Ailes questioned the spine of the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. In a private conversation with Bill Kristol, Ailes said, “Romney’s gotta rip Obama’s face off. It’s really hard to do. I did this with Bush Sr. He was uncomfortable with ripping Dukakis’s face off. George had to tell Barbara, ‘Look, this is Roger’s thing.’ It made Barbara uncomfortable that George was going so negative, but I had to rip off Dukakis’s face.”
Romney’s shaky interview with Bret Baier on the afternoon of November 29 proved Ailes’s point. For days, Romney had been declining invitations to appear with a roundtable of “All-Star” pundits. Romney’s campaign did not think it would look “presidential” for the candidate to be surrounded by Fox News commentators lobbing questions at him. Finally, they reached a compromise. Bret Baier would interview Romney at a Conchita Foods warehouse in Miami, where the candidate was on the trail. But just because Baier agreed to travel to Florida did not mean he was going to go soft. After rattling off a list of Romney’s flip-flops on climate change, gay marriage, abortion, and immigration, Baier confronted Romney about his position on universal health care. “Do you believe that that was the right thing for Massachusetts?”
“Bret, I don’t know how many hundred times I’ve said this—” Romney stammered. “This is an unusual interview.” The back-and-forth continued for several excruciating minutes.
When the cameras cut out, Romney complained to Baier about the exchange. Not coming prepared had been Romney’s first mistake. Insulting Baier was his second. The following night, Baier appeared on The O’Reilly Factor and reported Romney’s off-camera tantrum.
At times, it seemed that Ailes was using Fox to manufacture moments of excitement around alternative candidates. After receiving just 9.4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich bounced back in South Carolina. His springboard was a fiery on-air exchange with Fox analyst Juan Williams at a debate in Myrtle Beach held on Martin Luther King Day. Williams, who is black, asked Gingrich about his campaign trail comments that inner city children lacked a “work ethic” and should work as “janitors” in schools. Weren’t these remarks “insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?” “No,” Gingrich shot back. His answer was greeted with rapturous applause. “Only the elites despise earning money,” he said. Gingrich carried the state’s primary five days later.
Some in Romney’s camp blamed the outcome on Ailes. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s media strategist, later told Romney’s advisers that he thought Ailes put a black newsman onstage as a way of symbolically putting Obama in a room filled mainly with white conservatives. Gingrich’s defiant retort, red meat in the cradle of Dixie, was a symbolic smack-down of the president.
In one editorial meeting, Fox News executive Suzanne Scott wondered aloud if Ailes was damaging the party by stoking on-air death matches. “You can create a Reagan through an intra-party fight,” Ailes responded. “If there’s a fight, we should be the one doing the shooting.”
By any measure, 2012 was shaping up to be a phenomenal year for Ailes: Fox News was on track to make $1 billion in profit, the network was in the driver’s seat during the fractious Republican primary, and it still was crushing its cable news rivals. And yet, to some who knew him, Ailes seemed to be consumed by increasingly paranoid and morbid thoughts. “Listen, one out of every twenty-five people in America is a psychopath,” he told his executives. Petty grievances and past battles triggered outsized responses.
In the fall of 2011, Ailes found himself in a row with Google after the company co-sponsored a GOP debate with Fox at the Orlando Convention Center in Florida. Michael Clemente had worked hard to develop the relationship with the Internet search giant, but the relationship did not last long. Ailes was furious that the third hit in search results for his name was a liberal blog called rogerailes.blogspot.com (“Not affiliated with the fat FOX fuck,” the blog informed readers at the top of its homepage). Ailes told Fox executives that he wanted Google to push the blog’s ranking down. Google told Fox that they did not intervene in such matters. Afterward, Fox canceled the partnership and did not co-host future debates with Google.
