The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Fox believed in payback. In 2008 John Edwards used several primary debates to work in digs at the network. Later, after Edwards had a child with his mistress, Fox ran many more segments than the competition combined on the tell-all memoir by Edwards’s aide, Andrew Young. “Roger wanted to make sure Edwards paid a heavy price for opposing Fox and for boycotting the Fox debate that year,” an Ailes friend recalled. “He was sending a message to anyone with skeletons to lay off Fox.”

  RUPERT MURDOCH, CHAIRMAN of News Corp., which owned Fox, had met every president since Harry Truman and enjoyed meddling in politics. He liked to pick winners and was willing to back progressives when necessary, as he had Tony Blair in Great Britain. In 2008 he believed Obama was going to win and began trying to ingratiate himself with him. At first Obama rebuffed the overtures, but he finally relented and agreed to see Murdoch at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. It was to be the next president’s first and so far only meeting with the Fox high command.

  Murdoch and Obama chatted amiably, but when Ailes joined them, the conversation turned tense. Obama demanded to know why he was accused of being a terrorist on Fox every night. Not true, Ailes responded. “Sean Hannity does it every night,” Obama repeated, referring to Hannity’s obsession with Obama’s former neighbor in Chicago, the onetime radical William Ayres. Ailes tried to explain that evening shows were more like op-ed articles than news shows and that Hannity’s viewers wouldn’t be voting for him anyway. Ailes said bluntly that his biggest concern was that he wasn’t sure Obama would defend the sovereignty of the United States. “That’s ridiculous,” Obama replied. When the candidate left, Murdoch told Ailes, “Boy, you were tough on him.”

  A couple of months later, after Murdoch pushed him to moderate Fox’s coverage of Obama, Ailes threatened to quit. A panicked Murdoch gave Ailes a lucrative five-year contract and promptly endorsed McCain, though he privately told several liberals he knew that he had voted for Obama. None was sure that was true.

  If Murdoch was agnostic about Obama, Ailes and his subordinates helped popularize the idea that he was a threat to the republic. In March 2009 Ailes read the executive summary of the president’s first budget, entitled Obama criticized for Pakistan missions by, A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise. He told his colleagues at News Corp. that it was a socialist manifesto for the redistribution of wealth and that Obama was the most liberal president in history. Neither of these things was remotely true: Obama’s Democratic predecessors, including Clinton, favored higher levels of taxation and more progressive health care reform. But this was what Ailes believed, and it made its way into the conservative bloodstream for good.

  For the next three years Fox News pummeled the president relentlessly, trying to turn every flap into a major scandal. From the bogus 2009 stories of White House “czars” (every president has aides assigned to oversee policy areas) to the outrageous 2012 claims that Obama administration officials had intentionally left Americans to die in Benghazi, the network was committed to ripping down the president. Many Fox producers, reporters, and anchors were able journalists trying—and frequently succeeding—to perform professionally. Unfortunately the questions they asked and stories they pursued were too often in the context of their employer’s bias. Republicans responded by saying that the New York Times and the big broadcast networks were biased too, but the inapt comparison never resonated beyond the conservative base.

  The question Fox faced as the 2012 election approached was whether to ratchet the anti-Obama tilt of the network up or down. Murdoch was clearly worried that the phone-hacking scandal embarrassing him in Great Britain could spread to the United States. To lower the temperature (and possibly dissuade Obama-appointed prosecutors who might be looking into phone hacking in the United States), Murdoch once again told Ailes to lighten up a bit on Obama. When the morning program Fox & Friends aired a video about Obama’s record that was depicted by an often friendly critic as “resembling propaganda films from 1930s Europe,” the network publicly disavowed the work of the young staff producers. Romney still got five or ten minutes whenever he wanted to deliver his message on Fox & Friends without having to worry about even a slightly challenging question. But some of the most egregious stunts faded.

