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

by David Brock

  On March 13, several months before Van Jones’s resignation, Beck announced the launch of his 9/12 Project, a purportedly nonpartisan movement designed to “bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001,” when we “were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and the principles of the greatest nation ever created.”33

  Leading up to the 9/12 Project’s signature event, a rally in Washington, D.C., on September 12, 2009, Beck frequently touted the initiative’s effectiveness in organizing followers. During his August 12 Fox News show, he claimed the 9/12 Project would give “an outlet, a voice to connect, because you needed to community organize … Well, you have already done it. There are Nine/Twelve Projects and rallies happening all over. The biggest one seems to be in Washington, D.C., on September twelfth.”34

  On August 27, Beck said, “A few months ago, I told you, you got to know you’re not alone. You’ve got to know. You got to unite. Talk to people. Make sure you know you’re not alone, through the Nine/Twelve Project. We started that. Millions now involved across the country and the Nine/Twelve Project and other organizations like it. I knew we needed to connect with one another.”35

  The next day, Beck described his “March on Washington” as something “worth standing up for,” adding, “I hope to see you in Washington. I will make sure you’re seen all over the country.”36

  Predictably, Beck’s rally received heavy promotion on Fox News, the Fox Business network, FoxNation.com, and FoxNews.com. On the afternoon of Saturday, September 12, Beck broadcast a two-hour special edition of his show.

  The media rewarded Beck’s crusade against Van Jones with extensive coverage of the rally on 9/12. According to Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post, “The other networks indeed covered the protest, which—like similar demonstrations across the country—were heavily promoted by Fox, especially talk show host Glenn Beck … ABC, for instance, covered it Saturday and Sunday on Good Morning America and Sunday on World News, along with extensive reports by ABC Radio and the network’s website. NBC covered it Saturday on Nightly News and the next morning on Today. CBS covered it on the Evening News. CNN covered the Saturday protests during the 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. hours, as well as on other programs afterward. Correspondents such as NBC’s Tom Costello, ABC’s Kate Snow and CBS’s Nancy Cordes were involved in the coverage.”37

  With Beck’s influence on the rise in the wake of Jones’s ouster, Fox News began targeting other Obama administration staffers whom they labeled “czars.” Although the term “czar” has been used for decades to describe certain positions in the executive branch, Beck and others on Fox applied the term loosely and used it rhetorically to link Obama to Soviet communism. Of course, Russia had czars only in the prerevolutionary period.

  One day before Jones resigned, Beck announced his next targets on Twitter: “Watch Dogs: FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER. Do not link before burning to disc.”38 Sunstein and Browner both worked in the Obama White House, while Mark Lloyd was the Federal Communication Commission’s Chief Diversity Officer.

  Fox Business host Eric Bolling echoed Beck, writing: “Van Jones resigns amid controversial past. How about J Holdren Science Czar (mass sterilizations) and Cass Sunstein…”39

  At a rally in West Virginia, Sean Hannity gloated about Jones’s resignation and declared that “my job starting tomorrow night is to get rid of every other [czar]. I promise you that!”40

  On September 8, Megyn Kelly reported that “more of President Obama’s special advisers are now under scrutiny after the resignation of his green jobs czar.”41 This scrutiny, of course, was coming from her own network.

  That evening, Hannity launched his promised witch hunt, telling viewers that White House science and technology adviser John Holdren “advocated compulsory abortion.”42 This claim was not true. PolitiFact.com had fact-checked this allegation months earlier, stating, “We think it’s irresponsible to pluck a few lines from a 1,000-page, 30-year-old textbook, and then present them out of context.”43

  Meanwhile, on Glenn Beck’s show, Michelle Malkin targeted yet another member of the Obama administration. “I have been warning about energy czar Carol Browner since December,” she said. “I followed her career, her subversion of transparency.”44 Beck had previously called Browner a “socialist.”45

  The race for the next scalp was on. Anyone associated with the Obama administration could come under attack. Past statements, no matter how innocuous, would be taken out of context and blared across Fox News Channel and other network properties. Fox’s next success, though, did not involve an Obama administration figure, but a decades-old foil of the conservative movement.

  Chapter 7

  Six Steps

  They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack.

  —a former Fox News employee

  The conservative movement had long been obsessed with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a membership organization designed to serve the needs of low-income Americans. There was perhaps no progressive group that could arouse the visceral reaction among conservatives that ACORN provoked. From conservative elites to grassroots activists, they might not have known exactly what ACORN did, but they knew it was evil. This was evident in videos that appeared on YouTube in October 2008. When approached by videographers outside of rallies, McCain supporters would direct some of their ire toward the organization.

