Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
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efore leaving Arkansas for Fox News, Shuster had heard enough stories about Ailes to know his politics. But he believed conservative ideology was only a minor factor at Fox. Although his personal opinions were vaguely Democratic, Shuster never thought about advancing the interests of one side or the other through his journalism. The fact was, Shuster thrived on the energy of Ailes’s high-octane start-up. He thought he had the best of both worlds, shuttling between Washington and Little Rock.
“I was having the time of my life,” he recalled.
One of the things Shuster liked most about his job was working for Brit Hume, the network’s chief Washington correspondent and managing editor of the Washington bureau. While Shuster worked at the Little Rock ABC affiliate, Hume was an Emmy Award–winning correspondent at ABC News. Ailes recruited Hume, who was ideologically on board with Ailes’s mission, a few months after Shuster. “We believe we are eligible to pick up the audience of the disaffected,” Hume told a reporter. “Those who are looking for news but whose sensibilities are continually assaulted when they watch the other news outlets.” Though clearly a conservative, Hume was “at heart a journalist,” Shuster said. He remembered Hume holding the view that “there was a whole constituency of people at the White House who were trying to protect Clinton.” Shuster appreciated that his new boss wanted to give him the resources to find out the truth.
In the beginning, no matter how many stories Shuster reported, hardly anyone in the capital recognized him, since
many of the suburban precincts in which Washington’s political and media classes resided didn’t carry the channel; even Fox’s Washington affiliate didn’t carry the Fox News election night broadcast. And with Ailes’s political baggage, Fox had little to offer the Clinton administration. In the summer of 1996,
Moody had gone to Washington to meet with George Stephanopoulos, a senior adviser to the president. When Moody asked if Clinton would be willing to appear on Fox News on the day of its October launch, Stephanopoulos started laughing. “Why wouldn’t he?” Moody asked, pointing out that Clinton had done the same for MSNBC during its recent debut. “Well, for one thing,” Stephanopoulos said, “MSNBC’s not owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Roger Ailes.” Kim Hume, Brit’s wife and a former producer at ABC, had to fight to get Fox News included in the White House press pool after she joined Fox’s Washington bureau as news director and deputy bureau chief in August 1996.
When Defense Secretary William Cohen made a trip to Europe in late February 1997, MSNBC and CNN were granted room on the plane, while Fox was not.
A few months later, Fox complained that it was not allowed on Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s plane during her Middle East tour. “We’re trying to be as fair and balanced as possible. But Fox is the relatively new kid on the block,” a State Department official told
The Washington Post
.
The distribution problem continued to be a wellspring of frustration
in the spring of 1997. News Corp’s federal lawsuit against Time Warner in the Eastern District of New York proved to be a dead end. And a federal appeals court upheld Judge Cote’s original injunction.
But in mid-July, despite the victories, Time Warner suddenly reversed course. Over lunch at the annual Allen & Company media summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, Murdoch, Parsons, and Levin hammered out a deal.
Most observers viewed the agreement as a weak-kneed capitulation on Time Warner’s part, but Murdoch made the deal irresistible, agreeing to pay Time Warner upward of $200 million to gain access to eight million cable subscribers, which included the 1.1 million households in New York City.
Ailes was triumphant. “I made it look too damn easy,” he told a reporter. “I’m afraid they think I can launch a new network every six months.”
It was a short-lived celebration. That summer, Ailes learned that David Brock, a thirty-four-year-old investigative journalist, who had
once declared, “I kill liberals for a living,” was writing what Ailes surmised to be an unflattering profile of him for
New York
magazine. In July 1997, Brock published a widely read essay in
Esquire
, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” that detailed his spectacular break from the conservative cause. As a movement insider, Brock understood Ailes’s intentions for Fox News in a way others didn’t.
In a bid to get Brock to abandon the story, Ailes told him he was “confused.” “You shouldn’t be wasting your time on this article when you could be on our air,” Ailes said.
Brock demurred. Ailes responded with trademark bluster,
“Three people in the world hate me. You’re not going to get to them, and everyone else is too scared. Take your best shot at me, and I’ll have the rest of my life to go after you,” he said. The six-page profile, titled “Roger Ailes Is Mad as Hell,” hit newsstands on November 17, 1997. It was the most damaging article about Ailes to date, rendering him as a political operative in a newsman’s suit.
