Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
Like Ailes, Regan was a brilliant storyteller and mythmaker. Her November 2007 lawsuit was no exception.
The complaint, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, read like a pitch for a pulp corporate whodunit she might have published. “This action arises from a deliberate smear campaign orchestrated by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates for the sole purpose of destroying one woman’s credibility and reputation,” it began. “This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp’s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions.” Regan’s narrative sizzled with sex, power, and money. The media seized on an alluring nugget about Regan’s affair with
Giuliani’s disgraced former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was indicted the previous week on multiple federal corruption charges. Her lawsuit alleged that a “senior executive at News Corp told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive told Regan to lie to, and withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”
Regan would later allege that the unnamed executive was Roger Ailes.
The next week, the strength of Regan’s hand became immediately apparent.
Susan Estrich, a Fox News contributor and Regan friend, was at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s home in Malibu when she got a tip that, like Andrea Mackris, Regan possessed a trump card. Regan claimed to have secretly captured Ailes on tape allegedly advising her to lie to the Feds. Estrich got a copy of Regan’s complaint and called her friend Joel Kaufman, who had been Regan’s producer at Fox. “We have to help Roger,” she said. “We’ve got to strategize how we deal with this.”
Ailes passed Estrich off to his personal lawyer,
Peter Johnson Sr., a former street cop turned hard-nosed Manhattan litigator who had taken part in the battle at Iwo Jima in World War II. A meeting with Murdoch and News Corp’s senior legal team was convened. In Murdoch’s cold calculus, Ailes was the asset that needed to be protected. Murdoch had come to blame Jane Friedman for impatiently firing Regan, which had set off the unfortunate chain of events.
“He’s the talent. News Corp wants to make sure we helped him as much as we could in a way that was legal,” an executive involved in the talks said.
The view inside News Corp was that Regan was capable of anything.
Estrich, who was dispatched to act as a backchannel intermediary between Ailes and Regan, advised her against releasing the tape.
“Susan acted as Judith’s shrink,” one executive said, “making sure she did not self-destruct.” Complicating matters, Regan’s camp refused to allow Murdoch and his lieutenants to listen to her alleged tape of Ailes. Without knowing what was precisely said, News Corp’s lawyers were flying blind. In meetings, Ailes denied he advised Regan to obstruct justice.
“It’s embarrassing,” he told his lawyers, referring to his conversation with Regan. “I use salty language.” Lon Jacobs, who was then News Corp’s general counsel, pressed Johnson for hard facts.
“I need to know what News Corp’s exposure is,” he said. Johnson backed his client up. He assured Jacobs that Ailes had said nothing illegal on the tape. Even if Regan relented, Jacobs did not want to hear the recording. News Corp’s outside counsel advised him not to listen to it, in case Ailes had made incriminating remarks.
Regan’s deft play pushed News Corp to fold.
On January 25, 2008, four days before the Florida primary, News Corp settled the lawsuit for $10.75 million, with no admission of guilt by either party. As part of the deal, Regan signed a nondisclosure agreement and a letter stating that Ailes had not pressured her to lie to assist Giuliani (News Corp kept a copy of her letter on file, in case they needed to release it at some point). After the Mackris case, it was the second time in less than four years that a News Corp employee earned millions of dollars for keeping the secrets of Fox News out of the press.
The settlement did not reverse Giuliani’s fortunes.
He dropped out of the presidential race five days later, after placing third in Florida.
Years later, Regan blamed Ailes for smearing her. “Connect the dots,” she told a reporter.
The marathon battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination was the biggest story of 2008—and for most of the campaign, Fox struggled to grab a piece of it.
CNN’s prime-time audience was surging, up 42 percent in January from a year earlier, and up 68 percent in the third quarter of the year.
Wolf Blitzer—a decidedly un-cable personality—was somehow anchoring the highest-rated election night show. MSNBC was also finding success as a destination for an energized liberal audience.
In the fall of 2007, Tim Russert called Phil Griffin
into his office in the Washington bureau and said, “Griff, you’re gonna have the greatest election of our lifetime. Own it.”
Griffin debuted a new tagline: “The Place for Politics”—a phrase Russert had happened to say on the air. “It gave us the focus that we never had,” Griffin later said. “We once branded ourselves ‘America’s News Channel.’ It was a lie! We weren’t.”