  THROUGHOUT 2011 NEITHER Murdoch nor Ailes was enthusiastic about any of the Republican candidates. Their secret first choice was General David Petraeus, who was running the war in Afghanistan and in line to be Obama’s CIA director. In the spring of 2011, Ailes gave K. T. McFarland, a Fox national security analyst, a message for Petraeus when she interviewed him in Kabul. According to an audio recording obtained by Bob Woodward, McFarland said that Ailes advised Petraeus that if he wasn’t named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he should run for president in 2012. Ailes would resign as chairman of Fox to run his campaign and Murdoch would bankroll it. Ailes confirmed the story to Woodward, but characteristically trashed McFarland in the process, disclosing her “less than $75,000” part-time salary. McFarland was right that a Petraeus campaign was feared in the White House, though less so than in 2009 and 2010, when David Axelrod spoke openly of his concern about it.

  Ailes, McFarland, and other Republicans assumed that military officers were safely in the Republican camp, and, if past preferences were any indication, most were. But according to Colonel Jack Jacobs, a retired Medal of Honor winner who t of in-person voter impersonation he had Baught Petraeus at West Point, the highest-ranking officers, especially those with direct contact with the president, generally backed Obama for reelection. They found him supportive of the military and much more knowledgeable than any of the Republican challengers. Petraeus didn’t reveal his preference, but he accepted the president’s offer to run the CIA and enjoyed an increasingly close relationship with him right up to the time he resigned in November 2012 after the disclosure of his extramarital affair.

  Murdoch meanwhile couldn’t find anyone else to get excited about. By this time he had discovered Twitter and begun sniping at Romney: “Met Romney last week. Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.” Ailes agreed, and he didn’t contact Romney’s senior aides directly with advice, as he had with the Bush team. He still despised Obama but knew that his presidency was good for Fox. Since launching the network in 1996, Ailes had created at least a billion dollars in value for News Corp., and he was anxious that the profits keep rolling in. That would be easier with a Democrat in the White House to continue using as a punching bag. The network had first begun to thrive during the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. Under Obama, the aim was to ignite a Watergate-level blaze that would both consume the president and draw a bigger audience. A Romney presidency, everyone agreed, would bring at least marginally worse ratings for Fox, which was more popular as attack dog than cheerleader.

  EVEN AS HE moved up to a bigger corporate job as chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, Ailes remained obsessed with Fox News, which had been in his head in various forms forever. While working in the Nixon White House, he had circulated a memo entitled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV” that read like a prototype of the channel he would create. The idea—never adopted by Nixon—was to build a White House–run TV network that would circumvent the “liberal media” that he and Nixon detested and deliver pro-Nixon broadcasts directly to conservative-owned local stations.

  Four decades later Ailes was a brilliantly successful entrepreneur surrounded by fiercely loyal acolytes to whom he was generous. But Ailes was also a merciless bully, tormented by inner demons that went back to a childhood of long, lonely hospital stays as he battled hemophilia. Tales of his paranoia had circulated for years, like the time he tried to order bombproof glass for his office because he thought homosexuals outside News Corp. headquarters on Sixth Avenue might shoot at him (he settled for drawing the blinds instead), or when he demanded that security throw a “Muslim-looking” man out of the building and the man turned out to be a janit
or.

  Other stories about Ailes’s mental torment had gone untold. Two former News Corp. senior executives said that Murdoch routinely called Ailes “cuckoo,” “bonkers,” “nuts,” and “crazy,” but he also found Ailes’s behavior amusing. For instance, one Monday, Murdoch snickered to senior staff that Ailes was convinced that the whole News Corp. building was bugged: “Roger came in over the weekend to work in the only room that he thought was secure—a supply closet.” Ailes had a television monitor on his desk that showed video of the empty hall outside his office so that he would have warning if terrorists were coming to kill him. He posted round-the-clock ">Obama criticized for Pakistan missions by, had one, who doubled as his driver and left him at the curb. Current and even former News Corp. employees were terrified of Ailes, whose apparatchiks monitored their email like the Stasi and wreaked vengeance at his command. Associates described Ailes as charming but unhinged and a little pathetic. More than once he told his colleagues, “They hate me because I’m fat.”