A month later, Ailes put positive topspin on his public image.
His friend, gossip columnist Liz Smith, announced his impending marriage to
Beth Tilson on Valentine’s Day 1998 in a ceremony at City Hall. The officiant was a loyal friend: Rudy Giuliani.
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n Sunday morning, January 18, 1998, John Moody was at home in suburban New Jersey getting ready for Mass when Kim Hume called him from Washington with mind-blowing news.
Just past midnight—12:32 a.m. EST to be exact—Matt Drudge posted an article on his website with a salaciously tantalizing headline: “NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN/BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR-OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT ** WORLD EXCLUSIVE ** ** Must Credit The Drudge Report **” At the top of the page, Drudge affixed a flashing police siren—a comic book touch that would become his trademark.
“At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening,
Newsweek
killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!” Drudge did not reveal the intern’s name, but noted that word of the liaison “caused blind chaos in media circles.”
What should Fox put on the air? Kim wanted to know. The producers of
Fox News Sunday
had coincidentally scheduled a live interview with Wesley Holmes, a lawyer for Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton. Could they ask him about the intern allegations? Moody told her to avoid the story. He was heading to Fox News headquarters to hold a special meeting in the War Room to manage the coverage. On his drive into the studio, he reached Ailes from his car phone.
Ailes knew Drudge.
In December, he met with the Internet entrepreneur to discuss the possibility of his hosting a tabloid show on Fox News.
The thirty-one-year-old fedora-wearing gossip hound, who idolized Walter Winchell, was an unlikely protagonist in a national drama. His website, an incongruous mix of headlines—extreme weather events and movie industry talk—had the feel of a 1950s scandal sheet, with a readership of Beltway and media elites. Drudge’s abiding passion was politics.
He relished beating the press pack on national political news, like the time he reported that Bob Dole was going to choose Jack Kemp as his running mate. But sometimes he was disastrously wrong.
On August 11, 1997, he posted a rumor that Sidney Blumenthal, a newly appointed adviser to Bill Clinton and former
New Yorker
journalist, had “a spousal
abuse past that has been effectively covered up.”
Though Drudge pulled down the story within hours and issued a retraction the following day, Blumenthal sued for $30 million.
“I don’t give a damn what the bureau chief’s going to think. I don’t have one,” Drudge told
USA Today
.
Though Whitewater had the potential to become Watergate, Ailes urged caution.
“You better have multiple sources on whatever we go with,” he told Moody. Given Drudge’s uneven track record, Ailes made an understandable decision to hedge on the intern story.
Acting on Ailes’s directive, Moody instructed Kim Hume to inform Marty Ryan, the producer of
Fox News Sunday
, that Tony Snow and his panelists should refrain from addressing the Drudge item on camera until Fox could independently confirm it.
Snow’s co-anchor Mara Liasson danced closest to the overnight bombshell. “Do you have evidence of other episodes of the president committing sexual harassment?” she asked Paula Jones’s attorney, Wes Holmes. “I’m sorry. I’m probably going to be pretty boring in this interview,” he replied.
David Shuster was not surprised to find the Fox News bureau buzzing when he arrived at work on Monday, January 19, Martin Luther King Day. On Saturday, he had covered Bill Clinton’s historic six-hour deposition in the Jones case. But without access to the Internet at home, Shuster was not prepared for just how wild the story was about to become. Carl Cameron, a lanky political reporter from New Hampshire who had joined Fox at the launch, motioned at Shuster and pointed to one of the computer monitors in the newsroom. “Did you see this stuff?” he said. Drudge’s latest “world exclusive” was on the screen.
The item revealed the name of the intern, Monica Lewinsky, and a few biographical details. Drudge also reported that Lewinsky had been deposed in the Jones case.
“Holy shit,”
Shuster thought.
At 6:00 p.m., Drudge went on to report that Lewinsky had signed an affidavit in the Jones case in which she denied having a “sexual relationship” with the president. According to Drudge, NBC News had obtained a copy and was “reading portions of it to sources to provoke comment.” The news ricocheted around Fox, but Ailes continued to order his correspondents to hold off.
