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

by David Brock

  Part IV

  The Aftermath

  Chapter 11

  The Puppet Master

  Without exception, Fox has become a political player. It is not a news source, it is a political player.

  —Tim McGuire, Arizona State University School of Journalism

  Republicans won sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the largest gain by any party since 1948, capturing the chamber and elevating John Boehner to Speaker. In the Senate, Republicans gained six seats, allowing Democrats to maintain a slim majority. Fox’s role in this victory did not go unnoticed. The night after the election, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace strode onto the set of The Daily Show and was greeted by Jon Stewart: “Congratulations to your team at Fox. Great job. You guys did it, you worked hard and you pulled it off. Terrific.”

  “You mean the fact that we had the highest ratings,” Wallace answered. “More ratings than CNN and MSNBC combined.”

  Stewart interrupted, “No, no, no, no, no, retaking control of the House of Representatives. You did it. It was not an easy job, you know. This was a two-year plan.”1

  In the two days following the election, Fox News hosted a televised victory party featuring more than twenty-nine interviews with Republican candidates and other party officials celebrating their success. However, under this veneer of jubilation, a new battle had begun: the 2012 Fox primary.

  In 2010, all the elements of the Republican Party united under a single roof, advocating for the defeat of Democrats. With that battle won, Republicans would now fight for the soul of their own party. This squabbling pitted the establishment, led by Karl Rove, against the loud voices of the Tea Party movement, best personified by Sarah Palin.

  Establishment Republicans, while elated about Republican gains in the House, were insistent that Palin and her wing of the party had cost Republicans control of the Senate and the single biggest electoral prize—unseating Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who not only won reelection but maintained control of his chamber.

  Rove had a point. Sue Lowden, the establishment candidate, had lost the Republican primary thanks to a combination of her own missteps—such as suggesting Nevadans could barter chickens in exchange for health care—and the rising popularity of Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

  The state was the recession’s ground zero. Unemployment remained in the double digits, and a few miles from the Las Vegas strip whole developments stood empty, either never occupied or foreclosed on by lenders. Some strip malls in Clark County were offering free rent to anyone willing to open up a business. As a result, Harry Reid’s approval rating was mired in the low forties or worse.

  However, Sharron Angle seemed determined to lose the election, committing gaffe after gaffe. Despite her popularity among conservative diehards, Angle clearly was not ready for prime time. Ultimately, though he trailed in nearly every public poll, Harry Reid ended up winning the election by five percentage points.

  In Delaware, what would have been almost a sure victory for Republican Mike Castle ended with Chris Coons defeating Christine O’Donnell by more than sixteen points. Sarah Palin’s support and Sean Hannity’s barrage of promotion could not persuade voters in the moderate state to send O’Donnell to the Senate.

  In Colorado, Tea Party favorite Ken Buck lost to appointed Senator Michael Bennet by just under 1 percent of the vote. Buck had defeated Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton in the Republican primary. Norton, having already won a statewide election, would have been a favorite to win the seat.

  Some argued that these seats—and the extra resources the national party and allied groups were forced to divert from other competitive races to contest them—cost Republicans control of the Senate. In the final weeks before the election, this feud spilled out into the open.

  Just days before voters headed to the polls, Karl Rove attacked fellow Fox News contributor Sarah Palin in The Daily Telegraph, implying the reality show she had filmed was unpresidential.2 Palin fired back, asking on Greta Van Susteren’s show why Rove felt “so threatened and so paranoid?”3

  The fighting among Fox News contributors foreshadowed what was to come. The network had positioned itself at the center of the battle for the future of the Republican Party. As Politico noted in September 2010, “With the exception of Mitt Romney, Fox now has deals with every major potential Republican presidential candidate not currently in elected office.”4

  There was no medium better equipped to reach Republican primary voters than Fox News. Its audience was comprised of the most active members of the conservative base, who not only would provide votes but were also a proven source of grassroots contributions and boots on the ground. Winning over viewers in the Fox primary was perhaps as important as reaching out to voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

  Potential candidates employed by the network received more than eighty-five hours of airtime in 2010, often fielding softball questions from their colleagues. An aide to one of those who wanted to take on the president in 2012, but did not work for the network, told a Fox employee, “I wish we could get that much airtime, but, oh yeah, we don’t get a paycheck.”5

  Mike Huckabee, who hosted his own show, led the pack with forty-eight hours on the air, followed by Sarah Palin, who spent fourteen hours on the network in 2010. Newt Gingrich was on for nearly twelve hours, followed by Rick Santorum, who spent six hours talking directly to Republican primary voters on the network. The value of being a “Fox News Contributor” was far greater for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum than others. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, as the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee and the winner of the 2008 Iowa caucus respectively, were already assumed to be major figures in the party. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had been outside of electoral politics for years. Instead of being forgotten, they had access to the Republican base with regular appearances on Fox.