  AILES HAD REASON to be paranoid about the long-term future of Fox News. In April of 2009, after Glenn Beck, then a top-rated Fox News host, called the president “a racist” on Fox & Friends, a liberal advocacy group called colorofchange.org launched a boycott of Beck. ConAgra, Procter & Gamble, Geico, and a few other advertisers pulled their ads from Beck’s show. At first, Apple was slow to respond to the boycott, but when Apple founder Steve Jobs found out what Beck said, he was furious. On a Saturday, Jobs, who hadn’t known Apple advertised on Fox, fired off an email to a West Coast executive of Omnicom, the giant ad agency that spent hundreds of millions a year on Apple’s behalf. Jobs’s message was simple: I want all Apple ads off all Fox News shows immediately. And no, it couldn’t wait until Monday. After much scrambling, an Omnicom executive and a technician from News Corp. had to drive to a News Corp. facility on Long Island that Sunday and remove the digital file containing the ads.

  Even before the incident, Omnicom and other agencies were beginning to pull away from Fox News Channel because its demographics were the oldest in cable news. By 2010 only six of Omnicom’s hundred biggest corporate clients advertised there. The audience was affluent but otherwise monochromatic and uninteresting to advertisers. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly became unpopular with blue-chip advertisers, who in their package ad buys paid Fox News a small premium to skip over them in favor of other Fox programs with younger viewers. The ratings at Fox were still higher than those for CNN and MSNBC combined, but several shows slipped into second place in “the money demo,” the demographic of twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds that advertisers crave.

  The Fox News business model was still a money machine that pumped out hundreds of millions in profits, but the trend lines were ominous for Ailes. Cable subscriptions were declining as news and other content moved online. And the ad market had turned sour. Omnicom, the second largest ad agency in the world, bought more ads for corporate clients like Pepsico and GE on Jon Stewart alone than on all of Fox News. That left Ailes with “direct response” ads for gold coins, medical devices, and the like. “Long-term, there’s no possibility for growth,” one senior Omnicom executive said of Fox News. “Their audience is simply not getting replaced by younger viewers.” He contrasted Fox News with Spanish-language TV, where Omnicom’s revenues had doubled. Univision, the fourth largest broadcast network in the United States, had ratings three or four times as great as Fox News, a data point that would take on great significance in the 2012 campaign.

  BILL O’REILLY AND Sean Hannity were the most prominent faces on the network. For fifteen years their tough-guy personas had defined not just Fox News but the entire aesthetic of the American right: The Clintons were scum, Obama was a dangerous socialist, and liberals were “pinheads” (O’Reilly’s word) who hated America. When it served their purposes, they let up on the Clintons to pile onto Obama. To keep it interesting, O’Reilly occasionally gave Obama a break, only to trash him on something else the next night. Hannity was consistently ferocious and untruthful, from insisting that Reagan had “inherited a far worse economy than Obama” to claiming to “never hear” Obama praise America. When the Federal Reserve Board released statistics showing a 38.8 percent drop in the median net worth of Americans, Hannity, Karl Rove, and others at Fox blamed it all on Obama, without mentioning that the Fed’s starting point was 2007, which meant that more than half of the decrease was on George W. Bush’s watch.

  O’Reilly was the anchor of the highest-rated cable news show and the author of bestsellers, but he was angry and depressed around the office. His childhood had been more affluent and less happy than he let on. (Despite claiming repeatedly that he was raised in a working-class family in Levittown, New York, he was in fact from the more affluent suburb of Westbury.) Because of alcoholism in his family, he vowed from the time he was a child never to touch a drop of alcohol or smoke a cigarette, and he never did. By all accounts, his success brought him no pleasure. He was loyal to his staff but terrorized them daily. The famous viral video of him screaming “Do it live!” at a hapless Inside Edition producer was, according to longtime staffers on The O’Reilly Factor, business as usual.

