Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
Of all the Fox hosts, Hannity gave the story line momentum.
The week after he debuted the ad with Halpin, Hannity aired the first television interview with John O’Neill, the Texas lawyer who founded the Swift Boat group, while he was promoting his anti-Kerry book,
Unfit for Command
.
“I read the book,” Hannity told O’Neill. “It’s frankly devastating to Senator Kerry, what his fellow Vietnam guys are saying, what they experienced with him. They contradict just about every story he has told about his experience here.”
“It’s a pattern of total lying and exaggeration, much of it very demeaning to the other people that served with him,” O’Neill replied.
Unfit for Command
hit the top of the
Times
bestseller list, and CNN and MSNBC were compelled to cover the story, too.
“Heck, I know our group did in the range of a thousand different television and radio interviews. They were on virtually every network,” O’Neill later said. Looking back, he was thrilled with the results. “Giving the kidney to my wife was the best thing I ever did. The Swift Boat [ads] was the second best.”
M
any Democrats saw the controversy as so obviously contrived as to pose no danger to their candidate. But Kerry’s supporters didn’t understand the new dynamics of cable television. They ignored the warnings of liberals close to Ailes who knew his playbook. It proved a grave miscalculation.
Fox News contributor Susan Estrich was one. When she watched the Swift Boat story snowball, she recalled her experience running Dukakis’s 1988 campaign. All the dynamics were repeating themselves.
In ’88, the Willie Horton ad was produced by an outside group with shadowy connections to the George H. W. Bush campaign.
The Swift Boat attack was also funded by powerful Republicans with financial and personal ties to the George W. Bush campaign. In 2004, however, the authors of Kerry’s demise had one crucial advantage: Fox News. The group behind the Willie Horton spot had to buy airtime and hope the broadcast media and newspapers would pick it up. With Fox News, conservatives had a twenty-four-hour network that allowed them to inject attack lines directly into the political bloodstream. The interplay between political advertising and journalism was an old campaign gambit. When he was a political consultant in the 1980s, Ailes said networks only cared about pictures, conflict, and mistakes. If an ad generated conflict, reporters were bound to cover it as “news.” Fox News was a perpetual conflict machine.
It had already happened once during the 2004 campaign. In May, Estrich received a call from a Hannity producer who wanted to book her for a segment about an Internet ad produced by the Republican National Committee.
The spot mockingly compared Kerry to a cicada, who was trying to shed his liberal shell in time for the general election.
“We want you to respond to the merits of the ad,” the producer told her. Estrich lit into him. “How many times has it been shown on television?” The producer
stammered. Before hanging up, Estrich warned him she was calling Ailes to complain. When she reached Ailes that afternoon, he “burst out laughing,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I like to think I pioneered that technique.’ ”
Estrich was in a position to try to defend Kerry on Fox.
As it happened, she was booked to fill in for Colmes on August 5, the night after Halpin. Hannity would be interviewing Van O’Dell, a Swift Boat veteran appearing in the ad.
When Estrich called the Kerry-Edwards campaign headquarters to get talking points to use on camera, her concerns were confirmed: the campaign did not have any. Instead of cultivating Estrich and capitalizing on her ties to Fox News, Democrats shunned her—it was punishment for collaborating with Ailes. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, she was ostracized.
“Wherever I went, I was subjected to criticism,” she said. She was even left off the guest list for a party hosted by Dukakis. “Even if it was a clerical error, that was very hurtful,” she recalled.
Greta Van Susteren’s husband, the lawyer John Coale, was another Democrat with ties to Ailes who wanted to stave off disaster for Kerry.
A few days before Hannity hyped O’Neill’s book on the air, Coale received a frantic phone call from his friend Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian, who had recently authored the lionizing Kerry biography
Tour of Duty
. Brinkley told Coale he had gotten his hands on O’Neill’s book and was aghast at the distortions and falsehoods. “Shit, you gotta call Kerry,” Brinkley told him. Coale quickly arranged a meeting with Kerry and implored him to sue O’Neill and the Swift Boat group for defamation. “He was all hopped up to do it,” Coale remembered. But like Estrich, Coale was ignored by Kerry’s advisers.
