Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
In essence, Ailes treated journalism as he treated politics—it was another market to monetize. Shortly after being named news director, he suggested that TVN offer image consulting.
“Roger Ailes has suggested
offering a business communications advisory service,” a memo to Jack Wilson noted. “Roger’s reputation and expertise could turn this into a source of continuing contractual income as we coach corporate executives on how to improve their television performance.” It seemed appropriate to Ailes that a news organization could offer PR advice to the very powerful people its journalists were covering.
As Rosenfield updated Ailes daily on his entertainment consulting projects and day-to-day speechwriting duties for clients such as Oregon Republican senator Bob Packwood, Ailes integrated the aims of his consulting firm and TVN. One of the first stories produced after Ailes arrived was
a profile of Kelly Garrett. “She’s been called the best new singer of 1974,” the segment reported.
TVN Enterprises, a division of TVN, would also distribute Ailes’s documentary with Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Repeating the pattern of the
Mike Douglas
office dynamic, Ailes inspired young producers eager to advance, but clashed with senior employees who posed threats.
Reese Schonfeld, TVN’s vice president of operations, quickly became a rival. He represented a power center in the company, as Wilson had tasked him with studying the economics of satellite news delivery. “Roger and I were reasonably friendly for a while, then we were shouting at each other. He called me an asshole, I called him a fuckhead,” Schonfeld said. Schonfeld sensed his rival’s ambition. “From the day he walked in, he was looking for Wilson’s job, it was my feeling,” he said. “I’m sure he would have been better at it than Wilson.”
Unfortunately for Ailes, he settled into the job at a perilous moment.
In the winter of 1975, Stanhope Gould, a former CBS News producer, was putting the final touches on a cover story about TVN for the
Columbia Journalism Review
. Ailes did his best to parry Gould’s inquiries. During an interview, Gould pressed Ailes hard about the Kelly Garrett segment, asking him why Ailes used TVN to promote his client. At first, Ailes blamed management, who, he said, had approved the story before he became news director. Gould did not let the matter drop. “There is definitely a question in some people’s minds about conflict of interest,” Ailes responded. “I take full responsibility. It may have been a bum decision—but I made it.” Gould asked Ailes to comment on his lack of journalism training. “I’ve never run a newsroom, but I’ve been around them,” he told Gould. “And 90 percent of what you do in any job is common sense.” He stated that his consulting company stopped handling politicians (he could have meant political campaigns, as the ’74 election cycle had just ended) and that he had turned the company over to subordinates
(which was technically true, though Ailes and Rosenfield still spoke every day). Ailes also waffled when asked about TVN’s politics. At one point, he said, “one thing is sure, the networks are not biased to the right.” Just as at Fox, Ailes framed it as less a matter of ideology than of confronting the condescension of the media elites. The moralizing at the networks seemed to Ailes to be a pose, a front for their real agenda. He set himself up as the victim, creating a pretense to go on the attack.
There was one point that Ailes made completely clear: “No matter what has gone on here in the past two years, I’m not responsible,” he told Gould, as he leaned back in his swivel chair.
Ailes was right to attempt to keep some distance between himself and TVN. Gould’s fourteen-page article, which ran in the March/April 1975 issue of the
Columbia Journalism Review
and called Ailes “the only man in history to run a national news organization while owning an entertainment industry consulting firm,” was a damaging one. The story, headlined “Coors Brews the News,” crackled with embarrassing revelations detailing staff turmoil and allegations of political interference. TVN’s image would never recover.
T
he negative press was only one problem. Pauley’s original business plan was proving to be wildly optimistic. AT&T’s exorbitant video transmission rates discouraged local television stations from buying TVN stories.
In its first year, TVN was on track to lose more than $4 million. Losses ballooned to $6.2 million in 1974, and a similar amount was projected to be lost in 1975.
One of its last hopes was technological. In 1974,
Western Union and NASA had launched Westar I, the first commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, which could beam television signals to receiver dishes on the ground. Jack Wilson put together a deal, and
on January 9, 1975, TVN announced its plan to become America’s first satellite news service. The theory was that the satellite would give TVN the opportunity to grow into a full-fledged network, with diverse programming, providing an alternative to the Big Three.
