The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

by David Brock

  Fox’s participation in these events became a key part of its coverage. Nightly in the weeks leading up to the Tea Parties, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck promoted their attendance on Fox News, telling their audiences as Beck did on April 6 that they could “celebrate with Fox News”10 by either attending a protest or watching one on TV. The network was now a part of the news story, not just covering it. During the same show, Beck made sure to also promote his Fox colleagues, exclaiming, “If you can’t make the one in San Antonio, please go to the one with Neil or with Sean in Atlanta. That’s supposed to be great. Greta is in Washington, D.C. Just get out and let your face be seen and connect with other people.”11

  Hannity was even more direct on April 2, telling his audience, “And don’t forget to log on to our website to get all the details about our special ‘Tax Day Tea Party’ show. That’s live in Atlanta. It’s on April fifteenth. John Rich will be there and many more; details coming up.” Hannity later said: “On April fifteenth, we’ll be broadcasting from a Tea Party in Atlanta. I will be there in Atlanta, where one of the dozens of Tea Parties around the country will be going on. And we hope you’ll be watching.”12

  In addition to Fox’s own publicity efforts on behalf of the Tea Parties, organizers used Fox and appearances by its stars as a promotional tool, as well. The Sacramento Tea Party wrote on its Facebook page, “We’ve just received notice that Fox News will be broadcasting the Your World with Neil Cavuto show live from the Sacramento Tea Party. Now we really have a chance to let the whole nation hear our voices in Sacramento. Bring your friends, family and everyone you know!”13

  AtlantaTeaParty.net shared the same level of enthusiasm about Sean Hannity’s planned attendance: “Moments ago, Sean Hannity, of Hannity on Fox News, announced that he is going to broadcast LIVE from the ATLANTA TEA PARTY!!!! Fox will also have news crews in other cities around the country at their Tea Parties. This is huge and exciting news for the Atlanta event and also for the Tea Party movement in general.”14

  In Texas, San Antonio Express-News media columnist Jeanne Jakle wrote, “Eric Adam, the media correspondent for the San Antonio Tea Party, said he’s expecting thousands to attend the event now that Beck and his national forum are involved.”15

  Back at Fox News, America’s Newsroom’s website displayed a link to “Upcoming ‘Tea Party’ protests”16 with a list of scheduled rallies, telling visitors that “protests over big government spending and bailouts are popping up all over the country.”17

  Fox hyped the events across its platforms. Bill Hemmer repeatedly promoted Tea Party developments on air. For example, on March 24, Hemmer mentioned protests in Florida and Ohio and directed viewers to learn more about the protests on his program’s website. “There’s a list of the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party events coming up on the fifteenth of April,” Hemmer told his audience. “[The events] will be a huge deal for those organizations. So check it out online right now.”18

  As Hemmer spoke, the on-screen text encouraged viewers to visit his website for a listing of the Tea Party protests.

  Overexcited hosts were not the only source of Tea Party hype on Fox. The network itself pushed the Tea Parties in ten- and thirty-second promotional spots. Between April 6 and April 15, Fox News aired at least 107 commercials for its coverage of the April 15 Tea Parties.19 The spots were thinly disguised as network promotions but were clearly crafted to advance the message of and plug the Tea Parties. For instance, here is the script of a thirty-second spot promoting Fox News’ coverage of the protests:

  ANNOUNCER: April fifteenth, all across the country, Americans are making their voices heard. In California, Texas, Georgia, Washington, D.C., citizens are standing up, saying “no” to more taxes and demanding real economic solutions.

  April fifteenth: As Tea Parties sweep the nation on Tax Day, we’re there with total fair-and-balanced network coverage—live. What is the fate of our nation? We report. You decide.20

  And the script of a ten-second spot promoting Glenn Beck’s coverage of the Tea Parties:

  Taking a stand at the Alamo: Citizens revolt against more taxes and demand change now. Plus, Ted Nugent fires back at the government. Glenn is live at the Tea Party in Texas.21

  The morning of April 15, Fox News began with a discussion of how viewers could show their support for the movement. Fox & Friends’s Gretchen Carlson recommended, “You can hang [a teabag] from your mirror, too, like fuzzy dice.”22 If you couldn’t attend a protest in person, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly told her audience, “You can join the Tea Party action from your home if you go to TheFoxNation.com … a virtual Tax Day Tea Party.”23

  As the events began, Fox’s coverage heated up. Covering one rally, Fox Business anchor Cody Willard played the role of team mascot, howling to the camera, “Guys, when are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating this country?” And when it came time to interview participants, Willard’s question to a child summed up his performance that day: “Are you worried about me taking these dollars from you … or destroying those dollars? I mean that’s what the government does, anyway.”24

  During the prime-time lineup, the network’s “opinion” hosts analyzed the day’s events. The battle lines had been drawn. Far from participants in a simple political fight, the Tea Party protesters, comprising primarily Fox viewers,25 were heroes in the ultimate battle of good versus evil.