Watching CNN and MSNBC benefiting from the Obama phenomenon, Ailes found a way to counterprogram.
“Roger felt that as Obama emerged as a candidate, the media was giving undue coverage to him,” a person close to Ailes recalled. “At one point he said, ‘We have to be the one to balance the Democratic side.’ ” Despite his partisan bluster, Ailes continued to triangulate. In early 2008, Fox News and Hillary Clinton, who was performing strongly with blue-collar white voters in the industrial heartland—Fox News country—forged one such surprising alliance.
Hillary needed all the allies she could get. Relations between the Clinton campaign and MSNBC had all but broken down.
The day after Clinton roared back into the race winning the New Hampshire primary in January, Chris Matthews declared that her political career was made possible because “her husband messed around.” MSNBC president Phil Griffin ordered Matthews to apologize, but it did little to mollify the Clinton camp.
At Clinton campaign headquarters, an order went out that none of the twenty televisions in the press room were allowed to be tuned to MSNBC.
On the evening of February 7—two days after Super Tuesday—David Shuster, MSNBC’s political correspondent, speculated that Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” in a bid to win over super-delegates. After Hillary threatened to boycott future MSNBC debates, the network suspended Shuster.
In early March, Chris Matthews again displayed MSNBC’s Obama tilt when he gushed on air that Obama’s oratory talents gave him a “thrill going up my leg.”
Ailes helped out where he could.
On March 19, he forwarded an email to John Moody, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Shine containing an opposition research file on Obama’s relationship with the controversial Illinois state senator and pastor James Meeks with the subject line “Maybe God is a Republican.”
“Meeks has denounced ‘Hollywood Jews,’ blaming them for homosexuality; called Mayor [Richard] Daley as a ‘slave master’ and supporters of Daley ‘house niggers’; and called gays ‘evil,’ ”
the file read. That night,
O’Reilly and Hannity did segments on Meeks. “Now we don’t know the relationship between Reverend Meeks and Barack
Obama,” O’Reilly announced. “We are working on that story and a number of other people are as well. But the question tonight is how will the Clinton and McCain campaigns handle all of this? It’s a growing story.”
News Corp was also populated with influential Clinton surrogates who could hit back against MSNBC and Obama.
Susan Estrich lobbied behind the scenes to arrange a private meeting between Ailes and Hillary. “This would be a good thing for her,” she told Bill Clinton. “No one has to know about it. Fox isn’t looking for publicity, they understand the sensitivities on the Democratic side.” Gary Ginsberg, Rupert Murdoch’s director of communications, was another pro-Hillary voice. Earlier in the campaign, Ginsberg played a crucial role neutralizing
an attack by John Edwards in which he criticized Hillary for accepting donations from Murdoch. Ginsberg called HarperCollins and found out that
the company had paid Edwards a $500,000 advance to write a coffee-table book,
Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives
. (The Edwards campaign said the money went to charity.) Ginsberg promptly fed the information to Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications chief, who leaked it to the press.
Fox’s clubbiness with the Clintons created bad blood inside the Obama campaign.
In May, Hillary gave a widely viewed sit-down interview to Bill O’Reilly. “Are you surprised that Fox News has been fairer to you than NBC News and a lot of the other liberal news networks?” he asked. “I wouldn’t expect anything less than a fair and balanced coverage of my campaign,” she replied.
“She made some kind of compact with Murdoch,” Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn later said.
Another senior Obama adviser recalled, “Our campaign opened with Fox saying that Obama had gone to a madrassa as a child.” “If you watched Fox, you would not have known there was a financial crisis and two wars going on. You would have thought the most important issues in America were Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright.”
Not surprisingly, Obama harbored a deep distrust of Fox.
After clinching the Democratic nomination, Obama agreed to meet Murdoch at the Waldorf while he was in town attending a fundraiser. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who had been talking secretly with Gary Ginsberg, had agreed to set up the meeting. For sport, Murdoch brought along Ailes. Obama told Ailes he would not deal with Fox if they continued to portray him and his wife as dangerous subversives. Ailes told Obama that he would get better treatment if he engaged, rather than opposed, Fox. At that, the meeting ended.