The broader mission put Ailes’s TV skills to better use. He began to experiment with various news concepts, from longer documentary features, to ninety-second clips, which appealed to the “Action News” format in vogue with local stations.
“I want to find out what they want and to give them what they want,” Ailes said. In his first several months on the
job, he had taken a series of meetings with producers to scout potential deals. His programming ideas reflected his middlebrow, Mike Douglas sensibility.
He talked with Art Rush, the manager for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, about producing a half-hour country-western show for TVN; explored adding ninety-second inserts with the advice columnist
Joyce Brothers; and brainstormed specials ideas with the comedy writer
Paul Keyes.
Around this time, Ailes developed a new marketing tagline for TVN that previewed the cunning sloganeering he would apply to Fox News: “
The
Independent News Service.”
As Ailes handled the content, Wilson worked on the business and political fronts. In the spring of 1975, he crisscrossed the country on a three-week trip to meet television executives.
On his West Coast swing, Wilson spent an afternoon with Richard Nixon, newly in exile in San Clemente. The men enthusiastically discussed the mission to create a counterweight to the networks. It was what Nixon had been waiting for.
As Nixon’s dream to dethrone the establishment media appeared within reach,
Wilson hired Bruce Herschensohn, a forty-two-year-old former Nixon aide and film director, as a
$200-per-day consultant, to develop more ambitious conservative news programming. Herschensohn was a true believer, with strong convictions about the role of the liberal media in politics.
“It is not [Eric] Sevareid or [David] Brinkley that do the damage,” Herschensohn told Wilson. “It is the reporting of the news.”
From his apartment on Virginia Avenue, which overlooked the Watergate complex, Herschensohn went to work on his design. Projecting an annual budget for a fully staffed newsroom at $12.1 million, he scrawled the names of people who could execute his vision: “Ailes, Self … Jack, Coors.” He sketched an organizational chart. At the top was a position marked “Philosophy,” occupied by a senior executive who maintains the message and assigns “predictable and continuing stories,” what TV executives would later call “flow.” “The ‘philosophy’ man must know more than his subordinates know, or soon he is not top man,” he wrote. It was vital that the “philosophy” enforcer operate as a macro thinker, shaping the news to help the cause. Disagreeing with Pauley, Herschensohn called on TVN to own its conservative bias. He believed that
“the disguise of neutrality, and not bias itself, has been the great harm of CBS, NBC, and ABC.”
He proposed that TVN producers fill out paperwork “prior to the editing and narrative writing” for each broadcast to explain how the story would advance the conservative agenda.
Herschensohn viewed his television proposal as “a thought pattern
revolution” as sweeping as the civil rights movement. “Though I disagreed with the civil rights leaders in asking for ‘everything now,’ I was wrong and they were right,” he wrote in his private notebook. He went on, “What I would hope TVN will achieve is another ‘thought pattern revolution,’ this one to put faith and strength and humanity back into our country after a period of masochism, isolationism and selfishness. I believe the way to do [it] is to throw all the dice on the table and, in fact, ask for ‘everything now.’ … We are trying to create some balance within the media. That is a very noble enterprise. Few would disagree that the media needs some balance.… TVN was invented for a purpose.”
On April 30, 1975, Herschensohn submitted his programming proposal to TVN for review. It would presage many aspects of Fox News’s internal structure and programming tactics. The 179-page document, which detailed the evening newscast and other show ideas, identified twenty-eight techniques that TVN could deploy in its programming to “manipulate” the audience. Herschensohn explained terms like
Pretense Balancing
, the goal of which is “showing ‘all sides’ of a particular story when, in fact the balance is tilted.”
The Hold Frame
holds a subject “in a flattering or unflattering position” (depending on the agenda) and gives “the impression of ‘catching an event,’ or ‘catching a person.’ ”
Catch Phrases
are easily remembered words “which seem to be factual though they are, in fact, editorializations.”