  What made this antipoverty group the object of so much derision? The answer was as straightforward as it was offensive. ACORN’s registration drives and ballot initiatives had helped bring out millions of voters all over the country—1.3 million in 2008 alone. These voters, as a result of the constituency that ACORN served, were often African-American and poor, and therefore demographically linked to the Democratic Party, and so the organization needed to be stopped. It was political racism, plain and simple.

  Wade Rathke founded ACORN in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1970. Rathke had worked as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization and wanted to broaden his efforts beyond welfare recipients. Early on, the organization promoted Vietnam veterans’ rights and helped people living in poverty obtain clothing and furniture.

  The group became involved in politics for the first time in 1972, endorsing two of its members for the school board in Little Rock. From there, the group expanded nationally, serving communities in need across the country.

  In 1986, ACORN created a subsidiary, the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC). According to its website, “Since its inception, AHC has assisted over 45,000 families to become first time homeowners, and has rehabilitated over 750 vacant and abandoned housing units. Virtually all of ACORN Housing’s work takes place in areas that have been seriously disinvested and forgotten.”1

  ACORN was not without controversies of its own making. In 2000, Wade Rathke’s brother, Dale, was caught embezzling close to one million dollars from the organization. When the alleged embezzlement was discovered, the Rathkes returned the money but did not report the incident to ACORN’s board or law-enforcement agencies. Further complicating the situation, although Wade Rathke resigned his position on the board after the embezzlement became public, he was allowed to remain on the payroll of the organization. While the scandal damaged ACORN’s reputation, it continued to thrive, registering more and more low-income voters.

  In 2008, ACORN presented a tempting political target for the right, due to its loose ties to Barack Obama. In 1992, he had organized an ACORN-affiliated get-out-the-vote campaign in Chicago, which helped elect Carol Moseley Braun as only the second African-American senator since Reconstruction. Additionally, Obama later worked as part of a team of lawyers who helped sue the governor of Illinois on behalf of ACORN, and he spoke at two ACORN training sessions in the 1990s. These were tenuous conn
ections, but they were enough for Fox News and the conservative movement to accuse Obama of being deeply involved with what they deemed a criminal organization.

  In Fox News’s reporting during the presidential race, ACORN was targeted first for voter registration irregularities and then over accusations that its dealings with mortgage lenders had helped cause the housing crisis.

  The allegations of voter fraud stemmed from the fact that voter registration in the United States is a difficult business, with complicated rules that often vary from location to location. ACORN would collect hundreds of thousands of registrations, some of which contained fraudulent or funny names. In several localities the organization was essentially defrauded by its own paid canvassers, who filled out these phony registrations in order to collect paychecks without doing the work. While this proved embarrassing for ACORN and time-consuming for election officials, there was no chance that anyone using these fake names would end up casting illegal votes.

  Rather than automatically discarding such registrations, many state laws required ACORN to submit them to local boards of elections, who would judge their validity. Instead of crediting the organization for its efforts to expand the electorate, Fox News mocked ACORN for following the law.

  On October 14, 2008, Megyn Kelly derided ACORN’s statement that it was required by Florida law to submit a voter registration form filed under the name “Mickey Mouse” to the Orange County board of elections. When Bill Hemmer noted that the form in question had been rejected, and that “ACORN says they are required to turn in every application that is filled out, even if it says Mickey Mouse,” Kelly replied: “I love that, they’ve got the obligation to submit it no matter what it says. Mickey Mouse, Jive Turkey, which we saw yesterday. How are we to know?”2

  Despite Kelly’s scorn, ACORN was telling the truth—under Florida law, the organization could be fined up to a thousand dollars for every registration form withheld.3 The organization had to either submit registrations it thought might be fraudulent or face penalties. And yet, by obeying the law, ACORN opened itself up to attacks from Fox News and other conservative media organizations.

  ACORN’s involvement in increasing home ownership among minorities also gave Fox News commentators an opening to claim the group was responsible for the housing crisis. Reporting from the White House on October 5, Bret Baier said, “And the risks kept rising over the years, in part because the federal government wanted it that way. In particular there was the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, passed in 1977 during Jimmy Carter’s first year in office. The law increased oversight of financial institutions to ensure that they were giving credit to low-income families so that more people would have the chance to own homes.”4

  Later in the segment, Baier said, “Indeed, ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, would before long come up with a new tactic: challenging a thrift merger in Illinois, claiming they didn’t make the kind of loans that ACORN felt were required under the CRA. The bank complained that such loans would be financially irresponsible.” He then attempted to link the problem to Obama, saying, “A young community organizer named Barack Obama worked closely with the ACORN activists behind the new strategy. And that strategy worked. ACORN prevailed in court, and soon credit standards were being lowered across the country.”5

  These accusations were patently false. Soon after the election, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke wrote: “Our own experience with CRA over more than 30 years and recent analysis of available data, including data on subprime loan performance, runs counter to the charge that CRA was at the root of, or otherwise contributed in any substantive way to, the current mortgage difficulties.”6 Furthermore, Obama’s work with ACORN had nothing to do with the CRA or the housing crisis that coincided with his presidential campaign.

