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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Ailes helped out where he could. On March 19, he forwarded an email to John Moody, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Shine containing an opposition research file on Obama’s relationship with the controversial Illinois state senator and pastor James Meeks with the subject line “Maybe God is a Republican.” “Meeks has denounced ‘Hollywood Jews,’ blaming them for homosexuality; called Mayor [Richard] Daley as a ‘slave master’ and supporters of Daley ‘house niggers’; and called gays ‘evil,’ ” the file read. That night, O’Reilly and Hannity did segments on Meeks. “Now we don’t know the relationship between Reverend Meeks and Barack Obama,” O’Reilly announced. “We are working on that story and a number of other people are as well. But the question tonight is how will the Clinton and McCain campaigns handle all of this? It’s a growing story.”

  News Corp was also populated with influential Clinton surrogates who could hit back against MSNBC and Obama. Susan Estrich lobbied behind the scenes to arrange a private meeting between Ailes and Hillary. “This would be a good thing for her,” she told Bill Clinton. “No one has to know about it. Fox isn’t looking for publicity, they understand the sensitivities on the Democratic side.” Gary Ginsberg, Rupert Murdoch’s director of communications, was another pro-Hillary voice. Earlier in the campaign, Ginsberg played a crucial role neutralizing an attack by John Edwards in which he criticized Hillary for accepting donations from Murdoch. Ginsberg called HarperCollins and found out that the company had paid Edwards a $500,000 advance to write a coffee-table book, Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives. (The Edwards campaign said the money went to charity.) Ginsberg promptly fed the information to Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications chief, who leaked it to the press.

  Fox’s clubbiness with the Clintons created bad blood inside the Obama campaign. In May, Hillary gave a widely viewed sit-down interview to Bill O’Reilly. “Are you surprised that Fox News has been fairer to you than NBC News and a lot of the other liberal news networks?” he asked. “I wouldn’t expect anything less than a fair and balanced coverage of my campaign,” she replied. “She made some kind of compact with Murdoch,” Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn later said. Another senior Obama adviser recalled, “Our campaign opened with Fox saying that Obama had gone to a madrassa as a child.” “If you watched Fox, you would not have known there was a financial crisis and two wars going on. You would have thought the most important issues in America were Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright.”

  Not surprisingly, Obama harbored a deep distrust of Fox. After clinching the Democratic nomination, Obama agreed to meet Murdoch at the Waldorf while he was in town attending a fundraiser. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who had been talking secretly with Gary Ginsberg, had agreed to set up the meeting. For sport, Murdoch brought along Ailes. Obama told Ailes he would not deal with Fox if they continued to portray him and his wife as dangerous subversives. Ailes told Obama that he would get better treatment if he engaged, rather than opposed, Fox. At that, the meeting ended.

  Afterward, Murdoch asked Ailes his impression of Obama. “He’s like a middle manager,” Ailes said. Murdoch was taken aback.

  “I wasn’t asking you to evaluate him for a position at Fox,” Murdoch replied. “I’m asking what you thought of him as a presidential candidate.”

  “Well, that’s what I think,” Ailes said.

  A few weeks later, Ailes told Axelrod that he was concerned that Obama wanted to create a national police force.

  “You can’t be serious,” Axelrod replied. “What makes you think that?”

  Ailes responded by emailing Axelrod a YouTube clip from a campaign speech Obama had given on national service, in which he called for the creation of a new civilian corps to work alongside the military on projects overseas.

  Axelrod had a long history with Ailes, having defeated him in 1984 while running Paul Simon’s Senate campaign in Illinois. He later said that the exchange was the moment he realized Ailes truly believed what he was programming.

  Ailes eventually settled on McCain as his preferred candidate, though his campaign performance was far from ideal. “He doesn’t have the charisma, the message isn’t honed to the point where you know who he is,” Ailes said of McCain. “He has this fantastic story, and he tends to minimize it.” “Roger is a producer first and foremost,” a former staffer said.

