Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
“No,” she said. “But I think there are things that suggest it.”
Later in the interview, O’Reilly surmised, “You sound like you’re a person who says, ‘Hey, Saddam Hussein should be on the destruction death card, along with Osama bin Laden.’ He should be target number two, maybe.”
“I’d even say target number one,” she said. “The direction and the
expertise for these attacks are coming from Iraq. It would be good to get rid of bin Laden, I agree completely, but it won’t solve the problem. It wouldn’t be as meaningful as getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Given the president’s approval ratings—87 percent in November 2001, according to Gallup—cleaving closely to the Bush administration’s views was smart programming. In Iraq’s mustachioed dictator, Ailes had a perfectly cast enemy and a ready-made narrative of conflict.
“Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end,” a senior Fox producer said.
T
elevision networks roll out new series in the fall. The Bush administration did the same with its war plan.
“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, told
The New York Times
on September 7, 2002. Fox helped close the deal with the public, with Ailes personally directing the effort.
Twice each day—first at 8:00 a.m. and again at 2:30 p.m.—Ailes assembled his senior leadership for strategy sessions. The morning meeting took place in his office and focused on news; the afternoon gathering was held in a second-floor conference room and dealt with operations and financial issues. Ailes ran tough meetings. His authoritarian management style could terrorize his inner circle into silence. Executives sat around the table hoping he would not call on them.
“It’s not easy to be in that room. He looks around and points at people. If you talked, you’re fucking dead,” one executive recalled. “You’re supposed to take it until your face turns bright red, and you’re thinking,
if you move, will the
T. rex
see you?
”
The meetings were highly secretive, in keeping with Ailes’s background in political campaigns.
In the network’s early days, Ailes created a secret group of senior executives—he called it the “G-8”—to centralize authority. (
During George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, Ailes had been a member of the “G-6” along with Lee Atwater and others.) Like George H. W. Bush, Ailes did not attend these meetings; he expected his team to get along without him.
“Fox never went corporate,” one of Ailes’s executives said. Ailes was determined to keep the inner workings of his operation shrouded in mystery. He rarely communicated by email with his coterie of advisers, and when he did he usually used a pseudonymous account, “James Arlie,” a variant spelling of his maternal grandfather’s name.
“Roger is very good about giving himself plausible deniability for everything,” a senior producer said. When emails went out under his official
“Roger Ailes” account, they were “generally to announce company-wide things.” Otherwise, the producer said, “he prefers face-to-face meetings in his office.”
In the newsroom, producers would hear senior executives whisper the phrase
“the Second Floor says”
or
“the Second Floor wants.”
“You can’t say Roger’s name,” an executive explained. “It reminded me of the scene in
The Godfather II
where Al Pacino is talking to Johnny Ola, and they’re talking about Hyman Roth, except they never say his name. He was just ‘the Man in Miami.’ That’s Roger. He’s ‘the Man from Fox News.’ ”
Ailes policed leaks, especially those about his political agenda, with ruthless determination.
Judy Laterza, Ailes’s longtime assistant from his Ailes Communications days, sat in on every meeting, writing detailed notes on yellow legal pads. She developed a system to help Ailes speak freely.
“When Roger said something controversial, she just rolled her eyes,” a meeting-goer said. “But then she wrote it down. Then she wrote down everyone else who was in that room. So if it leaked, then Roger would know who was there.” Laterza’s mysteriousness made her powerful. Fox seemed to be her life, and she was said to be one of Ailes’s highest-paid employees.
One producer joked to people that he wanted to follow her home to see how she lived.
Bill Shine, who had been promoted to head of prime time after Chet Collier’s retirement, became the main conduit for Ailes’s directives. To low-level Fox producers, Shine was an intimidating presence. Across his cheek was a large scar of unknown provenance. After serving as Hannity’s producer, Shine moved into Chet Collier’s position because he was willing to be Ailes’s mouthpiece. When Ailes had a message to get on the air, he often turned to Shine. Where Collier was gruff, Shine was cryptic. He rarely put anything in email.
“Call me,” he would write to his colleagues. Or he would pop into producers’ offices unannounced to pass along instructions from Ailes, although he rarely dropped his name; “We’re not doing that,” he’d coyly explain. Because Shine could not challenge Ailes as Collier sometimes did, he complicated Brian Lewis’s PR mission to uphold Fox as a “fair and balanced” news network.
As payback, Lewis would attach Shine’s name on statements to the press when Fox had to disown programming embarrassments.