  After Barack Obama’s inauguration, Fox News’s fictitious attacks on ACORN continued. Glenn Beck, in particular, spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the organization, devoting dozens of segments to supposed “connections” between ACORN and AmeriCorps, the AARP, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Service Employees International Union. While most of these ties were uncontroversial or tangential, Beck consistently used ACORN as a bludgeon to bash the Obama administration and its policies.

  The straw that finally broke ACORN’s back was a videotaped stunt conducted by conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. O’Keefe’s patron, Andrew Breitbart, published heavily edited versions of the tapes that supported false charges against ACORN on his website. Fox News then parroted the allegations on the air.

  Andrew Breitbart worked alongside Matt Drudge, aggregating content for the popular conservative-leaning website Drudge Report. He emailed Drudge in 1995, asking him, “Are you 50 people? A hundred people? Is there a building?”7 Quite the opposite, “Drudge was at that time writing, editing and maintaining his site by himself.”8 This was several years before he broke the Monica Lewinsky story.

  When he emailed Drudge, Breitbart previously worked on digital content in the early days of the Internet at E! Entertainment Television. He soon began working at the Drudge Report. In a 2005 interview, Breitbart reminisced, “I thought what he was doing was by far the coolest thing on the Internet. And I still do.”9

  Arianna Huffington approached Breitbart in 2005, and he helped her launch The Huffington Post. Leaving after a few months, he went on to found Breitbart.com, which primarily served as a news aggregator. The Drudge Report would often link to newswire articles posted on the site, ballooning its traffic. He launched Breitbart.tv in 2007 to serve as a video aggregator. While the site was well trafficked, Breitbart had not made much of a mark with a site of his own. That would soon change.

  In September 2009, Breitbart used James O’Keefe’s videos to launch his new website, BigGovernment.com. Glenn Beck previewed the tapes on September 9, saying, “Tomorrow—tomorrow, things change. I think things change a lot for those in power. The tides are about to turn, and that will be on tomorrow’s broadcast. Trust me. Everybody now says they’re going to be talking about health care. I don’t think so. Tomorrow you will see an exclusive—stuff on tomorrow’s program. Don’t miss it.”10

  The next morning the first set of videos were posted on Big

  Government.com. O’Keefe exclaimed: “Hannah Giles and I took advantage of ACORN’s regard for thug criminality by posing the most ridiculous criminal scenario we could think of and seeing if they would comply—which they did without hesitation.”11 This was far from the truth. What actually occurred was that O’Keefe and Giles had visited ACORN offices around the country, supposedly posing as a pimp and a prostitute. Their goal was simple: try to entrap low-level employees on video.

  By the next day at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, Fox News had aired more than seventeen segments on the videos. “I am just asking you this—please, take a stand,” Glenn Beck implored his audience a week later. “Take a stand. This is clear-cut, unadulterated, taxpayer-funded corruption. You love your children. You love your country just like I do. You must understand that what you’ve been seeing from ACORN on these tapes this past week isn’t compassion, it’s corruption!”12

  Good government had nothing to do with Fox’s interest in the story. Fox News’s hypocrisy is clear when one compares its coverage of ACORN with its coverage of real examples of corruption. Between May 8, 2006 (Glenn Beck’s first show on CNN Headline News), and September 18, 2009, Beck and Sean Hannity’s show mentioned ACORN 1,502 times. Over the same period, they mentioned Jack Abramoff or Bob Ney a combined sixty-two times. The shows mentioned Halliburton just forty-three times and Blackwater/Xe just four times, even though those scandals cost taxpayers far more money. Beck had individually aired 1,045 segments on ACORN in his career, with the vast majority, 1,002, coming in less than a single year at Fox News.13

  A Fox source explains why the network would repeat these seemingly non-newsworthy controversies ad nauseam: “
It was relentless and it never went away. If one controversy faded, goddamn it, they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction, real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.”14

  The War on Christmas was a particularly egregious example of Fox’s creating a story where none existed. Each year, as the holiday season began, the network would search for examples of individuals, corporations, or municipalities removing Christmas from the public square.

  This fight was personal to Roger Ailes, who had engaged in his own pro-Christmas activism. “The first time I ever went over there [to his son’s school], they wouldn’t put up a Christmas tree. They had a friendship tree,” said Ailes. “I said to the headmaster, ‘What the hell’s a friendship tree?’ ‘Oh, we can’t say the word Merry Christmas.’ So I wrote ‘Merry Christmas’ on the wall in crayon and left. My wife said, ‘You’re fricking five years old. What the hell are you doing writing on the school wall with a crayon?’ I said, ‘Oh, screw ’em.’ ”15