. “He’s hyper-suspicious about things, one of the things he shares with Ailes,” a former O’Reilly staffer said. O’Reilly declared to a reporter that the press “are going to try to destroy me.” He saw himself as part of a struggle with historical sweep. “This has happened since the Founding Fathers,” he explained. “It has to do with power. It has to do with jealousy. It has to do with ideology. It has to do with money. The more power I get, the more lawyers I have to deal with, the more insanity I have to deal with.”

  O’Reilly was becoming an acute management challenge for Ailes. On- and off-camera, his rages were becoming less theatrical and more vituperative. Some days, he seemed to be spiraling out of control. During a February 2003 segment on the Iraq War protest movement, he blew up at a young antiwar activist named Jeremy Glick, whose father, a Port Authority worker at the World Trade Center, had died on 9/11. “Shut up, shut up!” O’Reilly said. At one point, O’Reilly accused Glick of shaming his family. “Man, I hope your mom isn’t watching this,” he told
him, shortly before ordering Glick’s mic cut and going to commercial. The argument continued off-camera. “Get the fuck off my set before I tear your head off,” one producer recalled O’Reilly saying.

  Staff came in for equally harsh treatment. After one taping, he stormed toward his staff’s cubicles and tore into a young female producer, whom he blamed for botching a segment. Staffers watched in shock as O’Reilly, easily a foot taller than the woman, started yelling and slamming his fist down on a shelf. “He got really close and in her face,” an eyewitness said. “She was scared he was going to hit her,” recalled another colleague. O’Reilly stalked off. A senior Fox executive was called in and escorted the woman, in tears, out of the building to calm her down. She was later given paid vacation from Fox. “Bill never apologized,” a person close to the matter said.

  O’Reilly was also frosty with Fox hosts. “I’m the big gun,” he declared to Fox executives. His relationship with Sean Hannity was almost nonexistent. O’Reilly, who was trying to build up his talk radio career, was competitive with Hannity, a talk radio star. O’Reilly sniffed to colleagues that Hannity was a right-wing shill. Hannity, in turn, mocked O’Reilly’s tabloid instincts. “Can you believe this garbage?” Hannity complained when he saw O’Reilly on the monitor interviewing a porn star. It made for a tense atmosphere since their offices were both located on the seventeenth floor of the News Corp building and Hannity’s Fox show directly followed O’Reilly’s.

  Fox executives had few options to rein O’Reilly in. “His was the only show that Roger doesn’t get the credit for developing,” a senior executive said. Which led to his disastrous encounter with Franken. As Franken was putting the finishing touches on Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, O’Reilly was completing his own book, Who’s Looking Out for You? On May 30, 2003, O’Reilly was invited to appear onstage with Franken and columnist Molly Ivins to promote their titles at Book Expo America in Los Angeles. Brian Lewis’s deputy, Rob Zimmerman, who handled O’Reilly’s PR, advised O’Reilly against making the trip. “You’re just going to give Franken more ammunition,” Zimmerman told him. O’Reilly ignored him.