Kerry’s campaign manager, Bob Shrum, and others warned the candidate that launching a counterattack would only dignify the allegations and give the scandal legs. Kerry did not personally respond to the Swift Boat vets for nearly three weeks.
Around-the-clock cable news coverage provided the free promotion.
By the time Kerry defended himself, one poll found nearly half the country had heard about the Swift Boat ad or had seen it. In the closing days of the race, Kerry’s camp exploded when Fox painted Kerry as a terrorist favorite.
After a tape of Osama bin Laden was released in late October, Fox anchor Neil Cavuto said on-camera that he thought he saw a Kerry “button” in bin Laden’s cave.
John Sasso, a veteran Kerry adviser and
onetime Dukakis campaign manager, threatened to throw Fox producer Catherine Loper off the campaign plane.
“Is that the one? Is that her?” Sasso said as he looked at Loper. “I want her off the plane tomorrow. I’m not kidding.”
On the night of November 2, Ailes and Murdoch watched the returns together at Fox News. Moody fed Ailes updates from the decision desk.
Fox called Ohio for Bush at 12:40 a.m. The battleground win put Bush a single electoral vote shy of 270, and all but guaranteed him a second term. But hoping to avoid a repeat of 2000, Fox refused to take any gambles.
As the minutes ticked by, Bush aides became apoplectic that Fox and the networks refused to declare their man the winner based on the projections in western states that would definitively put him over the top.
Rove called Fox analyst Michael Barone.
“I just got some spin from Rove on New Mexico,” Barone told Moody and the decision team members shortly after 2:00 in the morning.
“Not yet,” Moody cautioned.
Dan Bartlett, at Bush high command, frantically tried to reach Ailes, but could not get through. Ailes had been burned after his memo to Rove leaked, and he understandably did not want to be seen coordinating with Bushworld.
“You know I wasn’t going to take your call, Bartlett,” Ailes told him a few weeks later. In the end, Kerry made the decision easy for Fox. On Wednesday morning, he conceded.
After Bush’s victory, “Swift Boating” joined the American political lexicon. Kerry’s failings as a candidate—his Brahmin reserve and deliberative mien—certainly contributed to his defeat. But according to Sean Hannity, Fox News deserved at least some credit.
“Sean said he felt he played an important role in taking Kerry down,” Pat Halpin later said, recalling a conversation he had with Hannity not long after the election. Halpin said he felt unsettled at his minor role in promoting the Swift Boaters. “I was one of the props, unfortunately,” he said.
Months later, Halpin sat in for Colmes and decided to speak up. Before a segment about Bush’s intervention in the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case, Hannity told him to lay off his guests Rick Santorum and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.
“Go easy on these guys, they get good ratings,” Hannity said. Halpin ignored the directive. He pressed both men with tough questions.
“Sean was pissed off. He was like, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” Halpin remembered. “I never got invited on to guest host again. Bill Shine indicated that Sean didn’t want me.”
F
or Democrats, the trauma of losing consecutive presidential elections confirmed the political reality: post-9/11 America was a Republican country. Fox News got much of the credit for this development, of course. But the victory made Fox News and Ailes himself into something they had never been on such a scale: a target.
Fox News was now a juggernaut, earning more than $200 million per year, and its success changed the gravity of the cable TV world, and the wider culture, too. As MSNBC tried to siphon off Ailes’s viewers by bulking up with conservative commentary, Comedy Central began to prosper with Fox News satire.
In July 2004, the progressive documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald released
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
. Liberal groups like MoveOn.org, which was a producer of the film, aggressively promoted the exposé and turned it into
a surprise hit.
The passion of Roger Ailes’s audience was something that had never before existed in TV news, a consequence of Fox’s hybrid of politics and entertainment. Fox did not have viewers. It had fans.
They watched on average 30 percent longer than CNN viewers in prime time. In journalism, it was an achievement without precedent.
When Ailes later decided to launch a website to aggregate conservative headlines, it was aptly named
Fox Nation
. To watch Fox was to belong to a tribe.
Fox’s gleeful dismembering of Kerry’s campaign forced liberals to acknowledge that Fox had changed politics.
“Before Fox News, a lot of stories never would have gotten attention,” Bob Shrum later said. “Take the Swift Boat story: If you had had the old Huntley-Brinkley hour, it would not have appeared on the network.” Conservative passions had exploded into the mainstream, repackaged as prime-time entertainment. The dream of Bob Pauley and Joe Coors had been realized.
