Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
But amidst the journalism-as-advocacy, some of the network’s journalistic ballast was disappearing.
In July 2008, news broke that Brit Hume would step down from anchoring
Special Report
after the election.
Then, two weeks after the election, David Rhodes, Fox’s vice president for news, quit to work for Bloomberg Television.
Rhodes’s brother, Ben, was a senior national security adviser to Obama, and David told staffers that Ailes had expressed concern about this closeness to the White House.
David, for his part, felt uncomfortable with where Fox was going in the Obama era.
He cringed when Fox sent a camera crew to interview Philip
Berg, a Philadelphia attorney who had filed a lawsuit challenging Obama’s birth certificate. (The suit was thrown out later that month.) The network’s coverage of fringe groups like the New Black Panther Party made him concerned that Fox was stoking racial fears. Finally,
a few months after Rhodes’s departure, John Moody left. (Murdoch put him in charge of launching News Corp’s wire service.)
“They used to tell Roger no,” a senior executive said. “They could also filter his demands and make him think he was getting what he wanted on air.”
The turnover revealed that loyalty to Ailes had its limits. Although the culture he built at Fox had its rollicking appeal, its fear-inducing dark side pushed some toward the exits.
One Christmas season, Brian Lewis and his staff went to the second floor to hand out gifts to senior Fox executives, a tradition Lewis had started. “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas from Media Relations!” Lewis bellowed as he pushed a mail cart full of gifts down the hall. Sitting in his office, one executive heard the holiday greetings, followed by screams.
“What the fuck are you doing! What the fuck! What the fuck!”
Lewis yelled. His young female assistant had handed out the wrong present to the wrong person.
The executive sat there shaken. A moment later, Lewis popped his head into his doorway wearing a Santa Claus hat and handed him his gift. “Merry Christmas,” Lewis said cheerfully. He continued wheeling his cart down the hall.
The staff replacements tended to be either weak or ideologically driven.
Bill Sammon, a former
Washington Times
correspondent, was appointed managing editor of the Washington bureau, and angered Fox’s political reporters, who saw him pushing coverage further to the right than they were comfortable with.
Days after Obama’s inauguration, an ice storm caused major damage throughout the Midwest. At an editorial meeting in the D.C. bureau, Sammon told producers that Fox should compare Obama’s response to Bush’s handling of Katrina. “Bush got grief for Katrina,” Sammon said.
“It’s too early; give him some time to respond,” a producer shot back. “This ice storm isn’t Katrina.”
Later, Sammon caused problems internally when David Brock’s Media Matters obtained a series of controversial emails about Fox’s coverage of climate change and health care. “We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without
immediately
pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,” he wrote in one December 2009 email.
Media Matters also revealed that Sammon admitted in a speech to conservatives aboard a private cruise that he had knowingly misled Fox viewers in the closing days of the 2008 campaign by calling Obama a socialist. It was a notion he privately found “far-fetched.”
Moody’s replacement was an ABC News producer named Michael Clemente.
Early in his tenure, Clemente tried to fire F.O.R. Ken LaCorte because he had a vague brief. “What he does officially is a mystery,” one executive said. Many believed he was Ailes’s eyes and ears in the newsroom, who engaged in, as another executive put it, “black helicopter shit.” When Clemente told LaCorte he was out, a screaming match erupted. LaCorte immediately went to Ailes, who rescinded the firing. By undercutting Clemente, Ailes sent a powerful message to the entire organization that Clemente lacked influence. “Clemente fucked up with LaCorte. He never should have taken that on,” a senior producer said.
T
he most potent force in Fox’s reinvention of Obama was Glenn Beck, who debuted in the 5:00 p.m. time slot the day before Obama’s inauguration.
Within weeks, he was pulling in more than two million viewers a day, a 50 percent increase.
Only Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity put up better numbers, and that was in prime time, when the television audience was vastly larger. Although Ailes was often unsparing in his praise of hosts, he told Beck in one meeting,
“You are probably the most uniquely talented person on television I’ve seen.”
When Ailes hired Beck, he imagined him hosting a conventional cable news talk show.