  Even John Bolton, the ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, suggested he might run. “I am thinking about it,” Bolton told Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney, “because I think legitimate issues of national security should be more at the center of the national debate than they have been for the last two years.”6 Bolton spent just under six hours on Fox promoting himself, while receiving a healthy paycheck for his services.

  The value of airtime can be tabulated using data from the Campaign Media Advertising Group (CMAG). The time on the network these prospective candidates received from Fox was valued at more than $54 million. As Media Matters noted in a report, “Advertisers would have spent about $31 million for Huckabee’s time for the entire year. Gingrich’s and Palin’s time each would have cost advertisers about $7.5 million each for the entire year. Santorum’s estimated ad-value equivalency for the year comes to almost $5 million, while Bolton’s is approximately $3.7 million.”7

  Fox News intended to take full advantage of its privileged position as the primary employer of the potential Republican field. Partnering with the South Carolina Republican Party, the network announced it would host the first debate of the 2012 primary season in May 2011. Now all it needed was for candidates to enter the race.

  In the 2008 election, candidates from both parties had formed exploratory committees by late winter of the previous year. However, even with Barack Obama at a weak point in his presidency, Republicans hesitated to jump in. As the winter turned to spring, not a single major candidate had announced his or her intention to run.

  Following the midterm election, there were countless questions to be answered: Would Obama be able to govern with Republicans in control of the House? Would health care reform be repealed? What investigations would Republican committee chairmen with newly granted subpoena power undertake? What was the impact on the president’s reelection chances?

  To Glenn Beck, though, there were much more important issues to cover. On election night, he was busy promoting his special about George Soros, which would air one week later. He referred to the billionaire philanthropist as a “pup
pet master” and questioned his Jewish identity.

  Beck’s rhetoric, while not overtly bigoted, was rooted in deeply anti-Semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early-twentieth-century text proposing conspiracy theories that center on Jewish plots to control the world. Additionally he had established a pattern of using the words of anti-Semites to attack Soros and other progressives.

  For example, a month earlier, he told his audience, “Many, including the Malaysian prime minister, believe it was billionaire speculator George Soros who helped trigger the [Southeast Asian] economic meltdown.”8

  The statement Beck was referring to was actually an anti-Semitic diatribe by the prime minister, who said, “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that the Malaysians are mostly Muslim.”9

  Beck’s “special” included the recitation of a decades-old lie that Soros had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. According to Beck, Soros “had to help the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors.”10

  As a fourteen-year-old boy in occupied Hungary, Soros was hidden from the Nazis by a Christian family. The man hiding Soros was assigned to go inventory the estate of a wealthy Jewish family and brought Soros along to protect him. Soros himself was never part of any property confiscation.

  Jewish leaders roundly criticized these attacks. Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, which had recently honored Rupert Murdoch at a banquet in New York, told Jewish Week, “Look, I spit on Jews when I was six years old … Does that make me an anti-Semite?” The Holocaust, Foxman explained, “is so sensitive that I’m not even sure Holocaust survivors themselves are willing to make such judgments.” He continued, “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that’s horrific. It’s totally off limits and over the top.”11

  In January 2011, the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others outside a strip mall in Arizona sent shock waves through the political world. People on all sides of the political spectrum called for the violent rhetoric that had emerged the previous summer to be toned down. Even Roger Ailes had had enough. In an interview two days after the shooting, Ailes told hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons that his message to Fox employees was, “Shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually.”12 Apparently, the memo was not received.

  Three days after the tragedy, Glenn Beck used his Fox News show to scare the network’s audience about the political implications of the Arizona shooting. He falsely claimed politicians were “pushing a ban on certain symbols and words, a ban on guns, a ban on talk radio.”13 This baseless fear of the Obama administration’s taking away people’s guns had already inspired Richard Poplawski, who allegedly killed three police officers in Pittsburgh, but Beck defied his boss’s wishes and went on the attack.

  Within hours of the shooting, online journalists dug up an image Sarah Palin had promoted before the election on her political action committee website—a map of the United States with what looked like gun sights on targeted congressional districts. One of them was aimed squarely at the district represented by Gabrielle Giffords.

