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

by David Brock

  As the Fox debate in South Carolina neared, a robust Republican field had yet to emerge. For several potential competitors, one factor weighed heavily on their minds. As Mike Huckabee told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace in November 2009, “The reason I wouldn’t [run] is because this Fox gig I’ve got right now, Chris, is really, really wonderful.” Huckabee added, “A lot of it depends on how the elections turn out next year and whether Roger Ailes continues to like my show on the weekends.”30 Huckabee was reportedly earning $500,000 per year to appear on the network. Potential candidates such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were also receiving significant amounts. Jumping into the presidential race meant giving up these lucrative contracts.

  Toward the end of February, Fox began taking action. Bill Shine and other executives made calls to potential candidates to inquire if they were running. In some cases, they scheduled individual meetings to have the conversation. While Sarah Palin was on the outs in Roger Ailes’s eyes, she had not taken any affirmative steps toward a run.

  This was not the case for Newt Gingrich, whose contract was suspended by the network in early March. “We can’t have Speaker Gingrich on our payroll while he is in the midst of an exploratory committee to see if he’s going to run for office,” said Fox vice president of legal and business affairs Dianne Brandi. “It’s a clear conflict.”31 Rick Santorum had committed to participating in the first Fox News debate, a clear sign he was running, and the network suspended his contract as well. Huckabee was given leeway and permitted to continue broadcasting his show while he made up his mind.

  By the end of April, it was evident that Fox’s first debate would turn out to be a dud. Other than former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose campaign never caught fire and folded in August, none of the GOP’s top-tier talent would participate. Pawlenty was joined onstage by Santorum, Texas representative Ron Paul, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, who at the time was at the bottom of the GOP pack. On the day of the debate, Fox formally terminated its agreements with Gingrich and Santorum.

  Huckabee ultimately chose his network deal over the chance

  to compete for the presidency, announcing his decision on the May 14 episode of his show on Fox News. Even some of Huckabee’s closest advisers were surprised by the decision.

  Feeling burned by Palin, Ailes had no candidate to get behind. Published reports indicated that every mainstream Republican candidate had spoken with Ailes, but he could not find a single one to support. Each had potential political or ideological weaknesses that prevented Ailes from backing his or her campaign.

  Ever the strategist, he even tried to recruit a favorite candidate into the race. Gabriel Sherman reported in New York magazine, “A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he’d invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie.”32 But Christie rejected Ailes’s advances, preferring to stay in New Jersey and out of the 2012 election.

  Nevertheless, Fox News would play a defining role in the Republican primary. “They have taken a shot at manipulating the 2012 election by supporting certain candidates, having party regulars like Karl Rove as regulars, commentators,” says Tim McGuire, Frank Russell Chair for the business of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “Without exception, Fox has become a political player. It is not a news source, it is a political player.”33

  There was no venue on any medium that provided more direct access to conservative voters. If a trip on Sean Hannity’s show was worth $40,000 to a Senate candidate in 2010, access to the network could be worth millions in a Republican primary. No matter who ran for the GOP nomination in 2012, they would have to go through Roger Ailes.

  Epilogue

  These revelations show a culture run amuck within News Corp. and a board that provides no effective review or oversight.

  —from News Corp. shareholder lawsuit

  On June 2, Fox announced that Glenn Beck’s show would conclude at the end of that month. In May, his audience had declined 30 percent among viewers ages twenty-five to fifty-four, a critical advertiser demographic, and 15 percent overall.1 A roundtable discussion show called The Five, featuring a rotating cast of four conservatives and a token liberal, would now occupy the 5 p.m. time slot.

  As Glenn Beck’s last week on the network began, Fox launched an aggressive campaign against Media Matters. It was not the first time Fox’s hosts had singled us out for attack. As early as December 2004, just months after our founding, Bill O’Reilly called us “character assassins,”2 and, more recently, Glenn Beck had made us the focus of multiple episodes of his program. However, this latest attack took the shape of a coordinated campaign across numerous shows, each pushing its audience to file complaints against Media Matters with the Internal Revenue Service in the hope that we would be stripped of our nonprofit tax status.

  The campaign began with a June 22 column in The Washington Times by former White House counsel to George H. W. Bush

  C. Boyden Gray, a former Fox contributor and board member of the Tea Party group FreedomWorks.

  In his column, Gray argued that Media Matters should have its tax-exempt status stripped for two reasons. “First,” he wrote, “IRS rulings make clear that attacks on individuals, statements of positions that are unsupported by facts, and use of inflammatory language and other distortions will cost an organization its tax-free status. Second,” he continued, “in declaring ‘guerrilla warfare’ on Fox as the ‘leader’ and ‘mouthpiece’ of the Republican Party and in developing a sophisticated Democratic-leaning media training boot camp, [Media Matters] has transformed itself into an aggressive advocate for Democratic and progressive causes and thus produced a second deviation from exempt educational activities.”3 Gray’s charges were wholly without merit. Media Matters has always ensured that our behavior remains well within the legal confines set by the IRS, and we have never received the slightest hint the agency was concerned with our efforts.

