Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
During the impeachment saga, Shuster and other Fox journalists learned that Ailes was telling Brit Hume to commission Clinton-bashing assignments.
“We would hear that Roger would call Brit with a laundry list of five or six stories that he would want us to do,” Shuster said. “It was something like either the Clintons pushing a particular nomination, or that they were buying off someone for a vote. It was stuff that Roger was picking up.” He went on, “But Brit would say, ‘I’m not going to have my White House correspondent ask this at a briefing.’ ” In a private conversation in the bureau, Shuster told Kim Hume he was uncomfortable with the direction of the channel. “Kim said to me, ‘Look, Brit’s on your side. You don’t realize it, but he’s fighting tooth and nail protecting you and the other reporters from what Roger wants you to do,’ ” he recalled.
Catherine Crier was also increasingly unhappy. As the host of the 10:00 p.m.
Crier Report
and the newsmagazine
Fox Files
, her sensibility was vastly different from Ailes’s.
“I’m very interested in conflict resolution,”
she had told a reporter when the channel launched. “The world really doesn’t exist in black and white, wrong and right, liberal and conservative.” Ailes disagreed, at least for the purposes of television. “Be more opinionated,” he told Crier in one meeting. “The guests are there as a foil for you.” He also disagreed with her dress.
“He had admiration for her legs,” a senior executive said. In one meeting, Ailes barked, “Tell Catherine I did not spend x-number of dollars on a glass desk for her to wear pant suits.”
Crier found the editorial direction worrisome. “Over time, in the three years I was there, I began to feel more of a heavy hand,” she said. Ailes, she said, was “paying more attention to what stories were being covered or not covered.” After months of Lewinsky mania, she was bored. “Of course everyone covered it ad nauseam. But it was to the point I was stopping strangers on the street saying, is there
anything
about this you don’t know? I can’t do this anymore. There certainly was a take that was emerging, it wasn’t there when I was starting,” she said.
She was also disturbed by Murdoch’s influence on Fox’s coverage. In the summer of 1997, at a time when Murdoch was seeking to expand his media empire into China, Crier was told to soften her coverage of the British handover of Hong Kong to Beijing. “I would get comments through my production staff and my executive producer,” she said. Months later, Crier decided to leave Fox News for a position at Court TV. “They offered me a lovely contract to stay. I felt uncomfortable. There were no hard feelings when I left,” she said. “I was troubled when I left. I can’t even imagine the situation today.”
H
annity & Colmes
was another management challenge. Despite its bipartisan billing, the show was a vehicle for Sean Hannity’s right-wing politics.
An Irish Catholic from Long Island, Hannity came of age as two revolutions, Reagan conservatism and right-wing talk radio, sent the country on a new course. He harbored dreams of becoming the next Bob Grant, the caustic New York City radio commentator who provided an outlet for incendiary views on blacks, Hispanics, and gays.
Radio personalities like Grant, Hannity said, “taught me early on that a passionate argument could make a difference.”
In his twenties, Hannity drifted.
He tried college three times but dropped out.
By the late 1980s, he was living in southern California working
as a house painter.
In his spare time, he called in to KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station, to inveigh against liberals and to defend the actions of his hero Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. His combative commentaries impressed the station management.
Though he was not a student, Hannity was soon given an hour-long morning call-in show, which he titled
The Pursuit of Happiness
, a reference to Reagan’s 1986 Independence Day speech.
In April 1989, Hannity invited the virulent anti-gay activist Gene Antonio on the air to promote his already widely discredited book,
The AIDS Cover-up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS
.
A Lutheran minister without scientific training, Antonio peddled paranoid fictions about the epidemic.
He wrote that the virus could be transmitted by sneezes and mosquito bites and that the Centers for Disease Control and the American Medical Association conspired to cover up the “truth.”
At the opening of his hour-long interview, Hannity said: “I’m sick and tired of the media and the homosexual community preventing us from getting the true, accurate information about AIDS in this day.” He went on to describe
The AIDS Cover-up?
as an “excellent book” that was “so full of facts” and added, “if you want the real truth about this deadly, deadly disease, he’s not afraid to say what the homosexuals don’t want you to hear.” He gave his audience Antonio’s mailing address, where they could order “autographed copies” and write to find out about “places where homosexuals can go for help if they want to change.”
