Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
Media Matters launched in May 2004.
A few months earlier, Democracy Radio went on the air. Its debut program was
The Ed Schultz Show
. Both projects were the first salvos in the liberals’ counteroffensive against Ailes. But to effectively match Ailes, the left needed to alchemize entertainment and politics. Since the 1980s, conservatives had created a parallel media culture that had ended the left’s monopoly on comedy. Right-wing celebrities had vast followings. It was a remarkable achievement given that Ailes came of age during the fractious 1960s, a time when fame became synonymous with fashionable New Left politics. But with the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and conservative book publishers, Republicans were able to build a self-contained thought system that made mocking liberals fun. Comedy motivated people to vote. Liberals were finally realizing they needed personalities of their own who were capable
of performing at the same decibel level as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly. Al Franken had been rehearsing for the part for almost a decade.
A member of the comedy elite from his time as a
Saturday Night Live
writer and performer, Franken was also a diligent student of the culture and a political junkie. He figured out there was an untapped market on the left for a style of argument that could simulate conservative outrage while at the same time delivering a sophisticated critique of it.
In 1996, he published the bestselling
Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
.
For his follow-up, Franken set his sights on the entire conservative-media-industrial-complex itself. He assembled a team of fourteen Harvard students to research his new book, which he titled
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
. The book, published in September 2003, featured chapters devoted to slaying conservative giants with titles such as “Ann Coulter: Nutcase.” Fox News came in for particular scorn. And one Fox pundit in particular wound up in Franken’s crosshairs. Chapter Thirteen was titled “Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully.” Unexpectedly, Franken’s transformation from improv comedian to muckraking polemicist was about to trigger a chain reaction that threatened to destroy Ailes’s most valuable star.
B
y the spring of 2003, Bill O’Reilly was a booming national industry. On camera, he aspired to be a kind of cultural vigilante. Every night he went out to defend the little guy against the depredations of corrupt elites.
Often his targets were Democrats.
Or Hollywood celebrities. But O’Reilly could also aim his weaponized commentaries at less expected marks.
He hammered the Red Cross and United Way for mismanaging restitution for 9/11 victims.
“We’ve changed the country,” he proudly declared. “Bad guys get it. They’ll pay a price for doing bad things.” O’Reilly’s ambition was seemingly bottomless, and he continually found new ways to monetize his brand.
Through his various ventures, O’Reilly was earning roughly $10 million a year. Ailes grumbled to his executives that O’Reilly shamelessly plugged his wares on
his
network. In a sense, they were competitive with each other.
“He sees O’Reilly and says, ‘If he can write a shitty book that’s a bestseller, I want to do my own,’ ” an executive recalled. But there was little Ailes could do about it. O’Reilly delivered the eyeballs night after night. He was the linchpin of Ailes’s prime-time lineup.
As O’Reilly’s fame grew, his fuse shortened. More powerful than ever, he increasingly found himself consumed with petty feuds.
One night, he called
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich a “weasel.”
On another program, he commanded his audience to boycott Pepsi because the company had hired the rapper Ludacris as its celebrity pitchman. His worldview became increasingly conspiratorial even as his grandiosity reached new heights.
“He’s hyper-suspicious about things, one of the things he shares with Ailes,” a former O’Reilly staffer said.
O’Reilly declared to a reporter that the press “are going to try to destroy me.” He saw himself as part of a struggle with historical sweep.
“This has happened since the Founding Fathers,” he explained. “It has to do with power. It has to do with jealousy. It has to do with ideology. It has to do with money. The more power I get, the more lawyers I have to deal with, the more insanity I have to deal with.”
O’Reilly was becoming an acute management challenge for Ailes. On- and off-camera, his rages were becoming less theatrical and more vituperative. Some days, he seemed to be spiraling out of control.
During a February 2003 segment on the Iraq War protest movement, he blew up at a young antiwar activist named Jeremy Glick, whose father, a Port Authority worker at the World Trade Center, had died on 9/11. “Shut up, shut up!” O’Reilly said. At one point, O’Reilly accused Glick of shaming his family. “Man, I hope your mom isn’t watching this,” he told him, shortly before ordering Glick’s mic cut and going to commercial. The argument continued off-camera.