Repetition
, the last concept on the list, creates a news event through repeated assertion. “The creation of the most important story today” becomes “the truly most important story a week from today.” (“We can send a newsman and a camera crew over to the Capitol and talk to a congressman or senator about ‘the story.’ If the congressman or senator is willing, we can create news in an instant. Most are willing,” he wrote.) Repetition, Herschensohn wrote, is “the oldest and most effective propaganda technique.”
Ailes would have read Herschensohn’s memo when Wilson circulated it for review. “With a nightly news package we can
create ongoing
stories of importance,” Herschensohn wrote. (Fox would do the same with sagas such as the “War on Christmas,” “Obama’s Czars,” “Fast and Furious,” and “Benghazi.”) Herschensohn encouraged conservatives to identify whipping posts that played to their audience’s resentments. “Whereas others selected the CIA and the FBI, we can take HEW and HUD,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (Fox would later take on the United Nations and the Environmental Protection
Agency.) Herschensohn proposed filling the network with a slate of former Nixon officials. “Staff Possibilities” included Frank Shakespeare, Ken Clawson, Bill Gavin, Dwight Chapin, Stephen Bull, and even Nixon’s daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower. (Fox News would become a way station for former Republican politicians and officials.) “Sex Appeal” needed to accompany the presentation of the news. “This is one of the most important elements which we should not ignore, and network news has ignored,” Herschensohn wrote. (Fox would not make that mistake.
Anchor Bob Sellers remembered Ailes once calling the control booth. “I was doing the weekend show with Kiran Chetry. He called up and said, ‘Move that damn laptop, I can’t see her legs!’ ”)
T
he ambitious programming slate, however, far outpaced where TVN was as an actual business.
The dish to receive the network’s satellite signal cost $100,000, more than stations were willing to pay. And
at a choreographed rollout ceremony, the demonstration failed. With the project faltering, Herschensohn soon left to produce a
bicentennial film for NASA and to write a book of media criticism he titled
The Gods of Antenna
.
Wilson had reached an impasse.
By September 1975, TVN had lost $14.6 million, and Joe Coors was growing impatient. The scourge of big government was making Coors feel far less charitable.
After his father died in 1970, the family had to pay a sizable estate tax.
During a board meeting on September 25, Robert Pauley scribbled in his notes that management’s mood of late was a “feeling of desperation.”
A few days later, the board decided to shut TVN down.
On October 3, Wilson sent a letter to Nixon to inform him of the board’s decision. “After the pleasant time we shared together in your office, you must know how distressed I am at this time. In spite of those emotions, however, none of us at TVN need have the slightest hesitation to hold our heads high. Every man and woman gave their utmost to this effort,” he wrote. “Among those who worked the hardest and were most responsible were former associates of yours, Roger Ailes, Steve Bull and Bruce Herschensohn.” The failure, Wilson explained, was actually confirmation that the free market had worked. “The Coors people believe so deeply in freedoms of the press that they were willing to take big risks. Although TVN was not able to survive and prosper at this time in history, it is still better to have tried under the free enterprise system than to have arbitrarily handed over the responsibility
of news balance to existing agencies, or worse yet, to big government,” he wrote.
Ailes did not wait for the inevitable—he quit in late September. His stated reason was outside meddling. The board had brought in consultants, including John McCarty, who had gotten Ailes the job. “Roger objected to their presence,” Pauley wrote in his notes. He spent just under a year as news director, but absorbed many important precepts in that brief time. Bob Pauley, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-five, lived long enough to see his vision of a right-wing network realized.
“He believed all news should be fair and balanced. That was
his
phrase,” Barbara Pauley said of her husband.
TVN, while largely forgotten, was a crucial breakthrough in the birth of cable news. After the company folded,
Reese Schonfeld founded the Independent Television News Association, the first satellite-delivered TV news service.
In 1976 at a television industry conference, Schonfeld ran into a profane thirty-something billboard magnate with a penchant for sailboat racing and beautiful women. A born dreamer, he was transforming his Atlanta-based outdoor advertising company into a pioneering television enterprise.
In December 1976, he launched the first channel distributed nationally by satellite and soon
hired Schonfeld to create a twenty-four-hour news channel. His name was Ted Turner, and the channel was CNN.