Lewis had a nickname for Shine: around the office he called him “Toadie.”
Colleagues did not think of Shine as a deeply political person. They saw his devotion to Ailes and Fox in more pragmatic terms.
Like Fox’s prime-time stars O’Reilly and Hannity, Shine was from Long Island.
He was “a blue-collar kind of guy, not a Harvard-Columbia guy,” a colleague said.
From his modest roots as a son of a cop, he had become a well-compensated TV executive who bought his wife, Darla, a Land Rover and built a luxurious vacation home.
John Moody was another surrogate through whom Ailes expressed his agenda. He wrote a daily editorial note to the staff, which appeared in the newsroom’s computer system, offering guidelines about major stories to cover.
“We looked at them every day,” a former senior Washington bureau staffer said. “They were supposed to be mandatory reading.” In addition to story lineups, the memos crackled with partisan gibes that overtly signaled how Fox should frame the news.
“When Ashcroft was being confirmed as Bush’s attorney general, one of the issues that came up at the time was his opposition to abortion rights,” recalled producer Adam Sank, who spent six years at the network. “Moody’s memo that day said something like, ‘As we cover the Ashcroft hearings and the subject about his beliefs on abortion, I want you all to remember what this issue is really about: it’s about killing babies.’ ”
In October 2003, a Fox News producer named Charles Reina publicized Moody’s memos to the press. Media critics railed that the memos proved Ailes’s “fair and balanced” mantra was a sham.
But Moody’s missives were probably unnecessary.
“People know who’s running things. People know who the audience is. If you drink the Kool-Aid things can go very well,” recalled former Fox anchor Bob Sellers. “When I interviewed for the job, I had a script in mind for how I would negotiate the interview. It was: ‘I was liberal when I was younger, conservative as I got older, and after 9/11, how can you not be conservative?’ ” Ailes built a campaign culture that was defined by staffers’ need to prove their loyalty.
“Watch out for the enemy within,” he told Fox’s staff during a company-wide pep talk.
Adam Sank remembered the “little things you could do to win favor with people in power.” On the one-year anniversary of 9/11, he happened to wear a red, white, and blue tie to work. “Every single executive stopped me and said, ‘I
really
like that tie,’ ” he said.
Ailes cultivated the idea that he was everywhere.
“Look, I know everything I need to know about you,” he told one producer. “I talk to the people above you. I talk to the people below you. And I talk to the people on either side of you.” Executives never knew Ailes’s schedule. Sometimes he showed up for the morning editorial meeting, sometimes he didn’t. If he wasn’t there, chances were he was listening in on the speakerphone, although he would not announce himself. Suddenly his voice would
crackle over the line. Ailes also put eyes in every department.
One executive called it “the invasion of the secretaries.” When Suzanne Scott, Collier’s former assistant, sent directions to producers, the staff knew whom she was speaking for.
“She had rules of what you could wear,” a female producer recalled. “No jeans. If you went out to the field, no dyed hair. The camera people couldn’t wear shorts unless it was over 90 degrees. All of us understood it.” Brigette Boyle was another secretary promoted into Fox’s HR department.
“She had no HR qualifications, except to screen people who would be fit for Fox,” a senior producer said. “Roger every so often had her do a task that was bizarre. Once, he asked for a list of every employee who went to Brown. He said it was because he never knew a conservative who came from Brown.” Another time, he asked her to check for any employees who had played field hockey.
Ailes’s most powerful tool of control was Media Relations.
Brian Lewis’s department not only had veto power over which guests could appear on Fox shows, but the department made Fox employees feel like the channel was a surveillance state. Lewis and his assistants berated employees for speaking to the press without authorization. They also used laptops with untraceable IP addresses to leak embarrassing stories about wayward Fox hosts and executives (“No fingerprints” was a favorite Lewis-ism). Fox employees worried their conversations were being recorded. After one former producer joked to a friend he was thinking about writing a book about Fox, he got an accusatory phone call from a senior Fox executive about it. The producer stammered he was only kidding. Lewis became feared for the perceived pleasure he took in trafficking in smears. “Look, I know you can kill me,” an employee said to him once, asking him to hold his fire. “I don’t wanna wake up tomorrow to read I’m gay and fucking sheep.”
And just to ensure that there was no confusion about Ailes’s ultimate wishes, Ailes conducted “fair and balanced” seminars himself.
