Roger Ailes: Off Camera (12 page)

I heard Ailes say the same thing to a group of journalism students at the University of North Carolina. Of course, he was talking about different assumptions. “It is fine to question your country,” he said. “But if you want to be a good reporter, you have to question the questioning, too.” This sort of jujitsu is what infuriates liberal critics, because Ailes adroitly turns the clichés of their profession against them. Is the press skeptical? Then where is the skepticism about President Obama and his policies? Does it speak truth to power? Who, exactly, do liberals have to fear except the IRS and one another? “The entertainment industry, elite news media, and permanent bureaucracy all have an interest in large government,” says Mark Danner. “This is the basis of Ailes’s point that Fox is moderate and middle-of-the-road. He says the rest of the media are liberal, and there’s a lot of truth to that.”

One of the hallowed clichés of journalism is that the press’s role is to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” The phrase is often misattributed to H. L. Mencken, the most impious and least comforting of American journalists; it was actually coined more than a hundred years ago by the Chicago satirist Finley Peter Dunne, who put it in the mocking mouth of his fictional Irish character, Mr. Dooley:

“Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”

Setting aside Dunne’s fin de siècle snark about newspapers, standing up for the afflicted is a good aspiration—when it is clear who is on the side of the angels, as it was during the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. But very few conflicts in the contemporary world are so morally unambiguous. There are afflicted people on both sides of most political issues. Comfortable ones, too.

Ailes, of course, knows this. “Roger laughs at his critics and he mocks them,” says Chris Cuomo, one of the hosts of ABC’s
20/20
, who went to work for Ailes at Fox News in 1996. “The idea that the rest of the media are straight down the line is hypocritical and silly. Does Fox have a different perspective than CNN? Sure. We all pick who and what we feature. But Roger makes sure that both sides get told. When he came out with ‘We report, you decide’ [another foundational Ailes slogan], I loved it. He came right at the criticism. Roger played the media for fools when he was a political consultant. He knows how they work. He doesn’t pander to them and he isn’t afraid of them.”

From the outset, Ailes wanted to accomplish two things: He wanted a network that would appeal to conservatives and that had plausible deniability to the charge that it was a conservative organ. Given the state of American television journalism at the time, it wasn’t hard to do, at least in comparison to the industry standard. In 1996, you could count the number of conservative talking heads and news commentators on one hand. PBS had William Buckley; CNN used Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan (who did double duty on the
McLaughlin Group
syndicated talk fest); ABC empaneled George Will on its Sunday morning interview program. A few conservative commentators did guest spots (Ailes did some himself on NBC), but they were almost never on without a rebuttal by a liberal (and often more than one).

This imbalance presented Ailes with two golden opportunities. First, he was able to scoop up most of the really good conservative talent—Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Brit Hume, and Bill O’Reilly. At the same time, he hired lots of mainstream journalists and liberal commentators, whom he put under exclusive contract, including Susan Estrich, Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, David Corn, and others. They took hits from their colleagues for consorting with the enemy, but Fox actually paid its contributors well—an attraction to talking heads of any ideological persuasion—and they argued that they were, by going on Fox, changing conservative minds. Some left-wing critics charged that Ailes hired weak progressives and threw them to the right-wing wolves; Al Franken dismissed Colmes as “loofah-ing Roger Ailes in his personal steam room.” Ailes took the stance that he hired bona fide liberals; if they couldn’t make their points effectively, that wasn’t his fault.

One offshoot of Fox’s success is that it has paved the way for right-wing commentators on other networks. They are still in the minority—“there are more liberals on Fox than all the networks combined have conservatives,” says Brit Hume—but it is now considered necessary to have somebody
articulating conservative viewpoints. In an interesting turnabout, hard-core right-wingers now dismiss David Brooks (
New York Times
, PBS, National Public Radio),
Washington Post
columnist Kathleen Parker (who had a short-lived debate show with Eliot Spitzer on CNN), and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough as fainthearted faux conservatives.

