Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
Clinton’s brazen denial dared his enemies to expose him as a liar.
It was all eerily reminiscent of the challenge candidate Gary Hart had leveled to reporters who were chasing rumors of his infidelity during the
campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton’s taunting comments had the same crystallizing effect. They focused the minds of the American public on one basic question:
Did he or didn’t he?
Until Clinton came clean, Fox News had a never-ending story. Within hours, Ailes made the first of several significant programming moves to capitalize on the scandal. When Brit Hume called from Washington that morning, Ailes told him he wanted him to launch a new show.
That night
. Hume was astonished. The channel was planning to launch a program helmed by him in March, and there was some talk of moving up the start date, but he didn’t think that would mean going live in less than twenty-four hours.
Ailes envisioned Hume’s 6:00 p.m. program, which he called
Special Report
, as Fox News’s own
Nightline
, the ABC newscast in which Ted Koppel updated the American public on the Iranian hostage crisis. What Koppel had done for the abduction of fifty-two Americans, Hume would do for the president’s creative use of cigars.
Hume infused
Special Report
with the immediacy of breaking news even when there wasn’t anything new to report. Five producers and correspondents covered the Starr investigation full-time. “We had a whole formula,” Shuster, who was part of the team, recalled. “Every story had to lead with a ‘today’ picture.” So if the grand jury wasn’t in session, Hume could open the lead story with video of Starr taking out the trash at his home in Virginia that morning. To keep tabs on the Whitewater grand jury, the producers developed a surveillance system. A source gave them a telephone number that connected the caller, usually a lawyer, to a recorded message announcing whether or not the grand jury would be in session. It was a valuable shortcut. Other news organizations had to stake out the courthouse to find out when a new witness was testifying. “I think we were the only ones who had that,” Shuster said.
In short order,
Special Report
established itself as a competitive player on the Lewinsky beat. The program had a strong record of breaking stories, including Lewinsky’s decision to become a prosecution witness, Clinton’s agreement to testify before the grand jury, and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan’s grand jury testimony about his controversial conversations with Lewinsky. The show’s relentless reporting infuriated the Clinton White House. The president’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, and adviser Bruce Lindsey complained to Fox News’s White House correspondents Jim Angle and Wendell Goler about the show’s scandal-obsessed coverage.
“We’re trying very hard to be fair,” Hume said. He
took their complaints as something of a badge of honor.
“The Clinton administration—they hated us!” he later told
The New York Times
.
Launching Hume’s newscast at 6:00 p.m. required Ailes to juggle. He shifted Bill O’Reilly to 8:00 and Catherine Crier to 10:00. Mike Schneider’s 7:00 p.m. time slot was in flux. After clashing with Ailes, Schneider had left the channel a few months earlier. Ailes had Jon Scott and others fill in. Moving O’Reilly to prime time was an unexpectedly brilliant move.
At the opening of his inaugural 6:00 p.m. program, O’Reilly had stated the mission that he at first was unable to execute.
“How did it happen? How did television news become so predictable and in some cases, so
boring
?” he asked. “Well, there are many theories, but the fact is, local and network news is basically a rehash of what most regular viewers already know.” It was the breakthrough insight. The viewers Ailes was trying to attract did not want television to tell them what happened in the world. They wanted television to tell them how to
think
about what happened in the world—the news itself would be secondary.
“Few broadcasts take any chances these days, and most are very politically correct,” O’Reilly continued. “Well, we’re going to try to be different, stimulating and a bit daring, but at the same time, responsible and fair.”
He failed, initially. In those opening months, he attracted only a few audience members and the scorn of television critics. At forty-eight, O’Reilly was a journeyman long past his sell-by date.
His career began in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and climbed the affiliate ladder: Dallas, Denver, Portland.
In 1982, he was called up to the Bigs, landing a job at CBS News, where he covered the Falklands War. In 1986 he switched to ABC News. He declared to the network staffers there that he had the talent to sit behind the anchor desk.
“He would say he should have Peter Jennings’s job,” Emily Rooney, who worked with O’Reilly at ABC, recalled. There was no doubt he had talent.
At six-four and with piercing, glacier-blue eyes, he owned the screen. In interviews, he proved himself to be an effective interrogator.