  Some News Corp executives privately discussed whether Ailes would be out of sync with Murdoch’s political allegiances. Murdoch notoriously blew with the political winds, and he began making noises that he would be open to endorsing Obama for president in the pages of the New York Post, lest he be left on the wrong side of history. (In January, the Post had endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination.) Members of Murdoch’s own family were also captivated by the candidate and lobbied Rupert, including his third wife, Wendi. As these tensions played out, the writer Michael Wolff was putting the finishing touches on his authorized biography of Murdoch. The book, based on hours of interviews with Murdoch and many of his lieutenants and family members, itself became a flashpoint within News Corp. Over nearly a decade, Gary Ginsberg had worked tirelessly to soften and massage Murdoch’s image and had done a remarkable job of making News Corp, if not exactly admired, then palatable to a certain subset of Manhattan. Ginsberg, along with Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, a London public relations executive, was involved in dealing with Wolff on the book. But ultimately, much of what Wolff wrote in his book infuriated many camps inside News Corp. In a preview of the book in Vanity Fair, Wolff revealed how embarrassed Murdoch was by Ailes and Bill O’Reilly—a view Wolff says came from interviews with Rupert—and Ailes became enraged. “Is this true?” he demanded in a September 2008 meeting.

  “No, it’s not true,” Murdoch replied.

  Just as he had done after his confrontation with Lachlan over the anthrax attacks, Ailes forced Murdoch to demonstrate his loyalty. Murdoch assured Ailes he was happy with Fox News and offered him a new five-year contract, which was signed in November, that guaranteed him editorial independence. “That was the beginning of when the network went crazy,” a Murdoch adviser said. Ailes made sure to capitalize on the moment. “As Ginsberg was blowing up because of the Murdoch book, Brian Lewis and Roger would huddle about the best way to leverage that to hurt Peter Chernin,” a senior executive said.

  Any speculation about whether Murdoch was becoming liberal ended on September 8, when the New York Post endorsed McCain. Within the next year, News Corp’s top Democrats—Ginsberg and Chernin—would depart the company, leaving Murdoch with fewer checks on Ailes’s power. Ailes savored the moment. “Roger took credit,” an executive close to him recalled. “The day Ginsberg left, Roger walked into his afternoon editorial meeting, dropped the press release onto the conference table and said, ‘In life, there are winners, and there are …’ And just smiled as people passed around the note.”

  The promise of a new contract gave Ailes time to prepare for the effect of an Obama win on Fox ratings, but it turned out he didn’t need the time. On September 3, a day after confronting Murdoch, Ailes, watching the Republican convention, was riveted by the appearance of an exotic political creature: Sarah Palin. “She hit a home run,” he told executives the next day. Her gleeful establishment bashing made her a perfect heroine for a new Ailes story line—and Fox’s ratings soared to a cable news record. During Palin’s speech, Fox attracted more than nine million viewers, eclipsing every other news network, cable or broadcast. “At least people care now,” Ailes told his team.

  He was intensely interested in the Alaska governor. Palin had somehow managed to graft the old western myth of the self-reliant frontiersman onto a beauty-pageant face and a counterpunching, don’t-tread-on-me verbal style—a new kind of character, and a remarkably compelling one. A few weeks after her convention speech, Ailes secretly met with Palin during her swing through New York, when she toured the U.N. and had a photo op with Henry Kissinger. That afternoon, Shushannah Walshe, a young Fox producer who was covering Pal
in’s campaign for the network, had gone on-air and criticized McCain’s staff, which had prevented reporters from asking Palin questions during her U.N. visit. “There’s not one chance that Governor Palin would have to answer a question,” Walshe said on camera. “They’re eliminating even the chance of any kind of interaction with the candidate—it’s just unprecedented.”

  Ailes didn’t know Walshe, but he was angry when he heard her comments. Liberal media outlets like The Huffington Post were using her words to make it appear that Fox was turning on Palin. He called Suzanne Scott and demanded Walshe be taken off the air. “It’s not fair-and-balanced coverage,” an executive later told Walshe. Walshe was allowed to continue covering Palin but was barred from future on-camera appearances. She soon left Fox.