Ailes spoke frequently about death. “I’d give anything for another ten years,” Ailes would say. Having a child amplified these sentiments. “I don’t want the kid growin’ up in a fouled-up world,” he told a reporter. “He has common feelings of a parent who wants to protect a son,” a close colleague said. “The thing is, most parents don’t run a television network.” To prepare Zachary for his absence, he gave him an accelerated education. When Zachary was twelve, Roger set up a summer internship for him at the Manhattan-based PR firm the Dilenschneider Group, whose founder, Robert Dilenschneider, was Ailes’s personal PR consultant. Each morning, Zachary would put on a coat and tie and get driven in Roger’s News Corp SUV to the office. Around this time, Roger told a journalist that he set aside boxes filled with keepsakes. Besides family photographs and letters, the contents included a pocket-size copy of the Constitution (“The founders believed it and so should you,” he wrote on it), press clippings lionizing his accomplishments, some gold coins (“in case everything goes to hell”), and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, with a note inscribed on the opening page:
Avoid war if at all possible but never give up your freedom—or your honor. Always stand for what is right.
If absolutely FORCED to fight, then fight with courage and win. Don’t try to win … win!
Love,
Dad
But there was more on his mind than his own mortality. He sometimes feared the worst for Zachary. In February 2012, Gordon Stewart received an unexpected, hysterical call from Ailes.
“You’re putting a target on my son’s back!” he screamed. “You’ll be responsible if something happens!”
Stewart, who had to hold the phone away from his ear, asked Ailes what on earth he was talking about.
That week, Philipstown.info published a brief item about recent hearings of the local planning board. The final paragraph reported that Ailes and his neighbor were seeking approval to adjust the line between their properties, which were owned by “Hudson Valley 2009, formed by Roger Ailes; Viewsave LLC; and Gerald Morris.”
“I’ll sue you!” Ailes yelled into the phone.
The article, he said, put Zachary in danger because it disclosed the existence of a trust. He began fulminating about unrelated disputes, including the old charge that Stewart encouraged his employees to quit without giving notice. “You must know I did no such thing,” Stewart said.
“You’re a liar!”
“Roger, since you called and I said hello, you have insulted my integrity, called me a liar to my face, have threatened me with a lawsuit, accused me of potentially being an accomplice to the murder of your son,” Stewart said. “Can you explain to me how you can expect that approach will advance the purpose of your calling?”
Ailes paused. “You need to get help!” he blurted out and hung up.
An hour later, Ailes called back. This time, he calmly asked Stewart to take down the article from the website. Stewart told him he would get back to him. After discussing his concerns with his editor, Kevin Foley, and the reporter on the story, Stewart called Ailes and informed him that he would not be removing it.
“You don’t know how people are out to get me! I asked you for a favor and you’re turning me down.”
“First of all,” Stewart said, “there’s no mention of your son. There’s nothing in this article that would jeopardize you and your family. You’re asking me to remove what happened at a public meeting, and I can’t do that.”
Ailes repeated his claim that Stewart needed mental help. The conversation ended there. At home that night, Stewart’s cell phone rang. It was Ailes calling for the third time that day. Stewart didn’t pick up.
Later that month, Ailes’s old nemesis David Brock coauthored a new book, The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine, which synthesized the most damaging researc
h that Media Matters had published over the past decade on its website. “He was obsessed with Brock’s book,” one Fox contributor recalled. In one meeting, Ailes said he couldn’t “do anything” until it was published. Highlighting leaked emails from Fox executives, which expressed overt right-wing bias, and detailing wild on-air claims about Obama’s religion, background, and policies, the text provided Fox’s detractors with rounds of ammunition to deploy in their battle to define Ailes as a master propagandist. In retaliation, Fox aired segments claiming Brock was mentally unstable.
Google, Media Matters, and Philipstown.info were new media antagonists. Ailes’s threats did not have the same effect on them that they did on legacy media outlets. This was especially the case with Gawker. On April 10, the gossip website introduced a new series. “What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole—a longstanding, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization,” the editors wrote. The columns brought about a minor media convulsion, but the show had a short run. Within twenty-four hours, Fox executives successfully identified the Mole as Joe Muto, a thirty-year-old associate producer who’d worked at the network for eight years, and fired him.