Hannity’s description of gay life on the show was just as venomous as Antonio’s extreme rhetoric. He described San Francisco gay men as “disgusting people,” gay sex as “against nature” and “tantamount to playing in a sewer,” and gay adoptive parents as “really sick.” Hannity said he would not allow a gay man to teach his son at school. “I don’t care if you call me homophobic. I’ll take it,” he said. Strangely, given his avowed disapproval, Hannity expressed a prurient interest in Antonio’s explicit descriptions of enemas, golden showers, and bestiality.
As the men talked, irate calls flooded the studio. Jody May, a lesbian station employee, told Hannity about her baby boy.
“Artificial insemination?” Hannity asked. “Aren’t you married to a woman, by the way?”
“Yes, I am.”
“
Yeah
, turkey baster babies,” Antonio interjected.
“Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?” Hannity added.
“That’s also a really disgusting remark,” May said.
“I feel sorry for your child,” Hannity snapped. “You wanna make any more comments?”
Gay rights groups, calling for a boycott of the station, pressured management to yank Hannity off the air. In June the station canceled his show, citing his “multiple discriminatory statements based on sexual orientation,” which were in “violation of the University of California Nondiscriminatory Policy.”
Hannity played the victim of overzealous PC enforcers. After Hannity launched a free speech campaign, enlisting the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, the university agreed in the summer of 1990 to reinstate his program. Hannity insisted that the university double the standard one-hour show and one-semester appointment to two hours and two semesters. When the university balked, Hannity walked away. In his telling, he was a target of liberal persecution.
After applying for radio gigs around the country, Hannity found work in the South, eventually landing a job at the Atlanta talk station WGST.
His bio on the station’s website declared that he made “a proud name for himself by insulting lesbians.”
In an interview with New York’s
Newsday
several years after joining Fox, Hannity glossed over his time in Santa Barbara, speaking the powerful language of conservative resentment. “You work for free at a college station, where they spit on you and then they fire you,” he said. “Then you pack up and move to a small station across the country. And if you work hard and you are talented, eventually you get a shot. Everybody has that story in America. That’s why I love the capitalist system in America.”
Though cast as a supporting character for Hannity, Alan Colmes did not want to be Hannity’s punching bag. To indulge Colmes, producers tried to help him feel like more than a prop.
Each morning, a producer would first call Hannity to get a rundown on what he wanted to cover that night. Then the producer would call Colmes to get his input. Unbeknownst to Colmes, this second call was largely a ruse.
“There was a real tightrope walk we had to do to make Alan feel like he was an equal voice,” one producer recalled. “Sean basically served as executive producer of the show.”
W
hile conservatives like Hannity thrived at Fox, rank-and-file staffers began to express apprehensions with Ailes’s programming directives.
Some struggled with the channel’s self-conscious anti-intellectualism. Others felt uncomfortable with the overt politics.
“I had higher-ups wanting to see my scripts,” said producer Rachel Katzman. “They needed to make sure I wasn’t too liberal. I was told to change stories.” Jordan Kurzweil, who was hired to launch Fox News’s website, also got pressure to conform.
“John Moody would call my editor and ask me to change a headline or the positioning of articles because it was damaging to Republicans. The phone calls got made, it was frank,” Kurzweil said.
In hushed conversations around the halls, these young staffers wondered why the channel masked Ailes’s conservative aims with the “fair and balanced” slogan. One former producer remembered exchanges like this:
“What is the crime in coming out and saying what we’re doing? Everyone knows this is what we’re doing.… Why do we have to keep it a secret? What’s this ‘fair and balanced’ thing the producers keep talking about behind the scenes? I don’t know why they don’t just say what it is. It’s so blatantly obvious.”
The answer involved a combination of politics, history, and psychology. The conservative dream of establishing a counter-media hinged, in large part, on convincing the viewers that what they were getting was
news
, not propaganda. “Fair and balanced” was a commercial necessity.
“If you come out and you try to do right-wing news, you’re gonna die. You can’t get away with it,” Ailes said to the
Hartford Courant
.
“There’d been four failures at that,” he told
The New York Times
, without citing examples. “This was a different mission entirely.”
TVN’s failure had many causes. But certainly its stigma as a Coors propaganda tool contributed to its demise.
Two decades later, Paul Weyrich’s National Empowerment Television was ghettoed to the far right because the channel uniformly displayed Weyrich’s dogmatic conservatism—a turnoff to most viewers.
Keeping Fox News’s staff in line was not a major concern for Ailes.