  After witnessing and documenting coordinated attacks by Fox on ACORN, Planned Parenthood, Van Jones, and numerous other progressives, we knew this was the beginning of a campaign against Media Matters. Sure enough, the next night Bill O’Reilly interviewed Gray during the “Impact” segment of his show. By July 10, two and a half weeks later, Fox News had run thirty-five segments on Media Matters’s tax status and actively encouraged its viewers to file complaints with the IRS. Prominent links topping the Fox Nation website directed users to a pre-filled complaint form, and Fox & Friends dedicated several segments to interviewing viewers who filed complaints with the IRS. Additional segments were run on the Fox Business network, and links to the stories remained atop Fox Nation for nearly a month. As a point of comparison, Fox ran just six segments and thirteen news briefs on New York State’s historic decision that week to allow same-sex marriage.4

  As the campaign against Media Matters continued, the segments Fox ran became increasingly personal in nature. On July 5, Steve Doocy asked on Fox & Friends, “What goes on in [David Brock’s] head?” He then brought on psychiatrist and Glenn Beck coauthor Dr. Keith Ablow to speculate. Brock, he diagnosed, is “full of self-hatred, which he then projects on the world around him in order to get love. So he’s got to have somebody to hate because he thinks that’s the way—the best way to galvanize the love in his direction … There’s very sexual connotations here, too,” Ablow continued. “Taking the father figure down. This is a guy who was adopted. I don’t know whether he has deep-seated feelings about whether he wasn’t loved. He was given up for adoption.”5 The segment concluded with Ablow stating that David was a “very dangerous man.”6

  That same day on Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade and Juan Williams went on the attack in a segment in which they discussed, “Who’s this guy Ari?”

  Williams informed the audien
ce, “He has a political background. He has no background in journalism … This is a guy who comes from the world of politics working for the likes of Al Gore and other top Democratic operatives and the whole idea of negative research, negative commercials. Apparently, that’s where his mind-set is centered. For example, he brags about trying to disrupt Fox’s business interests.”7 While they spoke, the chyron read, “ARI RABIN-HAVT USES YOUR $ TO TARGET FOX NEWS.”

  As the attack took shape, it began to look like another run through the Fox Cycle:

  Step 1: Make an inaccurate charge designed to make progressives look bad:

  Former Fox News consultant and current FreedomWorks Foundation board cochairman C. Boyden Gray publishes a column in The Washington Times suggesting Media Matters should lose its tax status.

  Step 2: Devote disproportionate coverage to the story.

  In three weeks, Fox News runs more than thirty-five segments on the story.

  Step 3: Attack mainstream journalistic outlets for ignoring the “story.”

  In the third week of coverage, Fox repeatedly asked on air why only a single mainstream outlet reported on the story.

  Because we could identify the Fox Cycle, we were able to put the brakes on it, ensuring it would not reach Steps 4 and 5, where the real damage is done. We were aided by the fact that Fox could not gain any traction for its story, because the law is clearly on our side. In IRS filings we inform the agency that Media Matters is “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. Media.”8 Similarly, Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, which has been operating since 1987, maintains its 501c3 status. As Marcus Owens, a partner at the law firm Caplin & Drysdale and former director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the IRS, succinctly put it to Politico in its article on Fox’s non-story: “I’m afraid Fox loses this round.”9

  Undeterred by the facts, Fox continued its campaign well into August. The network invested resources into running a several-thousand-word, three-part series on the Fox Business website.

  As we write this final chapter, no government entity has contacted us about any investigation into our tax status, nor have we been officially informed by the IRS of any complaints filed against us. In fact, the only complaints we’ve seen are a cover page faxed to us by Fox News’s chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, who was seeking comment, and C. Boyden Gray’s complaint, which was posted by Washington Post media blogger Eric Wemple in early August.

  Far from muzzling our efforts, Fox’s campaign was a clear signal that our work struck a nerve at the organization. If anything, we would press even harder to advocate for better journalistic practices by the network.

  As Fox launched its attacks on Media Matters, its parent company, News Corporation, began to face perhaps the largest and most damning media scandal in history. Editors and reporters at News of the World, a 160-year-old British tabloid owned by News Corp., had been caught hacking into the voice mails of possibly thousands of individuals to further coverage on their gossip pages. As the sordid and shocking story unfolded, Fox News’s incurious and at times scant coverage of this major news story raised further questions about its objectivity and trustworthiness as a news organization.

  The scandal began in 2005, when News of the World reported that ITV political editor Tom Bradby had lent Prince William some video-editing equipment. The seemingly innocuous report read, “If ITN do a stocktake on their portable editing suites this week, they might notice they’re one down. That’s because their pin‑up political editor Tom Bradby has lent it to close pal Prince William so he can edit together all his gap year videos and DVDs into one very posh home movie.”10

  Since few people knew of the arrangement between the Prince and Bradby, it immediately aroused William’s suspicion. Bradby told William, “When I was royal correspondent, [phone hacking] was kind of an open secret and I remember having chats with tabloid hacks about how phone hacking is, you know, kind of rife.”11 An earlier story about a knee injury suffered by the prince also raised suspicions.

