Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
He was intensely interested in the Alaska governor. Palin had somehow managed to graft the old western myth of the self-reliant frontiersman onto a beauty-pageant face and a counterpunching, don’t-tread-on-me verbal style—a new kind of character, and a remarkably compelling one. A few weeks after her convention speech, Ailes secretly met with Palin during her swing through New York, when she toured the U.N. and had a photo op with Henry Kissinger. That afternoon, Shushannah Walshe, a young Fox producer who was covering Palin’s campaign for the network, had gone on-air and criticized McCain’s staff, which had prevented reporters from asking Palin questions during her U.N. visit. “There’s not one chance that Governor Palin would have to answer a question,” Walshe said on camera. “They’re eliminating even the chance of any kind of interaction with the candidate—it’s just unprecedented.”
Ailes didn’t know Walshe, but he was angry when he heard her comments. Liberal media outlets like
The Huffington Post
were using her words to make it appear that Fox was turning on Palin.
He called Suzanne Scott and demanded Walshe be taken off the air. “It’s not fair-and-balanced coverage,” an executive later told Walshe. Walshe was allowed to continue covering Palin but was barred from future on-camera appearances. She soon left Fox.
In October, Ailes found the other star of Fox’s next era: CNN’s Glenn Beck.
Ratings for his CNN Headline News show had jumped by more than 200 percent since he joined the channel in 2006. He had a string of
New York Times
bestsellers, and ratings for his radio show were nearing Rush Limbaugh’s. When Ailes met the forty-four-year-old for the first time that fall, he could tell he was born for television. Beck’s performances, a mix of New Age self-help speak and right-wing fervor, gave him the lineaments of Lonesome Rhodes, the drifter played by Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s
A Face in the Crowd
. With his neat, alabaster hair and doughy cheeks, he was a prophet of a nascent political movement that was rising up in tandem with Obama’s candidacy.
As they spoke, Ailes and Beck bonded over their shared triumphal version of American history. Ailes wanted Beck for the 5:00 p.m. hour, which had continually failed to attract an audience and delivered a weak lead-in to the shows that followed.
Fox executives dubbed it the “black hole.”
This was especially problematic because Brit Hume was telling executives he wanted to step down from his nightly newscast at 6:00 p.m. His departure would further imperil the lineup.
On Thursday, October 16, Fox announced that Beck was jumping from CNN to Fox.
Ailes was assembling his cast for television in the age of Obama. While he was unimpressed with Mike Huckabee as a candidate, he recognized he had a following among social conservatives. In addition to snapping up Huckabee, Ailes signed Karl Rove and John Bolton as pundits. Still, as Election Day approached, Ailes seemed to be in a dour mood.
In late September, McCain had suspended his campaign in hopes of negotiating a congressional accord on a proposed financial bailout in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy.
“He was so angry when McCain suspended his campaign,” an executive recalled. “He said, ‘The only people who suspend campaigns are the ones who are losing.’ ”
Ailes told executives Obama’s election would be “the worst thing for America,” but others sensed opportunity. Brian Lewis, a savvy operator and pragmatist—“Everything is a situation” was his mantra—felt that an Obama victory would be better for business than a McCain presidency.
A few days before the election, Lewis scheduled a meeting to tell Ailes he was voting for Obama.
Before heading to Ailes’s office, he called Gary Ginsberg. “If Obama wins, it’s good for us,” Lewis said. “I wanted to tell you that before I go into the lion’s den.”
T
HE WEEK AFTER
O
BAMA
’
S
2008
ELECTION NIGHT VICTORY SPEECH
in Grant Park, Chicago, Ailes took his son, Zachary, and Beth back to Warren, Ohio, for Veterans Day. Members of the community had asked Ailes to give the keynote address at the dedication ceremony for the Trumbull County Veterans’ Memorial. Since leaving for college fifty years earlier, Ailes had returned home only a handful of times—he had few remaining ties to the community. Ailes decided it was time for his son, who was then eight years old, to see where his father came from. In the plush seats of News Corp’s corporate jet, the Ailes family descended through the clouds over the flat landscape of northeast Ohio.
It was unseasonably cold for early November, barely above freezing in the afternoon. From the air, the fallow farmland was a quilt of brown and gray patchwork.