“He would call a group of senior producers and make you watch the channel and he’d point out stuff, like a banner that’s slightly liberal,” a senior producer recalled. “He would say, ‘The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.’ ”
Ailes maintained to his newsroom that “fair and balanced” had nothing to do with a partisan agenda.
“Am I a Republican? Sure,” he said in a staff meeting. “But does that mean that my news network is biased Republican? Of course not.”
Beyond the politics, however, Fox’s lodestar was Ailes himself.
At the Fox News Christmas party in 2002, held at a Midtown Manhattan bar, Ailes was conspicuously absent, but at one point in the evening employees were instructed to watch a Fox News presentation on a large video monitor set up in the basement. The MSNBC and CNN logos appeared on the screen and elicited boos from the crowd. On the third slide, Ailes’s picture popped up. The attendees went wild, chanting,
“Roger … Roger … Roger … Roger!”
A
s the administration rolled out its sales pitch for the war, Ailes installed a new head of daytime programming to package the production, promoting Jerry Burke, the producer of Shepard Smith’s nightly newscast. Burke expressed a tabloid editor’s thrill for the biggest story of a generation. Not long after 9/11, John Moody offered him the position overseeing the 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. news block.
“Will you keep the car on the road or will you crash it?” Moody said.
“I want to see how fast it can go,” Burke told him.
Fox’s raucous cheerleading disguised the fact that, on a complex story like international terrorism, the channel was at a distinct disadvantage against its rivals.
At the time, Fox News had just 1,200 employees and six foreign bureaus. CNN, in contrast, employed 4,000 people and had thirty-one international bureaus.
When the war in Afghanistan started, Fox had no one on the ground, while CNN had a correspondent in the country. Although MSNBC was struggling to develop an identity, it still had the robust newsgathering assets of NBC News to fall back on.
So Burke improvised.
Shortly after receiving the promotion, he teamed up with two staffers on the assignment desk—David Rhodes and Eric Spinato—to develop a flanking maneuver designed to pick away viewers from their better-funded rivals. They called it “Operation Rolling Thunder.” CNN may have been the entrenched opposition, but Fox News would cover the story in a way that would be irresistible to viewers. Terrorism would become serial entertainment.
“Fox approached news differently,” a staffer who had done time at other networks said. “It wasn’t actual journalism where you say, ‘Let’s go see what’s going on.’ At Fox, it’s ‘This is what we’re doing, so go do it.’ ”
Every morning, Burke got off the commuter train at Penn Station determined to inflict damage on the competition. He told people that
producing news was like scanning a searchlight across the horizon to hunt for the right story. His first read of the day was the
Drudge Report
, not
The New York Times
. Whatever items seemed to be generating heat on the right were fodder for the air. Conflict was good.
Too
much conflict was bad. After an interview with a Muslim guest devolved into a shouting match, Burke hollered across the newsroom,
“I need a better Muslim!” He was adept at convincing angry subjects to keep coming back. He cajoled another prominent Muslim guest to back off on his threat to boycott Fox after one particularly harsh interview. “Why would I come on to have someone say I’m a child murderer?” he told Burke.
“You’re doing a service, you’re getting your message across,” Burke replied. He also told him that, at the end of the day, it was just television. “You need to lighten up.”
Fox News promoted the buildup to war like a pregame show. Anchors played the role of announcers, championing the home team: America. George Bush was the star quarterback, carrying the hopes of an expectant fan base on his shoulders. On-air, troops were “heroes” and “warriors.” Ailes developed a roster of opponents who sought to block America’s drive down the field. Saddam Hussein was the principal foe, backed up by supporting players:
the United Nations,
France,
Germany, and
Al Jazeera.
“If they’re going to get us, it’s going to be in a gunfight,” Geraldo Rivera said in one segment from Afghanistan.
In November 2001, Ailes lured Rivera away from CNBC to be Fox’s war correspondent. Rivera could be embarrassingly thin on his facts. On December 5, 2001, he reported that he visited the site of a friendly fire bombing raid that left three American servicemen and several Afghan fighters dead.
“We walked over what I consider hallowed ground today.… It was just—the whole place, just fried, really—and bits of uniforms and tattered clothing everywhere. I said the Lord’s Prayer and really choked up.”
A week later,
Baltimore Sun
reporter David Folkenflik revealed that Rivera was actually hundreds of miles from the incident he cited. Rivera was indignant.
He attributed the error to the “fog of war” and impugned Folkenflik’s manhood.
“Have
you
ever been shot at?” he asked him.