Roger Ailes: Off Camera (7 page)

“Roger was disappointed as hell that we sold America’s Talking,” Jack Welch says. “But he had built up a lot of animosity. People were jealous of his accomplishments.”

Wright appointed Andrew Lack, the head of NBC News, to take over the new network. Lack was a charismatic former advertising executive who had turned NBC News around after a scandal.
Dateline
, a prime-time magazine show, had faked an explosion of a GM truck in what turned out to be a bogus exposé.

It fell to Lack to clean up the debris. He was a big man with a bigger ego, who famously bragged to the
New York Times,
in 1997, that he was “America’s news leader.” NBC was content to let Ailes stay on at the helm of the new channel, but there was no chance that Roger Ailes was going to report to a man like Andy Lack. Ailes left Fort Lee, but he wasn’t homeless. Rupert Murdoch was waiting for him on the other side of the Hudson.

Murdoch, whose trajectory had taken him from his native Australia to London and then to the United States, already owned a string of broadcast stations, but wanted to go into the cable news business. He had an intuition that a large portion of the public was unhappy with the tone of mainstream TV news and would respond to a more patriotic, socially conservative, and less parochial sort of information. He and Ailes had met only once, briefly, on the Twentieth Century Fox movie lot years before, but they knew each other by reputation. “Roger had great success at CNBC and I heard that he was unhappy there,” Murdoch says. “I asked him to come see me.”

Ailes listened silently as Murdoch laid out his idea. “The question,” Murdoch said, “is whether it can be done.”

Ailes said that it could, but only if it could get on the air within six months, to beat MSNBC (and perhaps also ABC’s new cable venture) to the punch. Ailes would be working from scratch. There were no studios, no equipment, no staff, and no infrastructure. Essentially he would be creating a network from nothing.

“How much will it cost me?” Murdoch asked.

“Nine hundred million to a billion,” Ailes responded. “And you could lose it all.”

“Can you do it?” Murdoch asked.

“Yes,” said Ailes.

“Then go ahead and do it.”

“I thought, either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen,” Murdoch says. Ailes was thinking pretty much the same thing about his new boss. Their negotiation was easy. “It was a fair deal,” says Murdoch. “I’m a softie.” In any case, Ailes wasn’t in it primarily for the money. He was being given an opportunity to stick it to his critics at NBC, and to create something entirely new—a news network shaped in his image. Murdoch was only putting up a billion dollars; Ailes’s reputation was at stake.

When news of the experiment got out, media sophisticates laughed as they had, fifteen years earlier, at Ted Turner. The
New York Times
was especially skeptical. “With no name and no formal plan for distribution, the promised channel inspired widespread doubts about its long-term survival among competitors and cable industry analysts. . . . The idea, some suggested, was to give Mr. Ailes a toy to play with, though given the current state of Fox News as described by some insiders, it may be less a toy than an imaginary friend.”

But Jack Welch, watching from his suite at General Electric headquarters, knew this was no game. “I told them they would rue the day they let Roger team up with Rupert,” he says. “You put a creative genius together with a guy with the guts and wallet of Rupert Murdoch and you have an unbeatable combination.”

LINEUP

When Roger Ailes left CNBC, he was followed by more than eighty staffers in what is known in the lore of Fox News as “the jailbreak.” These executives, producers, and on-air personalities became the backbone of the new network, and a large number are still there today. To this group, Ailes added close to a thousand staffers recruited from the ranks of television unknowns, underappreciated network personnel, or complete amateurs who had potential. His criterion was always the same. “In television, technology changes,” he says. “The one constant is content. There has to be a show. And that’s what I focused on—talent that could provide a show.”

Ailes says he never did market research or focus groups. “I start with one question: Do I like the person? Of course, I also want to know how smart they are, if they can write and report, but it begins with a personal feeling. I was looking for people who could attract an audience. People who cared about who was watching. Getting ratings is how you get paid.”

Chet Collier came over from CNBC to Fox as Ailes’s chief lieutenant. And Ailes made an important acquisition in John Moody, a Cornell graduate with impeccable print credentials as UPI bureau chief in the former Soviet Union and France, and a decade as a senior
Time
magazine correspondent in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Back in New York, a political and cultural conservative, Moody felt out of place. “I didn’t enjoy the corridors of
Time
,” he says. In 1996, public relations executive Howard Rubenstein told him that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes were starting a news network. He was interested but also hesitant about joining a new venture.

“I was forty-three years old with a mortgage, a wife, and a dog,” he says. Still, he went to a breakfast meeting in Ailes’s office. “There was dust everywhere and exposed wires. We sat at a low table and Roger gave me terrible coffee and a bad bagel and we talked. There was a definite intellectual spark.”

Their second meeting took place at a Chinese restaurant. Moody prepared by discussing the new venture with a friendly monsignor, who told him that everything happens for a reason. Ailes came prepared, too. “He took out a story I had written, pointed to something, and asked, ‘What did you mean by this? Are you a liberal?’” Moody countered by mentioning that Ailes had produced Broadway shows with progressive themes. “I reminded him that there’s a line in
The Hot l Baltimore
where a character says, ‘We don’t know how to dance but we must carry on as if we do.’ Roger was impressed that I had done research on him before our meeting.” Moody was hired as senior vice president for news.