When Muto quickly landed a low-six-figure book deal in early May to write about his exploits, Ailes decided to send a message. Jimmy Gildea, Ailes’s security guard, told the boss he could press charges. “If this Gawker paid for stolen goods, it could be part of the crime, same as if somebody hires a hit man,” the former cop said. Brian Lewis wanted Ailes to let it go, but was overruled. “I told them,” Lewis said, “but I was told that legal would be handling this from here forward. I’m like, Okay.”
At 6:30 in the morning on April 25, officers from the New York district attorney’s office arrived at Muto’s apartment with a warrant charging him with grand larceny and conspiracy, among other charges. They seized his iPhone, laptop, and old notebooks. A year later, a month before his book was published, Muto appeared in handcuffs at the Manhattan Criminal Court, where he pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanor charges: attempted unlawful duplication and criminal possession of computer-related material. The judge fined Muto $1,000, ordered him to forfeit a $5,000 fee he earned from Gawker for reporting on Fox, confiscated his Mac, and ordered him to do ten days of community service and two hundred hours of private service.
In the closing weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign, Ailes’s worldview radiated from his daily editorial meetings onto the screen. “He likes to raise questions in chyrons,” a senior producer said, referring to the graphics and the text that appear at the bottom of the screen. “Is Obama a socialist? He tells producers that such an approach is better than simply saying Obama is a socialist.” Ailes’s anchors and pundits breathlessly inflated a panoply of administration blunders into full-blown conspiracies. While Fox reporters did some enterprising coverage of the deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, the journalism was undermined by one host claiming it was “the biggest news story since Watergate.” A few days before the election, the mother of Sean Patrick Smith, a State Department employee killed in Benghazi, said that Fox’s reports had caused her to believe that “Obama murdered my son.” Fox hyped the influence of fringe groups like the New Black Panther Party and pushed fears of stolen elections. “ELECTION OFFICIALS IN BATTLEGROUND STATE OF OHIO FEAR WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD,” one on-screen banner read.
Ailes’s executives flattered him with suggestions that he go on camera and deliver the attack lines himself or even run for president. (Michael Clemente had “Ailes 2012” bumper stickers printed and distributed around the second floor.) At some moments, Ailes demurred. “Those days are gone,” he told his team. At other moments, he indulged them. That summer, he told his inner circle at the afternoon strategy meeting that he wanted to host a talk show. His PR deputy, Irena Briganti, who was sitting in the room, advised him against it. “The media will go after you,” she warned.
So when Ailes wanted to get his message out, he often turned to his lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., who took to Fox & Friends to spread it. In private, Johnson spoke of Ailes like a father. Johnson told a Fox colleague Ailes thought of him as a son. Owing to his special status, Johnson was allowed to use the teleprompter to read from scripts, a perk that was normally reserved for Fox hosts. “He can load a script directly into the teleprompter. So it’s not even Ailes unplugged. It’s Ailes plugged in,” one person familiar with the matter said. Johnson served up frightening scenarios filled with Muslim extremists and Occupy Wall Street anarchists and overreaching government bureaucrats, lacing his commentary with Nixonian bogeymen. On the day before Obama and Romney squared off in their final debate on foreign policy, Johnson discussed the situation in Benghazi. He speculated about whether Obama had known about the attack early enough to have ordered military action to save the Americans who were killed. “If he did nothing, then that is the shame of America,” Johnson said. “I have no evidence for this,” he mused, but “were these people expendable as part of a Mideast foreign policy?”
On the afternoon of November 6—Election Day—Ailes had lunch with Karl Rove, who still believed in a Romney win. Few Fox pundits had stumped as hard as Rove had for the candidate. Rove’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, had vowed to spend up to $300 million to back conservatives in the 2012 political campaigns. “Hell, maybe Karl’s right,” Ailes said later that day.