His decision to keep Fox News at bay may have been as much politically as editorially motivated, part of a strategy to obscure his channel’s perceived conservative bent. If Fox anchors reported on the intern affair before confirming it, the channel’s liberal adversaries would surely
pounce.
“They didn’t want to play into the whole right-wing idea,” one Fox producer recalled. But in fact Fox personalities were playing a role behind the scenes to move the scandal along. In the summer of 1996,
Fox News Sunday
host Tony Snow connected his friend
Linda Tripp, a disgruntled former White House secretary who wanted to write a tell-all book about Clinton, to Lucianne Goldberg, a big-haired, chain-smoking conservative consultant to the
New York Post
and occasional literary agent, who would advise Tripp to tape her conversations with Lewinsky.
“You ought to talk to Lucianne Goldberg,” Snow told Tripp.
“We were all part of a rat pack,” Goldberg later said.
On a conference call with members of Fox’s Washington bureau, Moody said not to worry about breaking new ground.
“His message was—given Ailes’s reputation and because of his Republicanism—as a news channel, we don’t want to be first unless we have it dead right. We have to be sure,” one participant on the call remembered. David Shuster received additional guidance from Brit Hume. “We know you know the story backwards and forwards, but it’s okay to lay off,” Shuster recalled Hume advising him. The guideline applied to Fox’s prime-time opinion pundits as well. “We don’t need to be first,” Hannity’s producer, Bill Shine, told another staffer.
Instead, Ailes instructed his team to prepare for the story breaking. On Tuesday afternoon, Shuster wrote a memo outlining the latest developments in the Jones lawsuit and the Whitewater investigation, “background info so we’re ready to go.” Shortly after finishing his memo, he heard Cameron’s voice call him over to his computer.
“TONIGHT ON THE DRUDGE REPORT: CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND TAPES OF FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, AS STARR MOVES IN! …” were the words on the screen. Shuster immediately placed calls to his contacts in Starr’s office, but no one picked up. Returning home, he continued to dial his sources. Finally, shortly before midnight, Shuster got confirmation.
A couple of hours later, a Fox producer called to tell him that
Washington Post
reporters Sue Schmidt and Peter Baker had published a story on the paper’s website. The producer read the headline aloud to him.
“CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE; STARR PROBES WHETHER PRESIDENT TOLD WOMAN TO DENY ALLEGED AFFAIR TO JONES LAWYERS.” (Drudge linked to the article with his own triumphant headline:
“WASH POST SCREAMS INTERN STORY!”)
To a competitive reporter like Shuster, the article stung. “
Fuck
, they got the scoop,” he thought. ABC News and the
Los Angeles Times
followed with reports of their own. He had little time for rumination. As soon as the scandal had been reported by mainstream media organizations, Ailes shifted the message from “slow down” to “full speed ahead.”
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n Monday morning, January 26, Clinton handed Ailes an invaluable wedge that would define the political battle in the months ahead. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he said in a surprise appearance in the Roosevelt Room at an event promoting after-school programs. “I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.” On a day when his presidency seemed imperiled, Clinton’s head-shaking, finger-pointing denial signaled to his enemies that he would never back down.
For Ailes, who had watched the moment on a wall-mounted television screen in his second-floor office, the president’s remarks were a godsend—and a chance to redress past wrongs. Shortly after Clinton’s first inauguration, Ailes received an anguished phone call from George H.W. Bush, who said he had seen a photograph of Clinton in the Oval Office in a short-sleeved shirt. If Clinton’s sartorial choices caused offense, then fellatio from an intern was sacrilege.
“Roger saw Clinton thumbing his nose at the institution of the presidency,” an Ailes friend recalled.
The audience to which Ailes appealed likely felt the same way. They deeply resented Clinton’s moral relativism and his lawyerly “I didn’t inhale” evasions.
“Roger once said that people in Iowa don’t care about what’s happening abroad. He said the focus is on American values,” a former Fox producer said. And what could be more American than the country’s conflicted relationship with sex?
“Roger thought it was amusing, and so did I,” Lucianne Goldberg said. “What Fox wanted was the president having sex in a room Reagan wouldn’t walk into without a jacket on.” She continued: “Roger understands you must simplify, simplify,
simplify
.”