Many of Moody’s journalist friends disapproved. “Some of them thought I was being brought in to make the paint look new,” he says. Others thought that Ailes, who had no real journalistic experience, lacked credentials. He was unmoved by this argument. “You don’t need a license to do journalism,” Moody says.

Moody’s new job made him, in essence, the managing editor of the network, and he was soon accused by liberal critics of collaborating with Ailes and Murdoch in shaping a right-wing version of the news. The instrument of this control was allegedly a daily memo issued by Moody to reporters and producers. Moody saw this as nothing more than standard practice. “Networks all have directors, producers, reporters, and anchors,” he says. “If each one did what he or she thought was best, there would be chaos. That’s why news organizations all work from a plan, a starting point. That’s why they are called organizations.”

The daily memo became controversial after it was revealed in the documentary film
Outfoxed
, which was produced in 2004 by anti-Fox activist Robert Greenwald. In response, Ailes offered to publish 100 percent of Fox News’ editorial directions and internal memos if competing cable news channels and broadcast network news divisions would do the same. So far, there have been no takers.

With Moody and Collier in place, Ailes went about building a lineup that would be able to compete with CNN and MSNBC. He needed a lead-off man, somebody genial and light enough to match the tone of the other morning shows, but with a sufficient edge to signal that Fox News was different. At CNBC, he had had Steve Doocy, but Doocy had left Ailes to host a morning comedy show on CBS’s New York affiliate. The show wasn’t funny and it was canceled within a month, leaving Doocy looking for work. He called Ailes, who told him that he had just one job left at Fox News—weatherman.

“I only did the weather once, in college,” says Doocy. Ailes was unfazed by this. “Just keep it simple,” he said. “All the squiggles are too complicated anyway. Just show me the high temperature and the low temperature and where it’s raining. You try to sound like a genius, you baffle viewers. Don’t get lost in the weeds.” When Ailes started
Fox & Friends
, he made Doocy a permanent cohost (his current partners are Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade).

Fox & Friends
is an easygoing program that delivers some hard political messages in the morning. Apart from Sean Hannity’s show, it is probably the most blatantly partisan program on Fox. “We are who we are,” Doocy says, as if they were an accidental conglomeration of talent. “You have a couple of kids and a mortgage; everyone winds up a little more conservative. All three of us are to the right, but we balance it with guests.”

Fox & Friends
does sometimes host liberal politicians. But since these politicians get asked tough and sometimes loaded questions, it is debatable whether they add balance or simply serve as targets.

When Doocy asked Howard Dean about reports that he had suffered a panic attack upon learning that as lieutenant governor of Vermont, he would be replacing the deceased incumbent, Dean indignantly denied it. Some exchanges with the opposition have been more congenial. When Tom Daschle was the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, he appeared on the show and did the weather. So did Henry Kissinger, an Ailes friend, to whom Doocy awarded a
Fox & Friends
“soap-on-a-rope” to go with his Nobel Peace Prize.

Shep Smith, one of the network’s star news anchors, is another Fox original. He studied journalism at the University of Mississippi, failed to graduate, and spent a dozen years kicking around small stations in Florida and at the syndicated TV newsmagazine
A Current Affair
. He was in Los Angeles when he got a job offer from Ailes. The Fox chief was looking for talent, but he was on a budget. “Will your agent act reasonably?” Ailes asked. Smith assured him that his agent was the soul of reason. It was a good decision for both sides. In 2007, the
New York Times
reported that Smith was making between $7 million and $8 million—broadcast anchor money. “Roger is fair. You go in to negotiate with him and there are certain things he won’t agree to, and if he says no, it’s no. You don’t come back on that. And he’s big on not letting people usurp power. But the perks—vacation days, cars, assistants—all those things are in the contract.” What Ailes demands in return is that you do your job—and that you don’t lie to him.

Ailes wanted Smith because of his informality. “I came up in the era when the newscaster told you what was happening and what to think about it,” Ailes told me. “Fox changed that some. It’s very important to get the anchors on an even field with the audience. Never let your talent talk down to people.”

A lot of people at Fox think of Smith as a liberal, partly because he tends to wear his heart on his sleeve, especially on issues with a racial component. A good ol’ boy from Holly Springs, Mississippi, who attended private segregated academies, he is, like a lot of Southerners of his generation, sensitive to the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. In his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, he was visibly infuriated by the failures of government, including the Bush administration, to relieve the suffering of the victims. “When I got down there and saw what was happening, I got in touch with Roger and he said, ‘Bring in the cavalry. The government is lying? Get the word out!’ You don’t expect people in the United States to be living in third-world conditions.”

Another crucial time in the cable day is 4:00 p.m., when the markets close. Ailes gave the job to Neil Cavuto, one of the original CNBC jailbreakers.

“I left money on the table when I came to Fox,” Cavuto says. “A lot of us did. This is an easy place to come to these days; we’re like the Yankees in a good season. We pay better than the competition. But back then we didn’t. Many, many of the people who left to go with Roger took pay cuts. Nobody’s sorry.”