“I see your show being more of a Jack Paar show,” he told him. “Jack delivered a monologue, but you also have guests and it has a variety component.” Beck had a different idea.
He conceived his program an anti-television show—partly because Beck said he didn’t like television—which would feature Beck roaming his set in plain view of the cameramen and cables. There would be few guests. Instead, his studio was like a one-room prairie schoolhouse where he delivered daily sermon-like lectures before a chalkboard, on which he traced a web connecting his progressive enemies, George Soros central among them, though Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was a supporting player.
With the Dow plunging from its peak of 14,000 toward 6,000, Beck’s dire scenarios—FEMA concentration camps, societal collapse—were fears that became imaginable.
Beck broke the mold at Fox. Unlike most of the unknowns and has-beens
Ailes recruited, Beck joined Fox at a time when he was well on his way to becoming a star. He was also a driven businessman.
He founded his own company, Mercury Radio Arts (a play off Orson Welles’s radio broadcasts of the 1930s), and brought in executives to run it.
In a break from Fox tradition, Beck had his own team of aggressive public relations counselors who had worked with Katie Couric and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
But Beck’s show built on Ailes’s playbook, making the culture wars personal. He seemed to many to be Fox News’s id made visible, saying things—Obama is a racist, Nazi tactics are progressive tactics—dredged from the right-wing subconscious. Beck crossed lines that weren’t supposed to be crossed, even at Fox, and the presentation—childlike, angry, often tearful—was as remarkable as the content. Some at Fox were alarmed by Beck’s rhetoric but Ailes was fully on-board. Privately, Ailes said Beck was telling the truth.
The day after Beck said on air that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people,”
Ailes told his executives, “I think he’s right.” The only question was how to manage the fallout. It was decided Bill Shine would release a statement.
“Glenn Beck expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel,” it read. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions.”
The White House failed to recognize Beck’s growing influence, until he dug up and publicized White House green jobs czar Van Jones’s collegiate flirtation with black nationalism and communism. At the time, Jones was something of a media darling, and the subject of a recent
New Yorker
profile.
One day in the summer of 2009, Jones received a Google alert on his BlackBerry about one of Beck’s commentaries. When he checked it out, he remembered thinking it was “almost clownish.” “The general attitude in the White House was this guy is a jokester and they didn’t want to give it a lot of oxygen,” he said. But as Beck kept up the barrage, Jones grew concerned. “I started to feel besieged. Because the guy’s ratings exploded and he’s using my face for a springboard,” he said. Jones began asking White House aides to defend him.
Obama officials, consumed over the summer with selling the health care bill and other crises, did not consider Jones a high priority.
Dan Pfeiffer, a senior communications staffer, did not even know who Jones was before Beck sparked heat around his posting.
Jones asked his chief of staff for security after receiving a death threat, but was told that he did not qualify for Secret Service protection. “I’ve got children,” he said. “I’m
just a regular civilian walking around here, and you had someone telling a couple million people every night that I’m a Communist and a felon.”
On September 1, Jones was sitting in his office across from the White House in a townhouse off Lafayette Park when his intern asked, “Did you ever say Republicans are ‘assholes’?”
“Probably,” Jones said.
“That’s what they’re reporting on now.” Jones looked at the screen.
A YouTube video of him was going viral on conservative websites. “Somebody found the videotape where I was yukking it up with students at Berkeley,” Jones recalled.
Under pressure, he released a statement to
Politico
apologizing, calling his remarks “offensive” and “clearly inappropriate.”
The same week, news broke that Jones had signed a so-called Truther petition that claimed the 9/11 attacks were in fact carried out by the Bush administration. White House officials confronted Jones. “They said, ‘Why did you sign this?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t sign this. I’ve never seen this. In my most wild left-wing days I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. This wasn’t anything I’ve seen.’ ” Jones investigated and discovered a group had approached him at a conference and gotten him to sign his name under false pretenses. “Now other people besides Beck were covering it. That was the beginning of the end,” Jones said.
On September 6, Beck got his scalp: Jones resigned. Jones’s ouster was a symbolic victory for Ailes that proved Fox was again driving the news.
Four days later, Ailes dealt another blow.