  In October, Ailes found the other star of Fox’s next era: CNN’s Glenn Beck. Ratings for his CNN Headline News show had jumped by more than 200 percent since he joined the channel in 2006. He had a string of New York Times bestsellers, and ratings for his radio show were nearing Rush Limbaugh’s. When Ailes met the forty-four-year-old for the first time that fall, he could tell he was born for television. Beck’s performances, a mix of New Age self-help speak and right-wing fervor, gave him the lineaments of Lonesome Rhodes, the drifter played by Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. With his neat, alabaster hair and doughy cheeks, he was a prophet of a nascent political movement that was rising up in tandem with Obama’s candidacy.

  As they spoke, Ailes and Beck bonded over their shared triumphal version of American history. Ailes wanted Beck for the 5:00 p.m. hour, which had continually failed to attract an audience and delivered a weak lead-in to the shows that followed. Fox executives dubbed it the “black hole.” This was especially problematic because Brit Hume was telling executives he wanted to step down from his nightly newscast at 6:00 p.m. His departure would further imperil the lineup. On Thursday, October 16, Fox announced that Beck was jumping from CNN to Fox.

  Ailes was assembling his cast for television in the age of Obama. While he was unimpressed with Mike Huckabee as a candidate, he recognized he had a following among social conservatives. In addition to snapping up Huckabee, Ailes signed Karl Rove and John Bolton as pundits. Still, as Election Day approached, Ailes seemed to be in a dour mood. In late September, McCain had suspended his campaign in hopes of negotiating a congressional accord on a proposed financial bailout in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy. “He was so angry when McCain suspended his campaign,” an executive recalled. “He said, ‘The only people who suspend campaigns are the ones who are losing.’ ”

  Ailes told executives Obama’s election would be “the worst thing for America,” but others sensed opportunity. Brian Lewis, a savvy operator and pragmatist—“Everything is a situation” was his mantra—felt that an Obama victory would be better for business than a McCain presidency. A few days before the election, Lewis scheduled a meeting to tell Ailes he was voting for Obama.

  Before heading to Ailes’s office, he called Gary Ginsberg. “If Obama wins, it’s good for us,” Lewis said. “I wanted to tell you that before I go into the lion’s den.”

  TWENTY

  COMEBACK

  THE WEEK AFTER OBAMA’S 2008 ELECTION NIGHT VICTORY SPEECH in Grant Park, Chicago, Ailes took his son, Zachary, and Beth back to Warren, Ohio, for Veterans Day. Members of the community had asked Ailes to give the keynote address at the dedication ceremony for the Trumbull County Veterans’ Memorial. Since leaving for college fifty years earlier, Ailes had returned home only a handful of times—he had few remaining ties to the community. Ailes decided it was time for his son, who was then eight years old, to see where his father came from. In the plush seats of News Corp’s corporate jet, the Ailes family descended through the clouds over the flat landscape of northeast Ohio. It was unseasonably cold for early November, barely above freezing in the afternoon. From the air, the fallow farmland was a quilt of brown and gray patchwork.

  The Aileses were in town for just one night and had a lot of ground to cover. There was a gathering of Roger’s high school friends at the Avalon Inn, the hotel where they were staying on Warren’s East Side, followed by a downtown reception for civic leaders and memorial donors at the Huntington National Bank and an interview with a reporter from the Warren Tribune Chronicle. The morning would bring the monument unveiling and a celebratory luncheon at the Trumbull Country Club. But before all that, Ailes had a promise to keep. He had told Zachary that they would eat at the Hot Dog Shoppe, a favored watering hole for high school kids in his father’s time.