  Others in the media took notice of Fox News’s role in the Tea Parties. During an interview on CNN, Howard Kurtz observed that Fox “practically seems to be a cosponsor” of the Tea Party protests. Kurtz pointed out that Fox contributors Newt Gingrich and Michelle Malkin were supporting the protests, commenting that “Fox News, whose new online slogan is ‘Just say no to biased media,’ began publicizing the protests. And, soon, some hosts were signing on.” Kurtz later added, “These hosts said little or nothing about the huge deficits run up by President Bush, but Barack Obama’s budget and tax plans have driven them to tea.” While Beck and Hannity “and the gang” were “paid for their opinions,” Kurtz said, “the question is whether Rupert Murdoch’s network wants to be so closely identified with what has become an anti-Obama protest movement.”26

  Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey followed Kurtz, writing, “Fox has been building up to the protests with Super Bowl–style intensity. Promos promise ‘powerful’ coverage of an event that will ‘sweep the nation.’ ” According to Rainey, Fox News gave “relentless support” to the protests. “You’d expect conservative commentators like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity to be hyping today’s wave of anti-tax ‘tea parties.’ But Fox personalities labeled ‘news’ anchors are right there with their blessings too,” he wrote.27

  As the year progressed and more Tea Parties were held throughout the nation, Fox continued to act as promoter, organizer, and cheerleader. This massive effort didn’t appear to have the approval of the boss’s boss. At a 2010 forum hosted by former Meet the Press host Marvin Kalb, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch distanced himself from the movement when questioned on the network’s role in the events: “No, I don’t think we should be promoting the Tea Party or any other party.”28

  Something was clearly amiss. How was Fox’s active role in the Tea Party movement possible, considering Rupert Murdoch’s directive? Less than a week later, this contradiction came to a head inside Fox.

  Sean Hannity was scheduled to tape his April 15, 2010, show at the Cincinnati Tea Party’s 2010 Tax Day Tea Party. The event required paid admission, and, according to the group, “All proceeds benefit the Cincinnati Tea Party.”29 The Cincinnati Enquirer even reported that the twenty-dollar premium seats would give attendees “a chance to be on TV,”30 linking the fund-raising for the Tea Party to Fox.

  Fox News quickly responded. According to the Los Angeles Times:

  Senior Fox News executives said they were not aware Hannity was being billed as the centerpiece of the event or that Tea Party organizers were charging for admission to Hanni
ty’s show as part of the rally. They first learned of it Thursday morning from John Finley, Hannity’s executive producer, who was in Cincinnati to produce Hannity’s show. Furious, top officials recalled Hannity back to New York to do his show in his regular studio. The network plans to do an extensive post-mortem about the incident with Finley and Hannity’s staff.31

  The Tea Parties—and the coverage they received—created a sense that the president was not invincible and that his agenda could be stopped. Perhaps most important, this conservative uprising made President Obama’s grassroots operation, Organizing for America, seem impotent. The strength of the grassroots on both sides was on the minds of many political observers in Washington as Congress began fighting over President Obama’s health care and climate bills. With the Tea Party movement looming large, Democrats in swing districts watched the Tea Parties fearfully.

  In January 2009, it looked as if Obama could buck history—as Bush did after 9/11—and win seats in Congress during the midterm election. But the Tea Parties flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. Ever the political strategist, Roger Ailes knew this would be the case, which is why Fox News put so much effort into promoting the Tea Party.

  “In 2010, the coverage was certainly aimed at taking advantage of doubts that were arising about Obama from a lot of different quarters,” says Michael Shanahan, former reporter for the Associated Press and assistant director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. “When the Tea Party got going and the suspicions about the health care bill got out and started showing up, Fox ran with those stories and got them out there. In that way, they contributed to some of the political shift in the country. [Fox News] certainly exploited it and tilted their coverage to take advantage of the attitude.”32

  The bigger and more powerful the opposition movement seemed, the less likely the president’s legislation was to pass Congress. The movement’s actual size didn’t matter, only its perceived power according to the media. And for those watching Fox News on Capitol Hill at that moment, no movement was more powerful than the Tea Party.

  During his first year in office, President Obama set his sights on several major policy goals, in addition to rebuilding the economy. When it became clear early on that the administration and congressional Democrats would prioritize health care and climate change, Fox News led the charge against needed reforms, using a barrage of falsehoods and misleading stories with one goal in mind: weakening the president of the United States.

  Ultimately, it would not have mattered what legislation President Obama was attempting to pass into law. If his agenda had included “The Fox News Must Be on TV in Every Home Act,” the network would have opposed it. Preventing a liberal president from appearing to succeed was more important than the popularity or effectiveness of any particular piece of legislation. Since health care reform and clean energy were issues that had strong support from the American people, it would be an uphill climb.

  For decades, reforming the nation’s health care system has been the preeminent progressive cause. Numerous times, most recently in 1993, the hope existed of actually achieving this goal, only to be thwarted by conservative and industry lobbying and grassroots efforts. Not only had the election of Barack Obama increased faith among progressives that health care reform would pass, but state reforms such as the Massachusetts plan stewarded by former and current presidential candidate Mitt Romney also seemed to demonstrate than even Republicans had recognized reforming our health care system as a national priority. Nevertheless, conservatives, led by Fox News, decided it was not to be—they would fight President Obama’s reforms, many of which where taken directly from conservative Heritage Foundation experts.