On the morning of September 10, Fox aired the undercover video of conservative activist James O’Keefe’s sting of the Baltimore branch of ACORN, the community organizing group. In the edited clips, O’Keefe captured ACORN employees allegedly showing him how to hide income earned from a brothel.
Andrew Breitbart, the conservative provocateur turned Internet publisher, worked with O’Keefe to get the video exclusively to Fox after other media outlets turned him down. One reporter told Breitbart it was “too political.”
Breitbart thought it was a bombshell, “the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” he called it.
Inside the White House, a debate unfolded over how to deal with Fox. Michelle Obama particularly loathed the network.
That summer Obama himself had lashed out at Fox in an interview with John Harwood on CNBC. “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” he told him. “That’s a pretty big megaphone. And you’d be hard-pressed, if you watched the entire day, to find a positive story about me on that front.” Now Obama advisers were getting
word that Fox was actively manipulating the coverage of the health care debate, which at the time was being played out in a national series of town halls.
“We had anecdotal reports that where there was no screaming, they would not report it,” said Anita Dunn.
In meetings, Ailes told producers that health care reform was a disaster. “He claimed there was nothing wrong with the current system,” one producer said.
What most alarmed the White House was that the rest of the media was suddenly following Fox News’s lead.
In an interview posted on the
New York Times
website after Van Jones’s resignation, the paper’s managing editor, Jill Abramson, acknowledged that they would need to follow Fox’s reporting in the future.
“The narrative was being hijacked by Fox,” Dunn said. “Fox had taken over a thought-leader role in the national press corps. What we could influence was the way everyone else looks at Fox. Frankly, that’s the real problem.”
As the White House hashed out their strategy,
Dunn reached out to David Rhodes at his new perch at Bloomberg Television. He told Dunn the White House was making a mistake. “You guys have this all wrong. Everything you’re doing is anticipating that they’re somewhere having a meeting which is like, ‘What if Beck says something that embarrasses us?’ That’s an NBC meeting. Now, let me tell you what a Fox meeting is: A Fox meeting is, ‘Boy, he’s really emotional. Now he’s tearing up. What if he gets really emotional and doesn’t do the show and we don’t get the ratings, what are we going to do?’ ”
After conferring with Obama, his aides decided that the White House would go to war with Fox. The White House first attempted to isolate the channel.
In mid-September, when Obama agreed to appear on the Sunday political shows, he skipped
Fox News Sunday
, leaving Chris Wallace to complain on
The O’Reilly Factor
, “They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my thirty years in Washington.”
In early October, Dunn went on CNN and declared Fox the “research arm of the Republican Party.” Then,
in late October, a Treasury Department official tried to deny Fox an interview with Ken Feinberg, the compensation regulator for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The move backfired when journalists from other networks, angered that the White House was picking on a member of the press, rallied behind Fox. David Axelrod called Ailes and blamed the decision on a low-level Treasury employee.
For the White House, Axelrod was a valuable back channel, who willingly played the good cop.
“He’s a fierce competitor. He lives on the line. Occasionally, he waddles over it,” Axelrod once told a reporter, referring
to Ailes.
About a week before Dunn’s CNN appearance in the fall of 2009, Axelrod sat down with Ailes at the Palm in Midtown Manhattan before the restaurant opened to avoid drawing attention. Axelrod told Ailes they should try to defuse things and work together.
But Ailes saw no benefit to laying down arms. Ratings were ticking up.
“He relished it,” an executive said. In editorial meetings, he told his lieutenants to return fire. One executive recalled Ailes saying, “They hate America. They hate capitalism.”
Another recalled, “He would say, beat the shit out of them.” “To use Roger’s vocabulary, he said,
‘Fuck these guys. Kick them as hard as you can.’
” Some executives agreed.
One told news chief Michael Clemente that the White House’s attacks were like “a hanging curveball” for Fox. But the war was hard on Fox’s more dedicated journalists. For all the larger-than-life talking heads who dominated its airtime, Fox still had a substantial Washington bureau made up of many nonpartisan journalists, and they were already beleaguered watching Glenn Beck become the network’s mascot.
“The D.C. bureau’s job was being made much more difficult,” said one producer, “but Roger loved it.”