The Aileses were in town for just one night and had a lot of ground to cover. There was a gathering of Roger’s high school friends at the Avalon Inn, the hotel where they were staying on Warren’s East Side, followed by a downtown reception for civic leaders and memorial donors at the Huntington National Bank and an interview with a reporter from the Warren
Tribune Chronicle
. The morning would bring the monument unveiling and a celebratory luncheon at the Trumbull Country Club. But before all that, Ailes had a promise to keep. He had told Zachary that they would eat at the Hot Dog Shoppe, a favored watering hole for high school kids in his father’s time.
On the drive from the airport, Roger could see how Warren was now a very different city from the one he had grown up in. The giant aluminum hot dog that blinked as it rotated on a fifteen-foot red pole mounted
on the Shoppe’s roof was still in working order, but many of the restaurants from his day were gone. Warren’s decline was no less precipitous than that of Rust Belt emblems like Detroit or Flint, Michigan. The financial crisis of 2008 visited its own kind of apocalypse.
During one eighteen-day period after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Warren’s then-mayor, Michael O’Brien, received ten letters from local companies announcing mass layoffs or closures. Severstal Steel, one of Warren’s few remaining employers, announced it was cutting its workforce from one thousand to thirty-five. Packard’s employment fell to nine hundred, about 5 percent of its peak.
Once a city that worked, Warren had become a city that was broken, sick with the all-too-familiar symptoms. Drug addicts robbed homes in broad daylight, running off with flat-screen TVs or video game consoles to pawn. Prostitutes leaning against shady oak trees worked the streets. Scavengers stripped foreclosed houses of their guts—copper plumbing and electrical wiring—to sell to local scrap dealers.
The municipal government cut social services and laid off 30 percent of its police force. To keep cops on the street, Mayor O’Brien—himself a former officer—dismantled the department’s detective bureau and put a dozen veteran detectives back into uniform.
After checking into the Avalon Hotel, Ailes went to a private room with a dozen former schoolmates from Warren G. Harding High School’s class of 1958.
They chatted for an hour about their youth, with Ailes speaking warmly about his time acting in high school plays. But when the conversation moved toward current events, the mood darkened. Ailes had a specific diagnosis for his hometown’s decline. “We have fed more people and freed more people than any country in history. Obama needs to focus Americans on personal responsibility,” Ailes said. He recounted his summertime encounter with the president-elect at the Waldorf Astoria. “If he wants to bring the nation together, as he says, now is the time to reach out,” Ailes explained. He told his classmates that he had hoped McCain would win, but that the “unbelievable” financial crisis had eliminated the Republicans’ chance.
Then Ailes talked about his own role in the struggle, and the stakes. “I defend the United States, Israel, and the Constitution. That’s when I get my death threats,” he told them. “I stand up for what I believe. I don’t back off. I’ve been that way for forty years. That’s the secret to my success. I have thick skin. I don’t care what people say about me.… We’re not a perfect nation. But the question is, if the U.S. is destroyed, what
would the world be like?” Later that afternoon, he told a local newspaper reporter that his hometown could learn a thing or two from the lesson his father had taught him as a boy.
“If you want a helping hand, look at the end of your arm,” Ailes said. It was the same lesson he imparted at Fox News.
He liked to tell people how, several years earlier, he launched a job-training program for minorities called “The Ailes Apprentice Program.” It was one of his genuine sources of pride.
“If every company did this, could you imagine what they’d do to minority unemployment?” he later said.
It was cold and damp the next morning when Ailes and his family arrived at the dedication ceremony in Monument Park.
Hundreds of people had gathered. It was the largest crowd Warren had seen downtown in many years.
As Ailes took to the microphone, he saw visions of his past.
“You see that fountain pool right around there?”
he told the audience, pointing toward a Victorian-era sculpture of a crane in flight with water shooting from its beak. “My mother and grandmother would bring me there, and I used to feed the squirrels.” He motioned at the YMCA across the street from the courthouse. “I used to go there every Saturday and take swim lessons.”
He told the audience that he was moved to speak at the dedication ceremony because his best childhood friend, Doug Webster, was killed in the Vietnam War. Webster was a grade behind Roger in school, but they were like brothers. Webster grew up on Edgewood Street, a mile away from the Ailes house.
Webster’s life exerted a palpable pull on Roger. In many ways, he was the man Ailes wanted to be: a star athlete, vice president of his high school class, co-captain of the Ohio State gymnastics team, and a Navy fighter pilot.
