Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
“No, we launch immediately,” Inhofe said. “I think you’re gonna see that we have a president who’s on his way back to Washington as we speak who is gonna be very decisive.”
In the evening, Reverend Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham prepared Fox viewers for the long battle ahead. “We need to be strong,” he said on camera. “This, I’m afraid, is the beginning of a long and difficult process.… I’ve seen for myself these terrorists, these Islamic militants. They hate the United States. They hate us because they see us as the defender of Israel. They hate us because they see us as a Christian nation. They see our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and there are these militants that want to do everything they can to bring down this nation.”
“It’s extraordinary to hear a man of God such as Franklin Graham speaking in that way,” Brit Hume told the audience.
The voice of Newt Gingrich, who made three appearances on September 11, stood out vividly in Fox’s chorus. “This is a twenty-first-century Pearl Harbor. This is a twenty-first-century kind of war … it deserves a complete and total American response to ensure that it never happens again,” he said an hour after the second tower fell. He soon remarked, “The administration has to reach out around the world and make quite clear that we are going to go after whoever did this, and that people can decide either to be with the terrorists or be with Americans, but there will be no middle ground. There’s not going to be any neutrality in the process of getting even.”
On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …”
Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike.
“Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed.
“Bill—”
“They—it was an act of war.”
“No, no. It
does
make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.”
“Mr. Husseini, this is
war
.”
“Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.”
“Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished.
Come on
.”
“Who declared war on us?”
“The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!”
“Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said.
“Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.”
E
veryone, from politicians to news anchors, wrapped themselves in flags after 9/11. Not long after the attacks,
“it was like a World War Two mentality and we were fighting an evil empire,” said a senior producer.
“I remember running to Times Square to buy a fistful of flag pins off a vendor.” Anchors began wearing the pins on-set. Ailes’s creative director, Richard O’Brien, came up with a design for a waving American flag to be displayed on the screen.
In those opening days, all of the networks necessarily adjusted their coverage to reflect the country’s wounded, angry patriotism, but Fox’s rhetoric was hotter and louder. The anchors referred to bin Laden as “a dirtbag,” and “a monster” who ran a “web of hate” made up of “terror goons.”
“What we say is terrorists, terrorism, is evil, and America doesn’t engage in it, and these guys do,” Ailes told
The New York Times
in December. “We understand the enemy. They’ve made themselves clear: they want to murder us.… We don’t sit around and get all gooey and wonder if these people have been misunderstood in their childhood.”
Ailes expressed the self-justifying belief that Fox’s approach was not only the right thing to do but also great television, bigger than any good-versus-evil Hollywood blockbuster. Ailes had once dreamed of producing a feature film. Now he had one. At first, it was
Batman
. Mayhem broke out in the heart of Gotham. Then, it was
High Noon
. A cowboy president
vowed to
“smoke out” the bad guys and to find them
“dead or alive.” “I don’t believe that democracy and terrorism are relative things you can talk about, and I don’t think there’s any moral equivalence in those two positions,” Ailes said. He went on: “If that makes me a bad guy, tough luck. I’m still getting the ratings.” And it was true—Fox’s voice was very much in keeping with the views of much of America.
In January 2002, Fox passed CNN in the cable news race, and never turned back.
A
iles experienced the traumatic day of 9/11 as a new father. On New Year’s Day 2000, Beth had given birth to a son, Zachary Joseph Jackson Ailes.
“He told me having a kid changed his life completely,” former Fox anchor Bob Sellers later recalled. Ailes took measures to protect himself and his family.
At the time, Judith Regan, host of
That Regan Woman
, was having an affair with New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik.
On the night of September 11, Kerik even made a stop at Regan’s apartment. Seeking security advice in the days after 9/11, Ailes called Regan’s producer, Joel Kaufman, to arrange a private meeting with Kerik for him and Murdoch.
Later, an internal New York Police Department memo surfaced that revealed Ailes asked for police protection with “a request for counter surveillance from [the] Threats Desk.” The memo also detailed his elaborate security protocol. “Mr. Ailes employs a retired Detective NYPD as a personal escort. He arrives via private Car and is dropped off in front of 1211 Avenue of the Americas [Fox News headquarters] daily.… He is escorted into the building by his security and is met by building security.”
The sense of lockdown pervaded the office.
“After 9/11, it got really fucked up,” a senior staffer said.
On the second floor, a glass door with a key code would be installed in the hallway leading to Ailes’s executive suite. That was in addition to the locked door that stood before visitors outside the elevator bank.
His private statements about the conflict were shocking.
About a year after the attacks, Bill Clinton went for lunch at News Corp with Murdoch and his top executives. Murdoch’s communications chief, Gary Ginsberg, who was a former lawyer in the Clinton White House and a key Murdoch emissary to powerful Democrats, brokered the meeting. Talk turned to Ground Zero and plans for reconstruction. The executives around the room offered ideas. When it was Ailes’s turn, the conversation halted.
“Roger said this insane thing,” one person in the room recalled. “He was
talking about rebuilding the towers and he said, ‘We should fill the last ten floors with Muslims so they never do it again.’ ”
Ailes’s sense of the drama, and Fox’s own role in it, brought him into conflict with powerful forces at News Corp. On the evening of October 18, 2001, Ailes was a guest at the annual Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, where Dick Cheney was delivering the keynote address.