Fox, in the meantime, has continued to stockpile liberals, twenty-four at last count. Among them are former Clinton adviser Kirsten Powers, who often appears on
Special Report
’s “Fox All-Star” panel; former Democratic senator Evan Bayh of Indiana; and Joe Trippi, the political consultant who managed Howard Dean’s presidential run. Of course, the game is rigged. Powers is outnumbered two to one by conservative fellow panelists. For every Joe Trippi there is a Dick Morris
and
a Karl Rove. Bayh is an eloquent centrist, but he lacks the star power of Sarah Palin. But Ailes didn’t invent these rules; he simply turns them against his competition and in doing so he has given conservatives what they never had on any network: a home court advantage.

It’s not that Ailes has achieved (or wants to achieve) real ideological or partisan parity. His liberals are there by and large for the same reason conservatives are at the other networks, as foils and tokens. It may be true, too, as Rick Kaplan says, that the conservatives on other networks are better than Fox’s liberals. That’s a matter of taste, and not the point. Ailes has made it disreputable to exclude right-wing analysts and commentators, or to frame the news too much. “Roger widened the agenda,” says Dick Wald. “It would not be better if the three networks and Bill Moyers were the only choices. Journalism is better for having opposing points of view.”

Fox may or may not be internally balanced. But Ailes is right when he says, “Sometimes we
are
the balance.”

•   •   •

“I don’t think Rupert Murdoch ever
told
Roger what to do,” says Av Westin. “He wouldn’t have hired Roger if he didn’t know that Roger was on the same page.” Westin is absolutely right. “Roger has strong views and vice versa,” Rupert Murdoch told me the first time we spoke. “He is longer and wiser in politics than I, but we broadly share the same views. There was nothing we had to agree on before I took him on board.” This is a very concise formulation of the normal proprietor-editor relationship.

It also describes the relationship between Roger Ailes and the six thousand or so people who report to him. Time and again, Fox journalists assured me that Roger Ailes has never told them what to say on the air or how to report a story. This is something you hear not only at Fox, but from self-respecting journalists throughout the media. And it is true, up to a point.

News organizations work like every other kind of hierarchic bureaucracy. “Let’s face it,” says Westin, “we all get our jobs through peer group selection. The people who were in charge of promotions moved me along. I pitched the right stories. And who will you pick [for a promotion]? Someone out of the same mold.” In other words, if you hire and promote people who share the general views and ethos of their workplace and are keen enough to see where the lines are, there is no need to tell them what to say or, in this case, report.

Unlike most other news organizations, Ailes has not had the luxury of choosing his personnel from a large pool of like-minded candidates. Polls taken over the last forty years consistently show that the great majority of journalists identify as liberals and vote for Democrats in national elections. Fox hires conservative Republicans, but there are not enough of them to stock a network. “Most of our producers are liberals,” says Michael Clemente, the vice president in charge of news. He was the executive producer of ABC’s
World News Tonight
during Peter Jennings’s tenure as anchorman and, before that, a senior Washington producer for CNN. His pedigree is strictly establishment—he worked with David Brinkley and Barbara Walters, and describes himself as nonpolitical. The reason why Fox has so many liberal producers isn’t ideological or political; it is a matter of necessity. “We’re in New York, after all,” he says. Fox also has a fair number of reporters who lean to the left in their personal views. It is fair to say that Fox News is more to the right than its staff, but it turns out that it is also closer to the left than Roger Ailes.

•   •   •

Tim Groseclose is a professor of political science and economics at UCLA. He is an Okie with the country twang and conservative views to prove it, and he also happens to be one of the best-trained and most highly regarded social scientists in the country. Groseclose, working with Steve Levitt of
Freakonomics
fame and James Snyder of Harvard, devised a method for measuring the political quotient (PQ) of politicians. The general idea is to take congressional members and place them on a liberal-conservative continuum based on the ratings of the Americans for Democratic Action, a Democratic-leaning organization. For example, Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint are near zero—the most conservative. Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank are close to 100. President Obama, according to his estimates, is about 88. Not surprisingly, the average voter is close to 50.

