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

by David Brock

  The network’s presence could also be felt throughout the crowd. Protestors carried signs supporting and promoting the network. Invariably, those who attended believed the misinformation Fox spread about the health care bill. They claimed it would add a trillion dollars to the deficit, that patients would no longer be able to choose their doctors, and, of course, months after its being called the lie of the year, that the bill included death panels.

  “[Fox News] certainly changed the attitude about Obama’s health care plan and made people believe big government was coming to get them, that they were somehow going to be controlled by a government, that your health care would be controlled by government bureaucrats,” said George Washington University’s Michael Shanahan. “What they do is not journalism. It is propaganda.”116

  Despite Fox’s efforts, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law. But victory was fleeting, and Fox’s fight against health care reform was not over. As conservatives launched efforts to repeal, defund, and overturn the law in court, Fox News was more than ready to lend a helping hand.

  Chapter 6

  Violent Rhetoric

  If you come out and say that a guy’s a commie, fag bastard, the public turns you off, not him.

  —Roger Ailes

  On the morning of July 28, 2009, appearing on Fox & Friends, Glenn Beck declared, “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”1

  When Brian Kilmeade seemed to disagree, pointing out that President Obama was surrounded by white advisers such as David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Rahm Emanuel, Beck responded, “I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem … He has a—this guy is, I believe, a racist.”2

  Beck, who had cut his teeth in broadcasting by testing the limits of acceptable behavior on morning-zoo radio programs, had pushed the envelope before as a political pundit. On CNN Headline News, for instance, Beck opened an interview with Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives, by saying, “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ ” Beck added: “I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”3

  At Fox, Roger Ailes was willing to defend the host’s most extreme behavior. “I don’t think that he’s nuts. I think that what he’s doing is, he’s half history professor and half Shakespearean actor,” Ailes told Esquire magazine. “He admits that he’s kind of off-the-wall. If he didn’t, that would be a problem for that show. But because he’s willing to say, ‘Don’t listen to me, look it up, I’m a rodeo clown, I’m just saying this is what it looks like.’ And because there’s a lot of truth in what he says and it probably mirrors what over half of the country believes, he’s successful.”4

  Ailes had recognized decades earlier that incendiary attacks have the potential to backfire when used by political campaigns. “If you come out and say that a guy’s a commie, fag bastard, the public turns you off, not him,”5 he told The Washington Post in 1972. A news network, playing to a polarized conservative base, not seeking votes in the center, was under no such restrictions.

  From the paranoid rants about the creeping threats of communism to odd comparisons between mainstream political leaders and Nazis, Beck gave voice to some of Ailes’s deepest fears about the Obama presidency. In October 2009, Obama adviser David Axelrod was interviewed during the First Draft of History conference, hosted by The Atlantic magazine. Addressing the polarization that was infecting political discourse, Axelrod mentioned a conversation he had once with a “significant figure on the right”—later revealed to be Roger Ailes—who tried to explain to him why conservatives were suspicious of the president.

  Ailes told Axelrod he believed Obama wanted to form a national police force, based on a twenty-one-second clip from a speech where the president proposed a civilian force that would complement the military in providing humanitarian aid around the world. Axelrod quoted Ailes telling him, “You can understand why that has people very nervous. This has shades of Nazism.”6

  Glenn Beck brought Roger Ailes’s theory to Fox’s audience, claiming that President Obama’s proposal of creating a civilian humanitarian force was “about building some kind of thugocracy.”7 Later in the program Beck went a step further to claim, “This is what Hitler did with the SS. He had his own people. He had the brownshirts and then the SS.”8

  The kinship between Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck would become more evident in the spring of 2010, when the host attacked criticism of him by Jewish Funds for Justice president and CEO Simon Greer. Greer had written in a Washington Post op-ed, “If we all attended houses of worship that put government last, humankind would be last, and God would be last too.” Greer continued, “From where I stand, the house of worship you desire—where God is divorced from human dignity—is not a house of worship at all. When churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship across this country advocate for social justice, advocate for the common good, advocate for America, they, and we, walk in God’s path.”9

  Beck claimed on his radio program that Greer’s comments about putting “humankind and the common good” first were “exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany,” adding, “a Jew, of all people, should know that.”10

  In previous eras, a statement like that would have been grounds for immediate termination. But not at Fox. Glenn Beck and conservative pundits such as Ann Coulter had shifted the boundary of acceptable attacks on political opponents. What would have been a major scandal just four years earlier was now par for the course.