But O’Reilly burned hot. He harbored petty slights and made a habit of self-destructing.
In one five-year period, he blew through four different television stations.
“He was always in trouble with management,” Ailes said.
In 1989, he bailed out of the networks altogether to anchor the syndicated tabloid program
Inside Edition
. There, he sensed a shift in the national media conversation. Loudmouths, from Howard Stern to Rush Limbaugh, were building massive audiences as the medium of talk radio
exploded. O’Reilly, a notorious loudmouth himself, wanted a piece of the action.
“I’m not sure where the business is going,” he told a friend, “but my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and man, I’m going to be there.” O’Reilly turned
Inside Edition
into a programming laboratory. Unshackled from the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand relativity crossfire that mirrors the journalism school ideal of objectivity, he was able to incubate the bullying Irish street cop delivery he would later master at Fox News.
His failure at Fox’s 6:00 p.m. slot turned out to be a matter of timing. At 8:00, when many people were settling in front of the tube after dinner, O’Reilly finally connected. Like any skilled actor, he subtly calibrated his delivery to engage the full range of his audience’s emotions. With the Monica Lewinsky scandal now at his disposal, O’Reilly gave his viewers all the different reasons it was okay for them to despise the president.
One evening he told Nixon White House counsel John Dean that sex with an intern was an “abuse of power.” If questions about sex seemed off limits, Dan Quayle told O’Reilly’s audience that lying shouldn’t be.
“It’s important if the president of the United States committed perjury,” the former vice president said. For those who worried that condemning Clinton made a person sound like a conservative kook, O’Reilly took partisanship off the table.
“You guys wanted him out since Day One,” he barked to Jerry Falwell. “Don’t care that he’s been a good president. How do you answer
that
?” O’Reilly heard from voices on the right and the left as he marshaled his interviews toward his unassailable conclusion: Bill Clinton was fibbing to get out of a jam. O’Reilly was there for the folks to make sure Clinton couldn’t pull a fast one.
It made sense, on several levels, that O’Reilly would become Ailes’s brightest star.
O’Reilly once remarked that their meeting was “just perfect synergy.” Like Ailes, O’Reilly had a talent for constructing a compelling personal narrative. Although O’Reilly’s father worked in Manhattan as an accountant, he presented himself as a scrappy son of Levittown, Long Island, where the local parish and the New York Mets competed for the faithful’s attentions.
“It was very basic,” O’Reilly told his biographer. “It was tuna. It was hot dogs and beans. It was steak on Saturday night. It was spaghetti. It was secondhand sports equipment, movies now and then.”
Class antagonism formed the foundation of O’Reilly’s carefully honed public image.
At prep school, he was sneered at by the WASPs from Long Island’s wealthy North Shore.
At Marist College, then an all-male
liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, eighty miles north of Manhattan on the Hudson River, O’Reilly hung with an Irish and Italian crowd that tried to crash parties at Vassar on the fancy side of town.
“I could feel those rich girls and their Ivy League dates measuring me,” he recalled.
O’Reilly also shared another significant Ailesian trait: he understood television news was nothing but a show.
“Bill O’Reilly is one of the greatest bullshitters in the world,” Ailes’s brother, Robert, said. “He can talk about any subject, he can get the best out of his guest by taking the opposite point of view even if he doesn’t believe it.”
O’Reilly’s sudden success at 8:00 p.m. showed Ailes that the audience was responding to the nightly melodrama. So Ailes added more supporting characters to his cast.
Disgraced former Clinton adviser Dick Morris—who was exposed patronizing a $200-an-hour Washington prostitute—became a frequent on-air presence and fount of embarrassing Clinton gossip.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked a producer in the green room before one Lewinsky segment. “What do you mean?” the producer asked. “Well, which side am I?” Morris said. Playing the Clinton apostate proved the most valuable role.
In March 1998, Morris told the Fox audience that years earlier Bill had asked him to poll-test how a divorce would hurt his political future. “Hillary and I are having some problems and I think we may have to split up,” Morris quoted Clinton saying. “Do you think that’s going to hurt me politically?”
In April, Ailes hired Morris as a political analyst.