Ailes went to the military recruiting office with Webster to enlist together. “He got in, I didn’t,” Ailes said. But Webster died in a freak accident three months into his first deployment to the Pacific, when his Navy A-4 Skyhawk slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS
Ticonderoga
. His body was never recovered. “I guess there is a certain amount of survivor guilt there,” Ailes said.
After the crowd dispersed, Ailes headed to the Trumbull Country Club for lunch.
An hour later, he motioned to his wife.
“Hurry up, we gotta go.”
“What do you mean?” Beth said.
“We gotta go back to the Hot Dog Shoppe so we can load up.”
On the way, Ailes made a detour onto Belmont Street. He wanted to show Zachary the house he grew up in. The two-story home had not changed much since his parents had sold it following their divorce. Ailes would have noticed only slight alterations to it. Now it had gray siding and navy blue shutters on the upstairs windows. The other houses on the block were in varying states of disrepair. Ailes knocked on the door. A young man named Chris Monsman answered. He was not yet thirty, a former high school baseball star, and now worked at a cabinet manufacturer.
“I grew up in this house,” Ailes said. “My son is here today, and I wonder if I could just show him the living room. Do you mind?”
“No, come on in.”
The house had one bath and five other low-ceilinged rooms. Roger pointed upstairs toward the cramped bedroom that he shared with his brother. Zachary looked around the small interior. “Dad, this living room is only as big as our car.”
“Well, three of us grew up in here, son,” Ailes said.
Ailes told the Monsmans that he ran Fox News. Did they ever watch it? Chris did not, but his wife, Danella, a home health aide, liked the channel. Danella thought the hosts seemed friendlier and were having more fun than those on the other news channels. Ailes complimented them on the condition of their home. They visited for ten minutes. Before Ailes left, he gave Chris his Fox business card. What he could offer the young man was not clear.
Three years later, the Warren
Tribune Chronicle
publisher Charles Jarvis invited Ailes to return to Warren to deliver a speech. Ailes would not commit to a date and did not return. Although he wrapped his identity in his hometown’s blue-collar history, there was only so much of Warren that Ailes likely wanted to see.
“I left there in 1958,” Ailes said in 2012. “Anything that anyone says there about me is
wrong
. They don’t
know
me.” Everywhere he looked, he was confronted with the vanishing America he had known as a boy. He had come to fear it might not return.
“We are in a storm, our mast is broken, our compass is off, and there is a damned big hole in the boat,” he often said. For Ailes, Fox News had a purpose higher than profits and ratings.
A
iles found the key to ratings in the Obama era shortly after 8:00 on the morning of February 19, 2009. About halfway through his morning editorial
meeting, a remarkable television moment was unfolding on CNBC.
Rick Santelli, a loudmouthed former hedge fund trader turned financial correspondent, uncorked a Howard Beale rant during a genial discussion of Obama’s stimulus bill and the housing crisis. “The government is promoting bad behavior!” Santelli yelled from his position on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. “How about this, president and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?” Traders standing nearby nodded and chanted their approval. “President Obama, are you
listening
?” Santelli bellowed into the camera. “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.”
The phrase and the sentiment were irresistible. As Tea Party groups sprang up around the country in the winter and spring of 2009, Ailes capitalized on the wave of excitement, making their protests, with their tricorn hat wardrobes and creative if sometimes over-the-top signage, a significant fraction of his news programming. The conflict between the president and his detractors was great for business;
prime-time ratings jumped 25 percent in the opening months of the Obama presidency.
Fox personalities more than ever before blurred the line between reporter and activist, often taking a direct role in creating the story they were covering. One reporter donned colonial costume for a segment on the movement’s history. Another producer helped whoop up crowds before a live shot. Fox built anticipation in the run-up to the tax day protests. On the morning of April 15, Fox hosts fanned out across the country to broadcast live from the barricades. “It’s Tea Party time, from sea to shining sea,” anchor Megyn Kelly giddily announced. The new movement was often written off by left-leaning pundits as artificial grass roots, but Fox helped them grow into an enduring force.
“There would not have been a Tea Party without Fox,” Sal Russo, a former Reagan gubernatorial aide and the cofounder of the national Tea Party Express tour, said.