Brian Lewis and the PR operation took care of that. Lewis’s absolute no-leaks policy scared employees into silence, from highly paid anchors to low-level grunts, at least when reporters came calling. Blasting rap music in his office—“Gangsta Nation” was a favorite track—Lewis planted negative stories about disloyal employees. When successful he liked to say, “I shoved a Scud up his ass!” The harder challenge involved the one thing Ailes could not ultimately control—the news itself.
B
y the winter of 1999, Fox News’s prime-time lineup was passing MSNBC for second place, even though MSNBC was distributed in
nine million more homes.
But in February, the Lewinsky saga finished its final act. The Senate voted to acquit Clinton. Ailes would need a new story line.
The options were unappealing.
The news cycle was favoring his less partisan rivals and Ailes was turned off by the coverage of the NATO air campaign in Kosovo, which he saw as both boring and expensive. His audience did, too.
During the conflict’s opening days in late March, MSNBC doubled its daytime audience and zoomed past Fox to reclaim second place in the ratings wars.
One afternoon, Ailes barged into John Moody’s office to complain about Fox’s war coverage. “You gotta stop this bullshit, how much are we spending?” he said. “Who the hell gives a shit? Is there even a story? What the hell are we doing there?” Moody, the former
Time
foreign correspondent, stared back. “Are we done?” he said.
The evening lineup was also a problem.
In January 1999, Ailes poached the respected CBS anchor Paula Zahn to helm a 7:00 p.m. newscast, which had rotated through anchors since Mike Schneider’s exit. But Zahn’s seriousness and elegance were out of sync with the prime time partisans. O’Reilly was firing on all cylinders at 8:00, which boosted
Hannity & Colmes
at 9:00. So Ailes tried a different tack.
He moved Zahn to 10:00 p.m. and put Shepard Smith, a thirty-five-year-old fast-talking field correspondent, in her slot.
The goal was to go tabloid. After his forceful performance covering the Columbine massacre, Smith convinced Ailes he could own the screen.
“Put Shep in front of a live picture, and it’s unbelievable,” one former Fox producer said. A gregarious Mississippian who had joined Fox at the launch, Smith was part of a clique of young staffers. He rented a beach house in the Hamptons with fellow Fox correspondent Rick Leventhal and
began dating Julia Rolle, a beautiful field producer. But Smith had a dark side.
He was known to explode unexpectedly on his colleagues. “He Shepped Out” became a phrase around the halls.
Whatever turbulence he caused, Smith had an ineffable quality that Ailes prized and that he had an instinct to spot.
To produce his show, Ailes hired a former tabloid producer named Jerry Burke, who had done a stint in Los Angeles at
Extra
, the syndicated celebrity news show. But Burke’s sensibility was not welcome in all corners of the channel.
On one
of his early shows, Burke told Smith to lead with a live report on the drama between basketball star Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra. The phone in the control room rang. Burke answered. It was Brit Hume, who had just signed off
Special Report
from Washington.
“Why are you calling me?” Burke said.
“You are single-handedly going to destroy this network,” Hume seethed. He told Burke the Rodman story had no place at the channel. Burke slammed down the phone. The following morning, Ailes walked into Burke’s office in the newsroom and told him he was backing Hume. “Jerry, you gotta be true to the brand,” Ailes told him. “I’m willing to risk a tenth of a rating point if you protect the brand. Think about it, we’re not
Extra
.”
While Ailes refused to acknowledge it in public, the Fox News brand had been set: the channel programmed news to appeal to conservatives. Which is why it was not tabloid for Hume to talk about blow jobs and semen stains on the air. That was a serious matter of national consequence. One of Ailes’s gifts was knowing where the taste line was and pushing right up to the limit of it. Matt Drudge did not.
In November 1999, Drudge stormed off his set when John Moody refused to let him show a photograph from the
National Enquirer
of a twenty-one-week-old fetus undergoing surgery for spina bifida.
Drudge wanted to use the photo to illustrate an antiabortion segment. Moody overruled him, saying it would be out of context.
The messy episode spilled into the press. “I guess I can go on and talk about Lewinsky’s dirty dress,” Drudge complained to
The Washington Post
, in a burst of truth telling. “I have to wonder whether their motto of ‘we report, you decide’ isn’t just some Madison Avenue slogan.” “Matt’s entitled to his opinion. It was an editorial decision,” Brian Lewis said.