Next, Groseclose computes the slant quotients of news outlets. To do that, you take the on-the-record speeches of congressmen and senators and examine which think-tank sources and other authorities they quote approvingly. Then you compare these with the think-tank sources and other authorities quoted approvingly in news stories. This gives you a slant quotient (SQ) for the aggregate news stories in each media organization. The average Fox show had, in 2004, an SQ of about 40, which places the network about 10 points right of center. All the other television news programs Groseclose examined were left of center (i.e., had an SQ greater than 50).
PBS NewsHour
was the most moderate, with an SQ of 55. The nightly news shows on the broadcast networks all hover around 65. This makes intuitive sense: Mainstream network news shows differ mainly in the personality of the anchors.

Groseclose then attempts to compare the leanings of mainstream journalists to the content of their reporting. Surveys consistently show that the great majority of mainstream reporters vote for the Democratic candidate in national elections. This was very likely the case in 2008, a supposition President Obama acknowledged at his first White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he laughingly told the audience that “most of you covered me, all of you voted for me. Apologies to the Fox table.”

Professor Groseclose puts the PQ of the average political reporter for a mainstream organization at 95, very close to the president’s, but the slant quotient of their news organizations, he finds, was closer to 65. In other words, the conventions of journalism meant their reporting was roughly 30 points nearer to the center than their own views.

Groseclose’s analysis relies on data that predate the second Bush term and the Obama administration. I asked him if he has detected a change. “Based on my casual observation, the slant of Fox between 2004 and 2008 was no different than its slant before 2004,” he says. “In 2009, however, it seemed to have moved slightly to the right. The biggest change was that the
Hannity & Colmes
show became the
Hannity
show. I’d say the change represented something like 25–35 points on my slant quotient scale. Otherwise, I don’t think there has been much of a change at Fox. Greta Van Susteren’s show, again based on my casual observation, changed from being slightly left-leaning centrist toward being slightly right-leaning centrist. Shep Smith’s show seems to have moved the opposite—from slightly right-leaning centrist to slightly left-leaning centrist.
Special Report
—whether hosted by Brit Hume or Bret Baier—remained right-leaning centrist. If anything, Baier seems to have moved the show slightly closer to the center [i.e., leftward] than it was with Hume.”

In his book,
Left Turn
, Groseclose provides a ten-question test that enables anyone to arrive at a personal political quotient. I tried it myself and came up with a score of 55, which puts me somewhere between Republican moderate Chris Shays of Connecticut and Blue Dog Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. I invited Roger Ailes to take the test as well. He hesitated—his political views are too nuanced, he said, to show up correctly on a test—but eventually he agreed. His score was 25—fifteen points to the right of the news coverage on Fox, somewhere between Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. Ailes didn’t disagree. “I am more conservative than the network,” he said. “That’s true. And I do influence things here. But I don’t dictate.”

•   •   •

Ailes often complains that his views are misrepresented by journalists who haven’t spoken to him. “In forty years, no reporter has ever actually asked me what my position is on any issue,” he says. So I asked what Ailes would do if he were president. “I could never be elected,” he said. “I couldn’t follow my own advice. Duck, weave, that’s what a candidate needs to do. That’s not me. I’d probably start calling people jerks. So, I wouldn’t be a viable candidate.”

He also admitted that he wouldn’t be suited to holding a political office. As a teenager he was chosen to represent Warren G. Harding High School at the Buckeye Boys State, an annual assembly. “I was elected president pro tem of the senate, and I found it very boring,” he said. “In a negotiation I can always sit and outwait the other guy, but I have a very short attention span for things that irritate me.”

So the White House is out of the question. But, as a hypothetical, what would an Ailes administration look like? “I’d start by repealing some of the laws we have that are unnecessary or worse,” he said. “The country doesn’t need more laws and regulation, it needs less.”