At 5:00 p.m., Ailes assembled his network’s election team in the second-floor conference room to discuss the night’s coverage. “Guys,” he told them, “no matter how it goes, don’t go out there looking like someone ran over your dog.” But as Fox’s exit poll team presented the numbers, Ailes came undone. “They weren’t good for Romney,” a person in the room said. “Roger started arguing about how the sample skewed toward liberals.” Ailes said, “Liberals like to share their feelings, and conservatives work, so they don’t vote until later.” Arnon Mishkin, the head of Fox’s decision desk team, told Ailes that the data accounted for a sample skew. It appeared that Romney was going to be trounced. Worse, so-called late deciders were breaking for Obama.
“Thank you, Chris Christie,” Ailes grumbled. He was still furious that Christie had given Obama a bipartisan photo op on the New Jersey coastline after Hurricane Sandy.
“Actually, that’s not true,” Mishkin said. “We asked people that. There’s no data in the polling to suggest that Sandy hurt Romney.”
“Well, hugging the guy couldn’t help people feel good about Romney either,” Ailes countered.
Data was no substitute for what his gut told him. “Everyone left that room with the knowledge that Roger didn’t believe the polls,” a participant said. His opinion would be channeled on-air later that night, with embarrassing consequences.
About an hour later, Ailes settled into a plush chair in the Fox Sports Suite. A couple hundred people, including Rupert Murdoch, mingled in the room snacking on sushi and lamb kabobs. One Fox executive recalled he made sure to avoid eating the raw fish in front of Ailes. “Sushi is liberal food,” he explained. The election coverage played out on eight flat-screen televisions mounted on the wall. Around 8:00, Beth arrived. The PCN&R was going to press that night. She sat beside Ailes reviewing the week’s edition on her iPad. Shortly before 11:00, with Romney’s chances fading, Roger and Beth called it a night. “I want to kiss Zac good night before he goes to sleep,” Ailes told a journalist, trying to put the best spin on the outcome. “If Romney wins, it’s good for the taxpayers. If Obama wins, it’s great for our ratings.”
Downstairs, Arnon Mishkin and Fox’s number crunchers were preparing to call Ohio for Obama. “Let’s remember this is Fox News calling Ohio. This will say something beyond Ohio going for Obama,” Mishkin told Fox brass. Fox executives told Mishkin to get the numbers right and ignore the politics: “If we think Ohio has gone Obama, we call Ohio,” said a Fox News executive.
By midnight, Rove reluctantly seemed to concede. The moment became a symbol of the denialism that had taken hold on the right in the closing days of the election. On air, Dick Morris had predicted a Romney landslide, putting Romney’s odds of winning at 90 percent. In private, some Fox staffers thought the network’s boosterism had become a joke. At a rehearsal on the Saturday before the election, Megyn Kelly chuckled when she relayed to colleagues what someone had told her: “I really like Dick Morris. He’s always wrong, but he makes me feel good.”
Only half of Roger Ailes’s grand plan had come to pass. While Fox’s ratings were still unchallenged, the channel had failed to elect the next president—the circus on Fox had complicated the effort as well as assisted it. By giving airtime to the most outlandish voices on the right, Fox had helped distort the debate over the country’s future, making it easier for voters to dismiss Republican arguments. Ailes’s personal political impulses—to enlist Chris Christie, or David Petraeus—were at odds with the vivid political comedy Fox often programmed. It turned out that television and politics were different disciplines. In pursuit of ratings, Fox had sharpened national divisions—and the division had favored the Democrats. Since the Nixon administration and TVN, the right had dreamed of a television channel that could make its case with the American public, to balance the debate. “You’re a hero to our people,” one prominent conservative told Ailes at a gala at the Kennedy Center. But in 2012, by this measure, Fox had been a failure.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 49