  First, Fox News personalities claimed that there was no health care crisis in need of a solution. As Steve Doocy told the audience of Fox & Friends in July 2009, “Currently, ninety percent of all Americans have got some sort of health care coverage, which means they are effectively blowing up the system for five percent.”33

  But denying the problem wasn’t enough. Fox News needed to terrify its viewers about the consequences of reforming the health care system. “We’re gonna have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, ‘You’re dead,’ ” Sean Hannity told his audience. “It’s a death sentence.”34

  Meanwhile, after watching the deficit balloon for years under President Bush with little comment, Fox News hosts and contributors suddenly became concerned with the fiscal impact of health care reform. Karl Rove, who helped shape many of the Bush administration’s policies that added trillions to the national debt, warned Fox viewers that Obama was “planning on a 1-trillion, 420-billion—420-million-dollar price tag of additional spending over the next ten years.”35

  And, of course, Fox would repeatedly promote the conservative nightmare that Obama was going to impose a nationalized “single-payer” system like Canada’s or the United Kingdom’s. Anchor Bret Baier reported, “President Obama spent a good deal of time at that news conference [on June 23] talking about health care reform, and Canada’s medical system has been cited as a possible model.”36 In reality, Obama, as president, had never proposed a single-payer system—something many progressives would have cheered.

  Sean Hannity went a step further, claiming the bill would ban private insurance. “The one thing that we do know in the health care bill is that … the bill says that if you don’t have your insurance the year this legislation is implemented, you can’t have a private insurance company,” said Hannity. “So that will end—hang on—that will end private insurance.”37

  Quite the opposite. The Obama plan relied on the private market as the primary provider of insurance, much to the consternation of many in the progressive movement.

  “They were selecting out the information available that was going to appeal to the people who had an opinion about health care, but no facts,” according to Bill Kovach, founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. “It was an opinion they chose to reinforce, an opinion not based on facts.”38

  While each of these distortions made an impact, none was more damaging than the idea that health care reform would create “death panels” with the power to decide who receives treatment and who is left to die. The “death panel” lie became impossible to kill and drove the national conversation about health care reform for months. It was no surprise that the debate was taken over by a single falsehood—in the era before Fox News, conservatives had used the same tactic to kill the last major push for health care reform.

  In 1994, just days before President Clinton was scheduled to deliver the State of the Union address, Betsy McCaughey, then a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, published a factually challenged article in The New Republic claiming that Clinton’s health care bill would ration care and prevent patients from making their own medical decisions. As Tom Wolfe wrote in the New York Post, “that one article shot down the entire blimp.”39

  It turned out that McCaughey was not acting on her own but working inside a network of conservatives funding efforts to defeat the bill. An internal Philip Morris memo titled “Tobacco Strategy” states that company staff “worked off the record with Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part expose in The New Republic on what the Clinton Plan means to you.”40

  Roger Ailes, while at CNBC, was also moonlighting for the tobacco industry’s campaign against health care reform. He had maintained a consulting relationship with the tobacco industry dating back to the late 1980s. While working for George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988, Ailes also fought to oppose a twenty-five-cent-a-pack tax increase on cigarettes in California. “The antismoking zealots tried first to throw water in everybody’s face,” commented Ailes at the time. “Now, they’re throwing legislation.”41 His $20 million ad campaign failed to win over voters, but in a memo recapping the campaign, Ailes Communications boasted, “Although we were not successful, the CAUTI [Californians Against Unfair Tax Increases] camp
aign moved an extremely large number of voters to our position.”42

  One of the proposed funding mechanisms for the 1993 health care plan was a significant increase in the federal tax on a pack of cigarettes. The tobacco companies lined up to oppose the proposal.

  At the time according to a February 1993 Philip Morris budget memo, Roger Ailes was receiving $15,000 per month for “general media strategy.”43

  In May, a memo from Philip Morris spokesperson Craig Fuller detailed some of Ailes’s efforts: “Roger Ailes and I have talked about running ads with a coalition we will form … one name ‘Coalition for Fair Funding of Health Care.’ ”44 Another memo from July 6, 1993, tasked Ailes to “develop ad copy for review, testing and approval by senior management.” It notes, next to Ailes’s name, “Real people affected by taxes.”45 On a subsequent page, Roger Ailes and two colleagues are charged with finding “shows where we can deliver our message” in addition to creating “counter talking points.”46

  Ailes joined CNBC in August 1993. As head of a financial news network that was covering the issue of health care reform and its impact on businesses and the stock market, he should have ceased his consulting activities. However, according to tobacco company documents, Ailes continued to work for the industry. A document titled “Tobacco Strategy Review,” dated March 22, 1994, reads, “We have developed ads on FET [federal excise tax] developed by Ailes Communications. Only a couple were run and they were run under the name of a tax organization as focus groups showed this was most effective.”47 Then, in June 1994, Philip Morris vice president Thomas Collamore sent a memo to Craig Fuller noting, “We pay [Roger Ailes] 5k a month to be available.”48 Even as head of the preeminent financial news network, Ailes would not cease his political activities.