  On the drive from the airport, Roger could see how Warren was now a very different city from the one he had grown up in. The giant aluminum hot dog that blinked as it rotated on a fifteen-foot red pole mounted on the Shoppe’s roof was still in working order, but many of the restaurants from his day were gone. Warren’s decline was no less precipitous than that of Rust Belt emblems like Detroit or Flint, Michigan. The financial crisis of 2008 visited its own kind of apocalypse. During one eighteen-day period after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Warren’s then-mayor, Michael O’Brien, received ten letters from local companies announcing mass layoffs or closures. Severstal Steel, one of Warren’s few remaining employers, announced it was cutting its workforce from one thousand to thirty-five. Packard’s employment fell to nine hundred, about 5 percent of its peak.

  Once a city that worked, Warren had become a city that was broken, sick with the all-too-familiar symptoms. Drug addicts robbed homes in broad daylight, running off with flat-screen TVs or video game consoles to pawn. Prostitutes leaning against shady oak trees worked the streets. Scavengers stripped foreclosed houses of their guts—copper plumbing and electrical wiring—to sell to local scrap dealers. The municipal government cut social services and laid off 30 percent of its police force. To keep cops on the street, Mayor O’Brien—himself a former officer—dismantled the department’s detective bureau and put a dozen veteran detectives back into uniform.

  After checking into the Avalon Hotel, Ailes went to a private room with a dozen former schoolmates from Warren G. Harding High School’s class of 1958. They chatted for an hour about their youth, with Ailes speaking warmly about his time acting in high school plays. But when the conversation moved toward current events, the mood darkened. Ailes had a specific diagnosis for his hometown’s decline. “We have fed more people and freed more people than any country in history. Obama needs to focus Americans on personal responsibility,” Ailes said. He recounted his summertime encounter with the president-elect at the Waldorf Astoria. “If he wants to bring the nation together, as he says, now is the time to reach out,” Ailes explained. He told his classmates that he had hoped McCain would win, but that the “unbelievable” financial crisis had eliminated the Republicans’ chance.

  Then Ailes talked about his own role in the struggle, and the stakes. “I defend the United States, Israel, and the Constitution. That’s when I get my death threats,” he told them. “I stand up for what I believe. I don’t back off. I’ve been that way for forty years. That’s the secret to my success. I have thick skin. I don’t care what people say about me.… We’re not a perfect nation. But the question is, if the U.S. is destroyed, what would the world be like?” Later that afternoon, he told a local newspaper reporter that his hometown could learn a thing or two from the lesson his father had taught him as a boy. “If you want a helping hand, look at the end of your arm,” Ailes said. It was the same lesson he imparted at Fox News. He liked to tell people how, several years earlier, he launched a job-training program for minorities called “The Ailes Apprentice Program.” It was one of his genuine sources of pride. “If every company did this, could you imagine what they’d do to minority unemployment?” he later said.

  It was cold and damp the next morning when Ailes and his family arrived at the dedication ceremony in Monument Park. Hundreds of people had gathered. It was the largest crowd Warren had seen downtown in many years.

  As Ailes took to t
he microphone, he saw visions of his past. “You see that fountain pool right around there?” he told the audience, pointing toward a Victorian-era sculpture of a crane in flight with water shooting from its beak. “My mother and grandmother would bring me there, and I used to feed the squirrels.” He motioned at the YMCA across the street from the courthouse. “I used to go there every Saturday and take swim lessons.”

  He told the audience that he was moved to speak at the dedication ceremony because his best childhood friend, Doug Webster, was killed in the Vietnam War. Webster was a grade behind Roger in school, but they were like brothers. Webster grew up on Edgewood Street, a mile away from the Ailes house.

  Webster’s life exerted a palpable pull on Roger. In many ways, he was the man Ailes wanted to be: a star athlete, vice president of his high school class, co-captain of the Ohio State gymnastics team, and a Navy fighter pilot. Ailes went to the military recruiting office with Webster to enlist together. “He got in, I didn’t,” Ailes said. But Webster died in a freak accident three months into his first deployment to the Pacific, when his Navy A-4 Skyhawk slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga. His body was never recovered. “I guess there is a certain amount of survivor guilt there,” Ailes said.