  In response to Beck’s taunting of Simon Greer, a group of politically mainstream rabbis and prominent Jewish figures led by Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, wrote Rupert Murdoch a private letter:

  Mr. Beck has, for quite some time, invoked the Holocaust and Nazi fascism on air in support of political arguments on a variety of subjects. He has compared public officials to Nazi party figures and characterized legitimate policy positions as akin to murderous Nazi policies … We appeal to you to consider the impact of Mr. Beck’s words; in our community, for the global understanding of the Holocaust, and for the reputation and standing of the business you have built and nurtured. You are providing him with a platform to reach millions. We believe he has been abusing that platform … With respect and friendship we request an opportunity to discuss these concerns directly with you. We are confident that you, like us, having fully considered the power of Mr. Beck’s words and the hurt and damage they are causing, will wish to work with us to rectify this situation in a responsible and productive manner.”11

  It was a simple request for reasoned and calm discourse. Nowhere did the rabbis ask Murdoch to alter the political positions or leanings of the network or its hosts. Instead, they merely asked him to respect the historic horror that was the Holocaust. The letter was forwarded to Roger Ailes, who made Fox News’s position clear. “I do not agree with your characterization of Mr. Beck or our program. In the specific language you point out, I’ve reviewed the program and Mr. Beck is talking about dictators who use ‘social justice’ language to accomplish political goals,” Ailes wrote the rabbis. “Of course social justice means different things to different audiences, however it has been used in situations leading to fascism, socialism, and communism as well.”12 The letter was an acknowledgement that, while his words were his own, Beck was speaking for the network, or at least its president.

  Like Beck, Roger Ailes is not afraid to use Nazi imagery to score points against opponents. In the wake of National Public Radio’s firing of NPR and Fox News contributor Juan Williams (for comments he made on The O’Reilly Factor about his fears of flying with men wearing “Muslim garb”), Ailes described the radio network in the f
ollowing way: “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism.”13

  In an awkward coincidence, these comments came just weeks after Rupert Murdoch had received a major award from the Anti-Defamation League, which was now forced to condemn Ailes’s remarks.

  He apologized but was hardly contrite. In a letter to Anti-Defamation League president Abe Foxman, Ailes vented that “the rabbis used us in an unscrupulous manner. Instead of quietly working with us to solve the problem internally, they put out a cheap press release to say Glenn Beck was out of line, Fox was out of line and they of course came in and told us what we could do. None of that happened. I was and still am insulted by their behavior.”14 According to his own logic, Roger Ailes should be permitted to call others Nazis because of a perceived slight by a group of rabbis.

  The only defect Roger Ailes saw in Beck’s broadcast was that he attacked Republicans too much of the time. According to Ailes, “[Beck] and I have had conversations and lunches where I say, ‘What the hell are you doing, man?’… Beck trashes Republicans every night. I’ve said to him, ‘Where the hell are you going to get your audience if you keep this up? You’re trashing everyone.’ ”15

  Glenn Beck’s declaration that the president was a racist marked a turning point. Color of Change, an online group that works to give African-Americans a stronger political voice, sent an e‑mail to supporters demanding consequences for Beck’s comments. “Together we can stop Glenn Beck,” the e‑mail stated. “Starting today we’re calling Beck’s advertisers, asking them if they want to be associated with this kind of racist hate and fear-mongering. When they see tens of thousands of people signing on behind that question, we believe they’ll move their advertising dollars elsewhere, damaging the viability of his show and possibly putting him out of business.”16

  By the end of August, approximately seventy companies had ceased advertising on Beck’s program. Although he claimed not to care, the loss of advertisers clearly angered the host, who spoke about the action repeatedly on the air. He previously had attacked Barack Obama’s Green Jobs adviser, Van Jones. In August, Beck became obsessed with him.

  Jones was a progressive activist and Yale-educated attorney from the Bay Area, where he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which works to strengthen communities in the inner city. Jones had helped launch Color of Change in 2005, and then started the group Green For All in 2007 to promote a new green economy, which he believed could provide well-paying jobs to those who had been economically left behind.

  In a move widely cheered by the left, Obama chose Jones to be the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, a position some on the right termed the “green jobs czar.” As an activist, Jones had a history of controversial statements, which Glenn Beck would use to wage a smear campaign against him.

  In 1992, Jones was arrested while protesting the acquittal of the police officers who brutally attacked Rodney King. The experience had a profound impact on Jones’s political philosophy. According to a profile of Jones in the East Bay Express:

  Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, “I met all these young radical people of color—I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ ” Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. “I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”17

  Aaron Klein of the conservative WorldNetDaily wrote about the East Bay Express story in April, but it did not receive any real coverage until July 23, when Beck declared on Fox News, “This is a guy who is a self-avowed communist and he is in the Obama administration … This guy wasn’t a radical, and then was arrested. He spent six months in jail, came out a communist.”18