Democrats were in general agreement that something needed to be done to counter Ailes’s influence. Unsurprisingly, they argued bitterly over strategy. The debate over Fox News was, in reality, a proxy war in a much bigger conflict within the Democratic Party. On one side, moderates, led by Bill Clinton and his allies, championed engagement with Fox. They contended it was a matter of basic electoral math.
Given Ailes’s audience—which at that point had grown larger than CNN’s and MSNBC’s
combined
—it was folly to ignore him. When Ailes hired Dick Morris in 1998, Clinton told his former adviser that he was happy he would be embedding
with the opposition.
“It’s stupid to avoid Fox,” Van Susteren’s husband, John Coale, said, echoing the Clinton argument. “What’s the worst case scenario? You get yelled at by Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity? But your base is going to love you for getting yelled at so there’s no downside.”
But Clintonian pragmatism incited vocal opposition among the party’s ascendant grassroots base.
Connecting online through nascent social networks and progressive websites like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, members of the so-called Netroots movement espoused a brand of liberal populism that viewed Fox as the enemy. Confrontation, not engagement, was their preferred strategy. The left’s anti-Fox groundswell started in the wake of the 2000 recount.
During a 2002 interview with
The New York Observer
, Al Gore declared that Fox News was “part and parcel of the Republican Party.” Admittedly, it was a partisan analysis. But Gore’s claims had resonance on the left.
And throughout the contentious 2004 Democratic primary, his combative stance was picked up by former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean’s implosion in the Iowa caucuses ended his insurgent campaign, but the base’s zeal was unabated.
Dean’s eventual ascension to chair of the Democratic National Committee propelled his confrontational style toward the mainstream.
At a Democratic fundraiser held shortly after Bush’s second inauguration, pro-Fox Democrats from Clinton’s camp attempted to stage an intervention. Dean was the honored guest that night. John Coale was in attendance and decided to confront Dean during the cocktail hour. “Let me talk to you,” he said, pulling him into an empty bedroom.
Why are Democrats boycotting Fox?
“They’re not a real news organization!” Dean snapped.
“Good, cede it to the goddamn right,” Coale said, angrily. “Let them go on and say anything they want. They have more Democrats watching than CNN does!”
Both men began shouting over each other in a ten-minute free-for-all.
Coale’s diplomatic reasoning had merit, along with a self-serving element, given that his wife was a prime-time Fox anchor. But it was a losing argument. The momentum had already shifted in Dean’s favor. Increasingly, Democrats viewed the media as the central front in the country’s ideological struggle.
O
ne morning in the summer of 2003, David Brock arrived for a private meeting with a small group of liberal senators on Capitol Hill. Leo
Hindery, the Manhattan media entrepreneur and Democratic fundraiser, had set up a gathering in South Dakota senator Tom Daschle’s office to discuss a shared goal: taking down Fox News and conservative radio. If there was one man who knew how the right-wing media machine worked from the inside, it was David Brock, the former conservative muckraker.
In the 1990s, Brock wrote for the right-wing magazine
The American Spectator
and was
hailed as the Bob Woodward of the Clinton scandals. In 2002, he published a caustic tell-all memoir,
Blinded by the Right
, that detailed his years as a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Brock told Daschle and his colleagues that they needed to build a media arsenal of their own. Brock had helped draw up plans for a liberal talk radio network and proposed launching a watchdog organization that would expose right-wing media bias. It was a stratagem conservatives had pioneered. Over the years, the right established a phalanx of activist groups that tarred newspapers and broadcast news as liberal mouthpieces.
The tactic became known as “working the refs.” Brock wanted to do the same for the left. He named his group Media Matters.
Like the groundbreaking conservative organizations Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center, Media Matters’ base of operations would be a war room. Instead of hounding
The New York Times
and CBS News with press releases, its targets would be Fox News and talk radio. Brock’s operatives would instantly post incendiary comments made by a Fox pundit or Rush Limbaugh on the Media Matters website. Peter Lewis, the billionaire owner of the Progressive Insurance Corporation, invested $1 million.
Other liberals, including hedge fund manager George Soros, would chip in $1 million more.