Several weeks later, Ailes recruited the mysterious figure who had done much to catalyze the scandal: Matt Drudge. But Drudge’s transition to television was not an easy one. Inside Fox News, he was as much an oddity to producers as he was to the outside world.
“It’ll be me, a hat, and the hippest stories on the block,” he told one reporter. “I’m going to go wherever the stink is.” Lucianne Goldberg was a regular companion on his set, which one reporter described as
“Raymond Chandler detective’s office,” complete with teetering stacks of faded newspapers and 1950s-style furniture.
To complete the picture, Ailes even let Goldberg smoke cigarettes on air.
In the summer of 1998, to feed his audience’s obsession with Clinton headlines, Ailes added more political news to the lineup. It was a period that marked a subtle transfer of power to John Moody from Chet Collier, who would retire a little more than a year later.
In July, Ailes hired
McLaughlin Group
regulars Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes to host
The Beltway Boys
, a weekly political roundtable. A few days later, he scrapped Collier’s original lineup. Hours of hard news between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. would replace Collier’s twenty-minute talk show blocks.
The new lineup premiered on July 27.
It was auspicious timing.
On the evening of August 17, Clinton spoke to the country from the White House’s Map Room a few hours after his videotaped Whitewater grand jury testimony. His four-and-a-half-minute address finally answered the American people’s singular question:
he did
.
A
s Clinton’s presidency spiraled toward its nadir, Ailes and Fox News were rocketing to new ratings highs. On the set of
Hannity & Colmes
that night, the mood was ebullient. Matt Drudge called into the studio from his cell phone to commemorate the momentous occasion.
“It’s all popping. Congratulations,” Drudge said, sounding like a star player celebrating with a teammate in the end zone. “I think this has been the finest night of the network.”
Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage of Lewinsky showcased Ailes’s unmatched ability to fuse politics and entertainment into a marketable product. His wit and theatrical flair were embedded into Fox’s programs in ways both big and small. Sometimes the channel covered the scandal as a comedy. That’s what its zany poll questions were for.
“Which of the following do you think better describes Monica Lewinsky: An average girl who was taken advantage of, or a young tramp who went looking for adventure and thrills?”
“What is President Clinton more thankful for this Thanksgiving? Still having a wife? Or still having a job?”
At other points, the scandal was covered as pure soap opera.
In April 1998, Fox aired exclusive video of Clinton in a hotel in Dakar, Senegal, where he was traveling on an official trip, after a judge dismissed Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit. “You see the president walking around in his suite, smoking a cigar, walking around the room, eventually beating on an African drum,” correspondent Jim Angle reported. “And at one point, he is also playing the guitar. So I think it gives you a pretty clear indication of the mood.”
In another report, by correspondent Rita Cosby, Fox showed the cad getting his due: “Sources tell Fox News that the reason the couple’s recent ski vacation in Utah was abruptly cut short and they returned one day early was because they had a shouting match which left Hillary storming out of the room saying she wanted her bags.”
Some Fox viewers kept the channel on for so long that the static Fox
News logo displayed on the lower left corner of their TVs burned the pixels. Before a rotating one was introduced, even when they turned off their sets for the night, the outlines of the graphic remained tattooed to the dark screens.
D
avid Shuster was no longer having the time of his life. His unhappiness was on one level surprising, because he was being lauded by management. Shortly before Clinton admitted to the affair, Moody called Shuster and told him that Ailes wanted to meet him in person in New York “to pat you on the back.” But Shuster was becoming increasingly frustrated with O’Reilly, Hannity, and other talking heads, who took his reporting out of context to damage Clinton. In August, Shuster told producers that he learned Starr was investigating the possibility of a “second intern.” He did not report it on-air and cautioned that Starr had found no direct evidence for it.
But Mort Kondracke, co-host of
The Beltway Boys
, promoted the allegation on camera. After Shuster complained about Kondracke to Brit Hume, Moody had Shuster indicate which part of his reports could be used on-air.
“There was initially this Maginot line between the news and the commentary,” said Steve Hirsh, a member of the Washington bureau. “As they became more successful and more identified with the niche they sought out to get, that line was blurred more. You had some of the old-line news folks, whether they agreed with the politics, who didn’t want to do that.”