  As Dave Weigel reported in The Washington Independent, “Beck took a shot at the ‘avowed communist’ Jones again on July 28, again on Aug. 4, again on Aug. 11 (‘this is a convicted felon, a guy who spent, I think, six months in prison after the Rodney King beating’), again on Aug. 13, and again on Aug. 21.”19

  On August 25, Beck began airing what Weigel called “a week-long special series, ‘The New Republic: America’s Future,’ ” in which Jones became Exhibit A of the “radical leftists currently advising the president of the United States.”20

  Beck’s obsession with Jones spread to other hosts on Fox News. “This guy reminds me of Reverend Wright,” commented Bill O’Reilly. “He’s an anti-American guy, we think. And they don’t—the Obama administration doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.”21

  Meanwhile, Beck continued his onslaught. On September 1, he ranted, “Do we want communists in the United States government as special advisers to the president?”22

  What ultimately doomed Jones’s tenure at the White House was the charge that he signed a petition distributed by conspiracy theorists claiming our government was involved in the September 11 terrorist attack. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Jones would state that the accusation was false.23 He had never accused the Bush administration of plotting the attacks. At worst, Jones carelessly added his name to a petition from a dubious source, but that didn’t matter to Beck and the conservatives who were committed to bringing him down.

  Congressional Republicans began echoing Beck’s charges. In a statement, Congressman Mike Pence called on Jones to resign, saying, “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.”24 In an open letter, Senator Kit Bond asked, “Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?”25 And Senator John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, took his message to the social networking site Twitter: “Van Jones has to go.”26

  Jones resigned on September 5, proclaiming, “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” Jones added, “I have been inundated with calls—from across the political spectrum—urging me to ‘stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”27

  After the Van Jones episode, Glenn Beck was no longer just a host; he had taken a scalp. This did not go unnoticed in the conservative movement or in the media. On September 6, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Nia-Malika Henderson wrote that Beck had “rocketed to a status as de facto leader of the opposition” and that Jones’s resignation had “confirmed Beck’s stature as the administration’s most potent foe.”28

  The most dangerous element of Beck’s successful scalping of Van Jones was that journalists now felt compelled to pay attention to his wild and untrue claims. As The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza explained on CNN, “I think when you have someone like Glenn Beck, with the ratings that Glenn Beck gets or Sean Hannity with the ratings that Sean Hannity gets, if they are every single night highlighting this you are starting as a reporter to … you’re paying more attention to it than if they ignored it. I mean, to me, the Van Jones story and this story suggest that we better pay attention because they have power. There is clearly no debate about that.”29

  While Glenn Beck’s influence was growing, his message to viewers, that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress were destroying the United States, had dangerous consequences. In April 2009, Richard Poplawski allegedly killed three Pittsburgh police officers after stockpiling guns and ammunition, fea
ring that President Obama would take away his Second Amendment rights. In an interview with Philadelphia Daily News reporter and Media Matters senior fellow Will Bunch, one of Poplawski’s best friends made it clear who his inspiration was:

  “Rich, like myself, loved Glenn Beck,” [said] Poplawski’s best friend Eddie Perkovic … For months Poplawski had been obsessed with an idea—frequently discussed by Beck, including in ads for his sponsor Food Insurance—of the need to stockpile food and even toilet paper for a societal breakdown. Poplawski was also convinced that paper money would become worthless—another claim given credence by the Fox News Channel host, particularly in close connection with his frequent shilling for the now-under-investigation gold-coin peddler Goldline International.30

  This wasn’t the only instance in which Beck’s rhetoric was linked to violent acts. Charles Wilson, a Washington State resident, was sent to prison for repeatedly threatening to kill Washington senator Patty Murray after her vote in favor of heath care reform. A cousin wrote the presiding judge, requesting leniency for Wilson:

  I found Glenn Beck about the same time Charlie did. I understand how his fears were grown and fostered by Mr. Beck’s persuasive personality. The same thing happened to me but I went in a different direction with what I was seeing. Rather than blame politicians for the current issues, I simply got prepared for what Glenn said was coming. I slowly filled our pantry as Glenn fed fear into me … While his actions were undeniably wrong and his choices were terrible, in part they were the actions of others played out by a very gullible Charlie. He was under the spell that Glenn Beck cast, aided by the turbulent times in our economy.31

  Perhaps the most spectacular incident of Beck-inspired violence occurred when Byron Williams engaged in an eleven-minute gun battle with California Highway Patrol officers in Oakland. Williams was on his way to kill employees of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation, a progressive nonprofit organization. Williams believed Tides was part of a plot orchestrated by the billionaire George Soros—one of Beck’s favorite villains—that culminated in the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Williams constructed his conspiracy theory in part based on a series of shows Beck aired in June 2010, saying Beck was “like a schoolteacher on TV … He’s got that big chalkboard and those little stickers, the decals. I like the way he does it.”32