“Get the fuck off my set before I tear your head off,” one producer recalled O’Reilly saying.
Staff came in for equally harsh treatment.
After one taping, he stormed toward his staff’s cubicles and tore into a young female producer, whom he blamed for botching a segment. Staffers watched in shock as O’Reilly, easily a foot taller than the woman, started yelling and slamming his fist down on a shelf. “He got really close and in her face,” an eyewitness said. “She was scared he was going to hit her,” recalled another colleague. O’Reilly stalked off. A senior Fox executive was called in and escorted the woman, in tears, out of the building to calm her down. She was later given paid vacation from Fox. “Bill never apologized,” a person close to the matter said.
O’Reilly was also frosty with Fox hosts.
“I’m the big gun,” he declared to Fox executives.
His relationship with Sean Hannity was almost nonexistent. O’Reilly, who was trying to build up his talk radio career, was competitive with Hannity, a talk radio star. O’Reilly sniffed to colleagues
that Hannity was a right-wing shill. Hannity, in turn, mocked O’Reilly’s tabloid instincts. “Can you believe this garbage?” Hannity complained when he saw O’Reilly on the monitor interviewing a porn star. It made for a tense atmosphere since their offices were both located on the seventeenth floor of the News Corp building and Hannity’s Fox show directly followed O’Reilly’s.
Fox executives had few options to rein O’Reilly in.
“His was the only show that Roger doesn’t get the credit for developing,” a senior executive said. Which led to his disastrous encounter with Franken.
As Franken was putting the finishing touches on
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
, O’Reilly was completing his own book,
Who’s Looking Out for You?
On May 30, 2003, O’Reilly was invited to appear onstage with Franken and columnist Molly Ivins to promote their titles at Book Expo America in Los Angeles. Brian Lewis’s deputy, Rob Zimmerman, who handled O’Reilly’s PR, advised O’Reilly against making the trip.
“You’re just going to give Franken more ammunition,” Zimmerman told him. O’Reilly ignored him.
The event, televised live on C-Span’s
BookTV
, was a predictable fiasco for O’Reilly. Standing at the lectern, Franken launched into a humiliating—and hilarious—roast of O’Reilly, and when it was his turn to respond, O’Reilly was painfully defensive.
The moderator watched passively as the two men sniped at each other.
“This is what he does,” O’Reilly said. “He is a vicious—and that is with a capital V—person, who is blinded by ideology. And that’s all I’ll say.”
After the story blew up in the media, O’Reilly demanded revenge.
He told Fox he wanted to sue Franken. Fox executives thought it a terrible idea, but O’Reilly’s ratings made him hard to ignore.
On August 7, 2003, about a month before Franken’s book was set to be released, Fox sued Franken and his publisher, Penguin Group USA, in the Southern District of New York. Fox’s suit against Franken alleged that his book violated the network’s trademark because the cover featured the words “fair and balanced.” The argument was not what got the most attention, however. The complaint was as bellicose as anything O’Reilly said on camera. It described Franken as “a parasite,” “shrill and unstable,” and, worse, “increasingly unfunny.”
Penguin’s outside counsel, the acclaimed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, recalled that “it was one of the most extraordinarily abrasive affidavits I’ve ever read.”
A hearing was scheduled for August 25, 2003. The judge, Denny
Chin, essentially laughed Fox’s attorneys out of the room.
“Is Fox really claiming that it has a monopoly on the phrase ‘fair and balanced’?” he said. After a five-minute recess, he issued his decision. “This is an easy case,” he declared. Fox’s suit was ruled to be “wholly without merit, both factually and legally.”
It was ironic, Chin concluded, “that a media company that should be seeking to protect the First Amendment is seeking to undermine it by claiming a monopoly on the phrase ‘fair and balanced.’ ”
Penguin rushed
Lies
into bookstores early and it spent weeks on the
Times
bestseller list. Fox waved the white flag.
“It’s time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he’s normally accustomed to,” a spokeswoman told the press. Except Franken was bigger than ever.
He launched a show on Air America, the new liberal talk radio network, and called it
The O’Franken Factor
. He later parlayed his fame into a successful run for the United States Senate.
In public, Ailes backed O’Reilly.