  Shocked by the news, William’s office complained to Scotland Yard, which launched an investigation into the incident. In January 2007, News of the World’s royal editor and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by the paper, both pleaded guilty to hacking the voice mails of members of the royal family. Each was sentenced to several months in prison. That month, News of the World editor Andy Coulson also resigned. Less than six months later, he was named communications director for the Conservative Party.

  In court, Mulcaire also confessed that the hacking went well beyond members of the British royal family and included model Elle Macpherson and Member of Parliament Simon Hughes.

  While the story faded from the headlines, a flurry of civil lawsuits kept the scandal alive. Guardian reporter Nick Davies spent nearly three years working on the case. The results of his dogged reporting were a series of investigative pieces that blew the case back into the mainstream. Davies explained his interest in the story, telling Media Matters, “Not only were there a lot of journalists doing a lot of illegal things within the Murdoch organization, the former editor [of the paper in question] happened to have gone to work for the man about to become the prime minister. Instantly, the significance of the story is raised a level.” Davies continued, “And then you have the fact that the largest police force in the country clearly failed to investigate, or inform all of the victims. And I found out early on that one of the hacking victims was the deputy prime minister—a man who knew about economic and military secrets.”

  In April 2011, News Corp. began to settle cases involving phone hacking, most prominently with actress Sienna Miller. However, that did not stop the story from expanding further.

  The story finally began to reach a tipping point after Davies reported in The Guardian that News of the World “illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance.”12 Most shockingly, Davies discovered that voice mails on the victim’s phone “were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive. Police feared evidence may have been destroyed.”13

  Prior to the publication of the Milly Dowler story, the known victims of these invasions of privacy were limited to members of the British elite, the royal family, Members of Parliament, and sports and movie stars. In the Dowlers’ case, not only had the phone of a non-public figure been hacked, but News of the World had committed a grievous injustice against the murder victim’s family. Because messages were being deleted by News of the World employees, the murdered girl’s parents held out hope their daughter was still alive.

  After Davies’s story on the Dowlers, reports about other potential victims of phone hacking began to emerge, including the relatives of British troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, individuals murdered in the bombings of the London Underground in 2005, and, perhaps most shockingly, the mother of a girl who had been murdered by a pedophile. The grieving parent, Sara Payne, was embraced by News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, who advocated for “Sarah’s Law,” named after Payne’s daughter, which allowed parent-controlled access to the U.K.’s registry of sex offenders.

  Evidence mounted that the tabloid potentially targeted almost “3,870 names, 5,000 landline numbers and 4,000 mobile numbers.”14 This was an invasion of privacy on a massive level, and as more and more details of this widespread illegal activity came out, it became clear that the misbehavior was not isolated to a few bad apples—the core of News of the World was rotten. And it came from a culture that was created by News Corp.’s CEO himself, one that pushed for shock headlines and ever-more-sensational stories that would lead to higher sales, unbound by journalistic ethics or common decency. As The New York Times reported, “Mr. Murdoch expects his tabloids to beat the competition with aggres
sive, intrusive reporting that results in splashy exclusives that expose sexual misbehavior or debunk the establishment line.” The Times continued, “It is this expectation, former editors and reporters say, that has pushed his tabloids’ editors into ever more adventurous news gathering practices.”15

  By early July, the pressure reached a boiling point for News Corp. For the first time, the phone-hacking scandal was being covered in both the U.K. and U.S. media. This accelerated the pace of the story. News Corp. announced on July 7 that the following Sunday would be the last edition of News of the World, ending the paper’s storied 160-year history.

  Andy Coulson, who resigned as British prime minister David Cameron’s spokesman in January because of his ties to the scandal, was arrested on July 8. Clive Goodman, who had already spent time in prison, was arrested again, this time for payments made to the police in connection with the phone hacking stories.

  When the scandal broke, Rupert Murdoch had been in the process of trying to acquire full ownership of the British satellite television service BSkyB. After nearly a year fighting to gain regulatory approval, News Corp. was on the verge of closing the deal.

  A potential parliamentary investigation forced News Corp. to formally withdraw its bid for the company on July 13. Phone hacking would have serious implications for the rest of the Murdoch empire. In August, the New York Department of Education canceled a $27 million contract with News Corp. State controller Thomas DiNapoli wrote, “In light of the significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with respect to News Corp., we are returning the contract with Wireless Generation unapproved.”16

  As the walls crumbled around him, Rupert Murdoch did not seem to take the scandal seriously. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the CEO claimed that News Corp. “handled the crisis ‘extremely well in every way possible,’ making just ‘minor mistakes.’ ”17