Afterward, Murdoch asked Ailes his impression of Obama. “He’s like a middle manager,” Ailes said. Murdoch was taken aback.
“I wasn’t asking you to evaluate him for a position at Fox,” Murdoch replied. “I’m asking what you thought of him as a presidential candidate.”
“Well, that’s what I think,” Ailes said.
A few weeks later, Ailes told Axelrod that he was concerned that Obama wanted to create a national police force.
“You can’t be serious,” Axelrod replied. “What makes you think that?”
Ailes responded by emailing Axelrod a YouTube clip from a campaign speech Obama had given on national service, in which he called for the creation of a new civilian corps to work alongside the military on projects overseas.
Axelrod had a long history with Ailes, having defeated him in 1984 while running Paul Simon’s Senate campaign in Illinois.
He later said that the exchange was the moment he realized Ailes truly believed what he was programming.
A
iles eventually settled on McCain as his preferred candidate, though his campaign performance was far from ideal.
“He doesn’t have the charisma, the message isn’t honed to the point where you know who he is,” Ailes said of McCain. “He has this fantastic story, and he tends to minimize it.” “Roger is a producer first and foremost,” a former staffer said.
Some News Corp executives privately discussed whether Ailes would be out of sync with Murdoch’s political allegiances. Murdoch notoriously blew with the political winds, and he began making noises that he would be open to endorsing Obama for president in the pages of the
New York Post
, lest he be left on the wrong side of history. (
In January, the
Post
had endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination.) Members of Murdoch’s own family were also captivated by the candidate and lobbied Rupert, including his third wife, Wendi. As these tensions played out, the writer Michael Wolff was putting the finishing touches on his authorized biography of Murdoch. The book, based on hours of interviews with Murdoch and many of his lieutenants and family members, itself became a flashpoint within News Corp. Over nearly a decade, Gary Ginsberg had worked tirelessly to soften and massage Murdoch’s image and had done a remarkable job of making News Corp, if not exactly admired, then palatable
to a certain subset of Manhattan. Ginsberg, along with Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, a London public relations executive, was involved in dealing with Wolff on the book. But ultimately, much of what Wolff wrote in his book infuriated many camps inside News Corp.
In a preview of the book in
Vanity Fair
, Wolff revealed how embarrassed Murdoch was by Ailes and Bill O’Reilly—a view Wolff says came from interviews with Rupert—and Ailes became enraged.
“Is this true?” he demanded in a September 2008 meeting.
“No, it’s not true,” Murdoch replied.
Just as he had done after his confrontation with Lachlan over the anthrax attacks, Ailes forced Murdoch to demonstrate his loyalty.
Murdoch assured Ailes he was happy with Fox News and offered him a new five-year contract, which was signed in November, that guaranteed him editorial independence.
“That was the beginning of when the network went crazy,” a Murdoch adviser said. Ailes made sure to capitalize on the moment.
“As Ginsberg was blowing up because of the Murdoch book, Brian Lewis and Roger would huddle about the best way to leverage that to hurt Peter Chernin,” a senior executive said.
Any speculation about whether Murdoch was becoming liberal ended on September 8, when the
New York Post
endorsed McCain.
Within the next year, News Corp’s top Democrats—Ginsberg and Chernin—would depart the company, leaving Murdoch with fewer checks on Ailes’s power. Ailes savored the moment.
“Roger took credit,” an executive close to him recalled. “The day Ginsberg left, Roger walked into his afternoon editorial meeting, dropped the press release onto the conference table and said, ‘In life, there are winners, and there are …’ And just smiled as people passed around the note.”
T
he promise of a new contract gave Ailes time to prepare for the effect of an Obama win on Fox ratings, but it turned out he didn’t need the time. On September 3, a day after confronting Murdoch, Ailes, watching the Republican convention, was riveted by the appearance of an exotic political creature: Sarah Palin.
“She hit a home run,” he told executives the next day. Her gleeful establishment bashing made her a perfect heroine for a new Ailes story line—and Fox’s ratings soared to a cable news record.
During Palin’s speech, Fox attracted more than nine million viewers, eclipsing every other news network, cable or broadcast. “At least people care now,” Ailes told his team.