  Palin aide Rebecca Mansour insisted the crosshairs were actually surveyor’s marks, but Palin herself had contradicted Mansour’s claim two days after the midterm election, writing on Twitter: “Remember months ago ‘bullseye’ icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats? We won 18 out of 20 (90% success rate;T’aint bad).”14

  Palin wanted to respond to her critics aggressively, but Roger Ailes had other ideas. “Lie low,” the network chief advised her. “If you want to respond later, fine, but do not interfere with the memorial service.”15

  Palin ignored Ailes’s advice, and her response only made matters worse. In a video message posted on her Facebook page, Palin said, “Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”16

  The term “blood libel” referred to the anti-Semitic myth from the Middle Ages that European Jews ritualistically murdered Christian children in order to use their blood in religious ceremonies. Comparing criticism of her actions, regardless of its fairness, to historic religious persecution was outrageous and put Palin at the center of another controversy. Ailes was livid. According to one Republican close to him, he now believes “Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”17

  As the spring began, protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt. After the fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, they continued to spread throughout the Middle East. While many Americans across the political spectrum cheered the democracy movements in the Arab world, Glenn Beck had a different take. He warned

  his audience of “a Muslim caliphate that [would control] the Mideast and parts of Europe.”18

  Many experts and pundits in conservative foreign policy circles had been waiting their entire careers for the dictatorships of the Middle East to be overthrown and, they hoped, be replaced with pro-Western democracies. Beck’s conspiracy theory was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Conservatives who had been fearful of criticizing Beck suddenly came out in full force against the host.

  Fox News contributor Bill Kristol led the charge, writing in The Weekly Standard, “[Beck] brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.”19

  But it wasn’t only conservative commentators who recognized the problem with Beck. “I’ve heard, from more than a couple of conservative sources,” wrote Joe Klein on Time magazine’s Swampland blog, “that prominent Republicans have approached Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes about the potential embarrassment that the paranoid-messianic rodeo clown may bring upon their brand.”20

  Beck’s time at Fox News was coming to an end. Down almost one million viewers since his peak, and faced with a successful advertiser boycott that culminated in more than three hundred sponsors pulling their ads, Beck’s show had lost its value to the network. In late March, Joel Cheatwood, the executive who brought Beck to Fox, foreshadowed what was coming when it was leaked that he was leaving the network to join Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts. By the first week in April, Fox and Beck announced that his daily show would end. Roger Ailes told the press, “Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody’s standards. I look forward to continuing to work with him.”21

  Ailes later told reporters, “Half of the headlines say he’s been canceled, the other half say he quit. We’re pretty happy with both of them.”22

  In March, mainstream Republican candidates still seemed loath to enter the race against President Obama. To the party’s detriment, this allowed possible fringe candidates to grab the spotlight. Donald Trump, who had flirted with running for president before, made another go at it. As part of his efforts to curry favor with the conservative base, the Celebrity Apprentice host repeatedly questioned the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

  The birther issue had been virtually absent from Fox News’s airwaves in 2009 and 2010. When the issue was covered, Fox hosts mocked the fringe political actors espousing conspiracy theories. Bill O’Reilly said “those demanding [Obama’s birth certificate] look unhinged,”23 and Glenn Beck called them “idiots.”24 Mike Huckabee was forced to backpedal after suggesting that Obama grew up in Kenya during an appearance on a New York radio show.

  Trump, however, embraced birtherism, and Fox enthusiastically followed. Broadcasting the real estate mogul’s pronouncements, the network devoted fifty-two segments to the subject of the president’s birthplace in
March and April. While other networks also covered Trump’s statements, Fox News made barely any effort to report the truth. In forty-four of the fifty-two segments, the false charges went completely unchallenged.25

  Sarah Palin applauded Trump, saying, “more power to him.”26 Sean Hannity cheered Trump on in segment after segment, making statements such as, “Do I think he was [born in America]? Yes. Do I think this is odd that they won’t produce the birth certificate? It’s beginning to get odd to me.”27 As The New York Times incredulously reported, “The so-called birther controversy stubbornly refuses to go away” and “now appears to have staying power as the political season lurches toward 2012.”28

  As Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, noted, “Fox is more unrelentingly, especially in its prime time, hyper politics. It is stridently anti-Obama, it kept the birther story alive.”29

  At the end of April, Barack Obama decided to end the “silliness” by asking the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate, which it did.

  A few weeks later, NBC announced its fall lineup, which included Celebrity Apprentice. As a result, Trump was forced to announce he would not run for president. The reality host had snookered the media into covering his every word for weeks while he promoted his television show. Fox merely took advantage of the situation to air segment after segment questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate.