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

by David Brock

  Fox News continued to inflate the level of anger at these events. During an August 25 segment on a town hall meeting held by Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill, Fox aired on-screen text that read, “TOWN HALL TEMPERS: SENATOR MCCASKILL GETS BOOED,”90 along with footage of the audience booing. As the Associated Press reported, the booing wasn’t representative of the mood at the town hall: “A couple of shouts and a few boos punctuated Sen. Claire McCaskill’s health care forum in Hannibal, but mostly the crowd crammed into a grade school auditorium offered polite, if mixed, feedback.”91

  By the time August ended, Fox News had successfully put Democrats on the defensive. The goal of its one-sided coverage was simple: paint a picture of the world where Democratic members of Congress, the president, and supporters of his agenda were on the defensive. It is an understatement to say that Fox succeeded. The network’s persistent coverage of town hall meetings and amplification of Tea Party anger had shifted the national dialogue and taken the momentum away from Obama’s agenda. This would prove critical as Congress returned to work in January and the final sprint to pass health care and climate bills began.

  Early in the process, President Obama and congressional leaders made unpopular compromises on the health care bill. While many progressives in Congress and the activist community wanted single-payer health care, Obama and the Democrats decided the political reality was such that that kind of a plan was not a possibility. Instead, they agreed to leave the private insurance system intact while giving Americans the option of purchasing their health care plans from the federal government.

  This “public option” quickly became the object of relentless attacks from Fox News and conservatives across the country. As previously noted, during the summer, Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Sean Hannity that opponents of the president’s plan should refer to the “government option” instead of the “public option” to make it sound less appealing. A few weeks later, Bill Sammon decreed that Fox News employees should use Luntz’s language and refrain from saying “public option” on the air.

  As the debate picked up, conservatives demonized the public option, accusing Obama of supporting what they called “socialized medicine.” The House of Representatives was able to pass a bill that included the public option, but conservative Democrats in the Senate eventually demanded the provision’s removal. At Fox News, the elimination of the public option was a double-edged sword. When the hated policy disappeared, so did one of the network’s favorite talking points and reasons for opposing the bill.

  With that in mind, Bill Sammon drafted another e‑mail to producers, suggesting that Fox’s fight was not over:

  From: Sammon, Bill

  Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 4:02 PM

  To: 169-SPECIAL REPORT; 069-Politics; 036-FOX.WHU; 054-FNSunday; 030-Root (FoxNews.Com);

  050-Senior Producers; 051-Producers

  Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean

  Subject: Was the public option really removed? Or instead replaced with the “mother of all public options”?

  After copying and pasting several quotes praising the tentative compromise to replace the public option with a provision allowing individuals over the age of fifty-five to buy into Medicare, Sammon wrote:

  Remember, single payer was always portrayed as the ideal that liberals dared not dream was within their reach. Instead, they were going to settle for a robust public option. Now comes the spin that the public option has been dropped from the Senate compromise, as reached by the Gang of 10. But that spin, which was quickly accepted as conventional wisdom, is contradicted by the above quotes.

  Allowing more Americans to opt into Medicare would have made the system more financially solvent and provided care to millions of Americans. There was no backdoor public option, but Fox News continued to attack the compromise proposal to help Republicans stop the bill. This idea, too, was eventually taken off the table.

  Following Republican Scott Brown’s surprising victory in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, the media were ready to declare health care reform dead. However, with a few deft political moves, Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid brought it back to life. The centerpiece of the president’s push to resuscitate the bill was a bipartisan summit with leaders from both chambers of Congress that would take place at the end of February. With the showdown looming, Fox’s activism intensified.

  To understand why killing health care reform was so crucial to Fox News and conservatives in general, one needed only to look back to 1993–94 and a memo written by the Republican strategist—and Fox News contributor—William Kristol. As conservatives were formulating their opposition to President Clinton’s plan, Kristol sent a memo to Republican leaders titled “Defeating President Clinton’s Health Care Proposal.” In the memo, Kristol wrote:

  Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy—and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas. And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, still the world’s finest. On grounds of national policy alone, the plan should not be amended; it should be erased.92

  For Republicans, the same rationale still applied fifteen years later. An Obama victory on health care reform could potentially help restore America’s faith in government, something conservatives had been working for more than five decades to destroy. “Obamacare” needed to be stopped at all costs. A bipartisan summit designed to bring the parties together was simply unacceptable.