  Hannity, who treated his staff kindly, loathed O’Reilly personally; the feeling was mutual. Their feud went back to a time shortly after the founding of Fox in 1996, when Hannity & Colmes was the top show on the network and O’Reilly’s program (not yet called The O’Reilly Factor), had low ratings. Hannity, an ingratiating right-wing radio talk show host, was friendly toward O’Reilly, a journeyman TV reporter and anchor with no personal following. But after Ailes moved O’Reilly to 8 p.m. and his show took off, O’Reilly didn’t return the favor. He saw himself as a speak-truth-to-power tribune of the working stiff, not an ideologue cheering for Republicans, and he was cold and snide toward his in-house rival.

  Unlike his counterparts at MSNBC, Hannity was willing to jump in bed with any crackpot. He and his fellow radio talk show host Dennis Prager were on the advisory board of a Tea Party group called Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), headed by a right-wing activist and regular Hannity guest named Jesse Lee Peterson. “I think that one of the greatest mistakes that America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should’ve never turned it over to women,” Peterson said in a March speech. Peterson is African American, which Hannity felt gave him immunity from criticism for associating with him. Here was a clear case where the ratings bump for Fox by having someone like Peterson on the air was at odds with the GOP’s obvious political interests.

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  WHILE HE DIDN’T like to admit it, Obama kept tabs on the right-wing media. At a White House Christmas party for the news media in late 2011, he told Ailes when they were posing for a picture, “I saw on the cover of a magazine [Newsmax, a conservative publication] that you’re the most powerful man in news.” Ailes and his wife loved it. In private, Obama found this a sad commentary on the media culture. The president often said that he thought of Fox News, which he rarely watched, as nothing more than talk radio on television. That was an oversimplification. If Fox were the lungs of the conservative base, breathing life into the Tea Party and its other causes, Rush Limbaugh and his imitators were its spleen. The reach of talk radio in red states helped explain why the president was so unpopular in rural America at a time when the farm economy was doing so well. It was as if a viciously anti-Obama radio ad played on a loop all day and night to anyone in a car on the highway.

  Limbaugh had been on the air so long that his racism had lost its ability to shock. But it was racism nonetheless, and not a particularly subtle strain of it. He had begun in 2007 by calling Obama an “affirmative action candidate” and playing a ditty entitled “Barack the Magic Negro” (to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon”). After the 2008 election, Limbaugh confronted his slipping ratings by going even harder on the theme. Although the benefits of food stamps, Medicaid, and other social programs went mostly to whites, Limbaugh insiste
d, “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations.”

  Obama, an African American under the most literal definition of the term, couldn’t even get that concession out of Limbaugh. The talk show host deemed him a “halfrican American,” by which he meant that Obama wasn’t black but Arab because “Kenya is an Arab region.” (This would come as a surprise to any resident of Kenya, where Arabs make up less than 1 percent of the population.) Later Limbaugh changed his mind and said, “Obama is more African in his roots than he is American and is behaving like an African colonial despot.”

  For Limbaugh, anything that involved blacks anywhere in the country was somehow Obama’s fault. In September 2009 video surfaced of a white kid being beaten up by black kids on a school bus. Even though all the children involved said the issue wasn’t racial, Limbaugh disagreed, insisting, “We need segregated buses.” Then he blamed the president: “You put your kids on a school bus you expect safety, but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering ‘Yeah, right on, right on, right on.’ ”

  When the Occupy Wall Street movement coincided with Obama’s unveiling his jobs bill, Limbaugh drew a sinister connection and added a racist twist: “There’s rioting in the streets now! And there’s going to be more rioting in the streets because that’s part of the problem here. And next up there are going to be race riots, I guarantee it. Race riots are part of the plan that this regime has. That’s next.” Limbaugh’s ads drove home that the broadcast thrived on stoking fear. He sold precious metals, threat protection, debt consolidation, and other services of special interest to white males who overextended themselves.