“When somebody calls you a liar to your face, you know, sooner or later, you either say ‘shut up,’ or pop him, or leave,” he told a reporter. “I think Bill was restrained. I wouldn’t have given a shit. In the old days I would have popped him one.”
But in private, Fox executives struggled to figure out how to contain O’Reilly. When Ailes recruited O’Reilly, it was clear there was a risk he could self-destruct, since it had happened a half dozen times earlier in his career.
A
nd then it happened again.
The letter was hand-delivered to Ailes’s office on the morning of Wednesday, September 29, 2004. Although it was short, just six terse paragraphs, the words on the page left little doubt that Ailes had a serious problem on his hands. It was sent on letterhead from the law offices of Benedict P. Morelli & Associates, a boutique Manhattan firm specializing in highprofile personal injury and employment cases.
Morelli wrote that he represented “a young woman employee of Fox.” His unnamed client had endured “constant and relentless sexual harassment” from “one of Fox’s most prominent on-air personalities.” Morelli indicated that a settlement was the most favorable course of action. If not, he would sue, an outcome, he warned, that “would be extremely damaging to both Fox’s reputation and the reputation of the individual involved.”
Morelli was a virtuoso trial lawyer who needed to be taken seriously.
He claimed to have lost only two cases in twenty years, and was a fixture on New York’s tabloid stage. Dianne Brandi, Fox’s legal chief, went to
investigate. Brandi met Morelli at his office on the East Side of Manhattan and reported back.
Morelli’s client was a thirty-three-year-old associate Fox News producer named Andrea Mackris. The alleged perpetrator of the “constant and relentless sexual harassment” was her boss: Bill O’Reilly. Having handled employment matters for Ailes, Brandi had presumably seen a lot in her time at Fox.
“Dianne would often say, ‘Get out of this place, they don’t treat anyone well here,’ ” a Fox colleague recalled. And she may herself have felt out of step at Fox.
“Not my politics,” she once told a TV agent. Sex was a fact of life at Fox.
“The whole Fox culture, like the
New York Post
newsroom, had a whole sexualized nature to it,” a former female Fox producer said. But the Mackris suit was something new.
In their meeting, Morelli showed Brandi a draft of the five-count lawsuit.
The document stipulated that settling each count would cost O’Reilly $100 million—but Morelli explained that Mackris would be willing to take “10 cents on the dollar, but nothing less.” The discounted settlement amounted to the staggering sum of $60 million.
Mackris was not saying that O’Reilly ever touched her. What was detailed in the draft complaint was perhaps more damaging. The complaint told a strange tale that started with inappropriate office banter and culminated two years later with a late-night phone call at the 2004 Republican National Convention, in which O’Reilly masturbated while telling Mackris his sex fantasies. In exacting detail, the suit portrayed O’Reilly as a hypersexualized misogynist with a romance novelist’s imagination. In one infamous exchange, O’Reilly described taking Mackris on a Caribbean sexcapade. “You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I’d join you and you would have your back to me and I would take that little loofa thing and kinda’ soap up your back … rub it all over you, get you to relax.… So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda’ kissing your neck from behind … and then I would take the other hand with the falafel [
sic
] thing and I’d put it on your pussy but you’d have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business …”
It wasn’t just Mackris’s recollection—she’d recorded him. The audio, if released, would certainly humiliate him—and potentially blow up his whole career. “O’Reilly couldn’t afford to let [the lawsuit] go forward,” Morelli told Brandi in one meeting.
The trouble had started not long after O’Reilly hired Mackris away from NBC a few years earlier. In short order, she impressed him with her
hustle.
“She was a very strong booker,” a colleague recalled. But professional boundaries were allegedly crossed after she began confiding in him about her breakup with her long-term boyfriend. O’Reilly responded by giving her a raise—and romantic advice. Over dinner one night in May 2002, he told her that she should get “manicures and pedicures” and “pick up 23-year-old men in bars.” From there, according to the suit, things got weird. Mackris said it was during this dinner that O’Reilly broached the topic of phone sex. Mackris described another dinner in which O’Reilly regaled her and a female college friend about his carnal conquests and propositioned the women to have a threesome. He said he could teach them “lessons.”