As the evening wound down, Ailes got a tip from Mayor Giuliani’s office: the
New York Post
was the latest media organization hit with an anthrax-laced letter. Earlier that day, a
Post
mailroom employee had come down with symptoms of anthrax exposure, but no one knew where the letter was. Ailes raced back to the office. On the tenth floor, in the newsroom of the
Post
, Murdoch’s oldest son, Lachlan, the tabloid’s spiky-haired publisher, was handling the response. Workers in hazmat suits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scanned the office. Lachlan wanted to keep the incident under wraps. News Corp had thousands of employees who were possibly at risk. There were human resources protocols to follow and certainly questions about the company’s legal exposure if more employees got sick. Lachlan and Ian Moore, News Corp’s head of HR, huddled together, strategizing options for alerting the staff in the morning.
Suddenly, someone told Lachlan that Ailes had burst into the Fox News newsroom shouting, “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” To Lachlan, that was precisely the wrong message to be sending at that moment, and he decided to do something about it. He took the elevator to the basement and found Ailes in his white-tie tuxedo giving directions to the crew of overnight producers. Lachlan told Ailes he needed to settle down. Ailes did not take his advice well. “You could see him getting aggravated. He’d been taken down in front of his people,” one executive said. The producers watching the confrontation were startled at what they were witnessing—Ailes was openly challenging the chairman’s kid, who was the deputy chief operating officer of the entire corporation.
The gravity of the situation was not lost on Ailes. Fate could be cruel to News Corp executives who crossed the Murdoch children.
In London, Sam Chisholm, the profane, New Zealand–born CEO of BSkyB, was forced out in part because he tangled with Rupert’s daughter Liz, who worked for him (he had called her a “management trainee”).
“On one level, Roger was very scared. No one had had a conflict with the children and survived. He didn’t want to be Sam Chisholm,” one executive close to Ailes explained.
Ailes needed to do something to turn the situation to his advantage.
Several months earlier he had already come close to overstepping his bounds when he decided to get rid of Fox News executive and longtime Murdoch ally Ian Rae.
“Don’t ever fucking fire a mate of mine again,” Murdoch told Ailes. Within days of his confrontation with Lachlan, Ailes made an appointment to see Rupert. In the meeting, Ailes threatened to resign as a preemptive strike. Ailes told Murdoch that his kids were aligned against him.
“Rupert is not the hardest person to manipulate,” a family intimate said. It was an effective move—Murdoch offered him a new contract. Ailes had secured his place at the company. Dealing with Lachlan could wait.
P
ROGRAMMING WAS ONLY ONE ARM
of Ailes’s effort to shape events. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he sent a confidential memo to Karl Rove with advice for George Bush.
“The only thing America won’t forgive you for is under-reaching,” Ailes wrote. His missive expressed his view that the country was facing an epochal conflict against a ruthless adversary.
“I wrote that letter as an American,” he told a Fox colleague. He knew that Americans craved revenge.
That’s why, he’d say, Americans still loved John Wayne, even though he had been dead for two decades. The country had some basic rules.
Rove made sure Bush received Ailes’s letter. Copies were also circulated to senior White House staff, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, communications director Dan Bartlett, and press secretary Ari Fleischer. Fox News was a crucial ally. In the wake of the divisive recount, the White House recognized Fox’s power to drive the debate and rally the faithful. On a personal level, Rove was said to be intimidated by Ailes, who antedated him on the national stage.
“Roger was the bigger figure,” recalled Bush aides who observed the power dynamic between the men. When Ailes complained that Fox was not getting enough access to White House officials, Rove leaned on White House communications director Dan Bartlett to rectify the issue.
“Ailes would call Karl and say, ‘we’re not getting enough guests during the daytime,’ ” a Bush official said. “Ailes’s message was:
‘You better fucking do something about it.’
So Karl would then call the press office and be like, ‘Why isn’t [Attorney General John] Ashcroft getting out there?’ ”
To help Bush build his image as a war president, Ailes continued to
feed Rove strategic advice.
“It focused on how to use the presidential role and rally morale,” a senior Bush official said. “Roger’s reference point was Reagan. He would point out where he saw similarities to use the presidential pulpit. He would say, ‘The president has to be out there more.’ It was macro level advice, as opposed to tactical.”
Ailes also made it clear he would leapfrog Rove if he felt particularly displeased.
Around the time he sent the military strategy memo, Ailes discovered that the administration was filling a crucial vacancy in the press office—the White House’s liaison to the television networks—with a former MSNBC producer named Adam Levine. Levine had worked for Chris Matthews on the staff of
Hardball
and was once a registered Democrat who worked in the office of New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Ailes complained directly to Dick Cheney about the appointment.
“Roger was afraid it would favor NBC. He wanted to make sure Brit Hume and Tony Snow got the interviews,” another Bush official said. Cheney’s aide Mary Matalin, Ailes’s friend, instructed Levine to go to New York to clear the air. During a meeting in Ailes’s office, Levine pledged his loyalty. “Mr. Ailes,” he said, “having worked for MSNBC and having been a Democrat, I can tell you I have more reasons than you could imagine to hate both organizations.”
Ailes’s producers clearly understood Fox’s role.
“Someone has to speak for the White House,” one said. Though much of the media credulously amplified the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq War, Fox News was its chief cheerleader, stoking passions born in the collapse of the towers and turning them to a new end.
Three days after 9/11, Bill O’Reilly hosted foreign policy analyst Laurie Mylroie to make the argument for hitting Saddam Hussein.
A year earlier, Mylroie—whom terrorism expert Peter Bergen would dub
“the Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist”—had published the controversial book
Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America
, which argued that Iraq was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O’Reilly wanted to know if she had “any evidence” that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11.