  On February 8, Rush Limbaugh spoke out against the summit. “This is no time for bipartisanship,” Limbaugh declared. “This is a setup because Obama wants to be able to blame this on the Republicans when in fact it is his own party that’s been saying ‘no’ to itself.”93

  Fox News was quick to echo Limbaugh’s disapproval. The next morning on Fox & Friends, Peter Johnson, Jr., said, “Rush is right. Of course it’s a trap. There’s such a deep chasm and wide chasm over the goals and the objectives of health care reform in this country.”94

  The theme continued throughout the week. “The only thing you can do with the Republicans is make them look bad,” Andrew Napolitano said. “I am in full accord with Rush Limbaugh on this, that this is a trap that he’s setting for the Republicans. He will look presidential and open-minded, and they will look narrow.”95

  The truth was, Republicans had no choice but to fall into Obama’s “trap” and attend the summit. The night before the meeting, Fox escalated its attacks on the Democratic plan. Karl Rove got the ball rolling during an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor. “There is a trillion dollars’ worth of additional money being spent over the next ten years,” Rove said. “It’s got to come from somebody, and it’s not just tanning salons. Remember, it’s going to come from everybody who has an insurance policy, because the Congressional Budget Office says everybody’s health care premiums are going to be higher than they would be otherwise.”96 This was a blatant distortion of the Congressional Budget Office’s report, which actually found that most people’s premiums would stay the same or decrease under health care reform.

  Later, Dick Morris continued the onslaught by reviving Palin’s award-winning lie. “What is major about this bill,” he said, “is that it gives the federal government the power to tell people, ‘No, you can’t have this bypass surgery. You have to die.’ ”97 Morris’s claim was absurd on its face.

  Fox News was equally unimpressed by the actual content of the summit. Bill O’R
eilly called the meeting “boring,”98 while Glenn Beck dubbed it “Snorefest 2010.”99 Others on Fox decided that it was embarrassing for the president to sit down with leaders of the opposing party. For example, Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer claimed that Obama had “given up the aura of the presidency—which is half king, half prime minister—and he’s now at the level of prime minister, toe-to-toe with members of Congress.”100 And after O’Reilly conceded that Obama “did a good job as moderator,” Laura Ingraham responded, “He’s the president of the United States, he’s not a moderator … He lowered himself.”101

  Additionally, Fox aired clear falsehoods from Republican lawmakers during the summit without making any effort to correct the record. For example, Major Garrett’s report on the summit included this exchange between the president and Republican Senator Lamar Alexander:

  ALEXANDER: Premiums will go up, and they will also go up because of the government mandates.

  OBAMA: It’s not factually accurate. The cost for families for the same type of coverage as they’re currently receiving would go down fourteen to twenty percent.

  ALEXANDER: I believe, with respect, you’re wrong.102

  Alexander’s assertion had been contradicted by the Congressional Budget Office, but Fox let it stand unchallenged. Garrett also aired Congressman Paul Ryan’s claim that the bill “does not reduce deficits”103 without noting the CBO’s estimate that the legislation would reduce the deficit by $130 billion over ten years.

  Following the summit, the momentum toward passage increased. When conservatives recognized that they could not defeat the bill on substance, they turned to attacking the process by which it would pass Congress.

  The House of Representatives and the Senate operate on an arcane set of rules that are incomprehensible to most casual observers. Even reporters who cover Congress day in and day out are often confused by these procedures. In order to pass the health care bill, Democrats considered using two procedural maneuvers known as “deem and pass” and budget reconciliation. On Fox News, these mundane tactical moves were portrayed as subversions of democracy, even though Republicans had adopted similar tactics in recent years when attempting to pass the Bush tax cuts and a bill permitting drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

  In March, Fox started claiming that Democrats planned to pass the bill through the House without ever holding a vote. Steve Doocy told the audience of Fox & Friends that, by using the deem and pass procedure, “they can pass the health care bill without actually voting on it.”104

  Contrary to Doocy’s suggestion, the procedural measure still required a majority vote in the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, the maneuver was renamed “Demon Pass,” an epithet that was soon adopted by the entire conservative movement.

  The second procedure that Fox News vilified was budget reconciliation. Under this procedure, Senate Democrats could pass the health care bill with fifty-one votes instead of the sixty required to break a filibuster. The attacks on reconciliation were particularly ironic given the network’s coverage of the 2005 fight over the obstruction of President Bush’s judicial nominations. At that time, many Fox commentators had proclaimed that the filibuster itself was unconstitutional.

  Far from an unprecedented ploy, budget reconciliation is a process codified in U.S. law. Major adjustments in health care policy had been enacted under reconciliation in the past. Many Americans who were left unemployed as a result of the recession were receiving health insurance through COBRA, which allows workers to keep their employer-sponsored insurance for up to eighteen months after losing their jobs. COBRA is an acronym for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985.

  George W. Bush had used reconciliation five times to usher major policy changes through Congress, including both of his signature tax-cut bills. But now that Obama wanted to play by the same rules, Fox News was up in arms. Moreover, the health care reform bill had already passed both the House and the Senate under normal rules. The only thing left to do was resolve the differences between the two legislative bodies.