Shortly after making the move, Cavuto was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was fearful about breaking the news to his boss. “A lot of television executives would have wanted to get rid of me,” he says.

Ailes asked how the disease might affect Cavuto’s performance.

“It could cause me to lose my train of thought on the air,” Cavuto said.

“Hell, you already do that,” said Ailes.

“And I could lose the use of my legs.”

“So what? If you do, we’ll build you a ramp.”

Cavuto is now in his sixteenth year in the 4:00 p.m. slot, and he is senior vice president of Fox Business Network. “I feel toward Roger like I do toward my own father,” he told me. “He’s somebody I can always count on.”

This is a very widespread sentiment at Fox News, but it comes with a price. In Ailes’s world, loyalty is rewarded, disloyalty punished. It is a point he made early, and emphatically, in the case of another financial journalist, Jim Cramer.

Cramer was a hot commodity when Ailes and Murdoch lured him to Fox News in 1999. A onetime president of the
Harvard Crimson
, he was a successful hedge fund manager and a well-known writer and commentator who appeared as a talking head on various network shows, including ABC’s
Good Morning America
and CNBC’s
Squawk Box.

Cramer saw right away that Ailes could teach him how to be effective on television. “Life with Roger was an education,” he says. “I learned more about TV from him than anyone else. He invented the lightning round. He taught me that the only guests worth having on a business show are CEOs—take anybody lesser and it lowers your credibility. And he showed me the power of repetition. I once told him that I had said on the air three times how much I liked Apple stock. He laughed and said, ‘Jim, after eighteen times, and only after eighteen times, will some Americans have heard it.’”

Another lesson was on the importance of longevity. “We were at a broadcast dinner and Ailes said, ‘I’m going to introduce you to the most influential TV personalities in the room.’ He took me over to meet Gene Rayburn, the game show host who had been on the air forever. ‘People like him, they want him in their homes,’ Roger said. He knew politics but these old show-business people, like Rayburn and Bob Hope and Judy Garland, were his real heroes.”

A few years earlier, in 1996, Cramer and some partners started TheStreet.com, an early venture into financial cyber-journalism. Cramer joined Fox (and worked without monetary compensation) in order to leverage the exposure he would get for his website. Ailes thought having Cramer would draw viewers to the new channel. It was a classic nineties example of the theory and practice of synergy.

“I told Roger when he hired me that I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’ve given the party a lot of money over the years. Roger was joyous. ‘Give more,’ he said. ‘I’ve got myself a real liberal.’ I always expected there would be a catch, but there wasn’t one.”

Cramer’s problem with Ailes wasn’t political, it was personal. Cramer is hypercompetitive, but he couldn’t match his boss’s even fiercer dedication to winning, or the burdens it placed on him.

“Roger believes that you need to win every hour in order to win the next hour. Ratings at nine depend on ratings at eight. And that’s a team effort. Let’s say you had a special coming up in the morning. The night before, you had to go on the prime-time shows in the last two minutes and hype it. You’d be on at 7:58, 8:58, 9:58, talk about what each host wanted to discuss and then at the end they say, ‘So Jim, I hear you’ve got a show coming up tomorrow on greedy bankers. Give us an advance peek.’ I’d say a few words about it and the host would go, ‘Wow! Tune in tomorrow for that,’ like they were enthralled. It wasn’t a true shill exactly, but it’s a way to build numbers.”

Many years before, Marjorie Ailes had gone to Roger’s boss at the Douglas show to complain about the hours. Now it was Karen Cramer’s turn to get indignant. “She was just pissed off at how much time I spent away from home. The pressure built up and I talked to Roger, but his attitude was, ‘This is the job, do it or not.’”

Cramer was under pressure from his investors to appear less on TV. They wanted him to give their money his full attention. His associates at TheStreet.com had different ideas about how he should spend his time. The cross-promotion they had envisioned at Fox wasn’t working well. Kevin English, the site’s CEO, convinced Cramer to hold a secret meeting with executives at CBS’s financial show,
Market Watch.
Ailes, who is exceptionally well informed about matters that concern him, found out about it and called Cramer in. Cramer describes the experience in his autobiography,
Confessions of a Street Addict.
“[It was] one of those meetings where he would stare at you with those tungsten eyes of his, the same eyes that had stared down everyone from Nixon to Manson. I knew he knew.” Ailes coldly reminded Cramer that they had a contract, and Cramer dropped the CBS initiative. But there was bad blood. A couple of months later, he was caught backstage on a hot microphone bad-mouthing Ailes. He apologized, but he knew he had crossed a red line. Soon after, he blew off a scheduled taping session. The final straw was mentioning his own stock as a buy on his show. By now, Cramer’s marriage was falling apart, and he was being medicated for anxiety, but Ailes was unsympathetic. “Roger just said that we have a contract, and that’s it. He fired me. We had worked together for two years but the truth is, he was right to fire me. And, despite everything, I still like him. He delivered on what he promised. I just wish, in retrospect, that I had, too.”