  During the fight over judicial filibusters in 2005, Republicans threatened to use a process that Senator Trent Lott termed the “nuclear option,” whereby the Senate president would rule on a point of order declaring the use of the filibuster for judicial nominations unconstitutional. Realizing that the “nuclear option” wouldn’t go over so well with the public, Republicans eventually tried to rebrand the procedure as the “constitutional option.”

  In 2010, Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Bret Baier, Dick Morris, and Bill Sammon all mislabeled the budget reconciliation process the “nuclear option.” For example, Baier declared that reconciliation “was once called the nuclear option” before airing clips of what he claimed were Democrats criticizing the procedure “when Republicans were using it.”105 But that wasn’t the case at all. The video showed Democrats criticizing Lott’s “nuclear option,” which was an unprecedented attempt to change the Senate rules without a vote. Budget reconciliation was a tool, codified in law, that had been used dozens of times since the 1980s.

  Predictably, newly minted Fox contributor Sarah Palin joined in the attacks, inarticulately claiming that Democrats were trying to “cram through via reconciliation, this scheme, this government growth takeover of too many aspects of our health care.” Palin added, “The risk is this one-sixth of our economy being so controlled and one-sixth of our society being so controlled by government with this takeover of health care.”106

  The truth was, the Senate was using reconciliation only to alter aspects of the bill to gain final approval in the House. The total changes comprised fewer than a hundred pages, amending the legislation that was more than a thousand pages long.

  Of course, Fox wasn’t interested in the intricacies of Senate procedure. Led by Glenn Beck, who had declared in November that the bill’s passage would mean “the end of America as you know it,” the network had spent thousands of hours trying to kill health care reform. And with the bill on the verge of passage, the rhetoric became even more unhinged.

  On March 16, Beck stated, “You know and I know in this twenty-three-hundred-page bill that includes education now, the control that this government has is endless. They will—if this passes, they will control every aspect of your life.” Moments later, Beck added, “They will be able to—there is places in here that if you can be deemed someone who maybe shouldn’t have a baby, they can have their people come in. The government is in our homes on this.”107 Three days later, Beck added to his bizarre rant by asking, “If this passes, don’t we lose, really, the Democratic Party to the socialists?”108

  Meanwhile, Bill Hemmer suggested that Americans could be thrown in jail because of the bill’s requirements. “The mandate would tell Americans you’ve got to buy health insurance, if not you could be fined, and I guess eventually that could lead to prison,” he said. “I mean, this—the way you understand it right now, could people be going to jail for not owning health insurance?”109 There was no provision in the bill establishing criminal penalties for noncompliance with the individual mandate; the consequence was a fine from the IRS.

  Fox & Friends was even more shameless in its advocacy. While the show’s hosts teased a segment about the health care bill on March 18, an on-screen graphic superimposed the words “DON’T DO IT”110 over an image of President Obama exiting Air Force One. Later that day on Twitter, Laura Ingraham announced, “I’ll be hosting the O’Reilly Factor on Friday, 8pm eastern. Let’s kill the bill!”111 Ingraham seemed to be echoing the sentiment of the full-time host, who declared that “Obamacare is a huge risk for the country, and at this point, I believe the risk is not worth taking.”112

  Once again, Fox shed the pretense of objective journalism by repeatedly encouraging viewers to contact members of Congress to express their opposition to the bill. On March 19, FoxNation.com reported what it judged to be the “breaking news” that Rush Limbaugh w
as urging Americans to “Keep Calling Congress.”113 The website touted Limbaugh’s criticism of the bill and provided the phone number for the congressional switchboard so readers could take action.

  Glenn Beck also boosted Limbaugh’s effort, saying, “Rush Limbaugh, for only the second time in his career, told his audience yesterday to flood the switchboards of Congress and, boy, did they ever. He’s right. He said yesterday that this is the endgame. This is it. The fundamental transformation of America is here, America.”114

  Mike Huckabee told his show’s viewers, “Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are attempting to ram their massive health care bill through Congress … We must stop this bill.” Huckabee urged those watching to “call, e‑mail, write” to lawmakers and repeated his call to action while appearing on Your World with Neil Cavuto, aided by on-screen text reading “HUCKABEE: CALL CONGRESS; TELL THEM VOTE NO ON HEALTH CARE.”

  When last-minute protests against the bill were scheduled to take place outside of Congress, Fox News assumed its role as lead promoter. On March 18, Beck hosted Republican Congressman Steve King, telling him, “I hope people show up on Saturday at noon there at the Capitol and plan on just staying there. I mean, you know, camp out if you have to.”115

  Thousands did show up at the Capitol, and Fox gave the protesters wall-to-wall coverage. Nearly every speaker, including several Republican members of Congress, repeated lies about the health care reform legislation that had been prominently featured on Fox News.