Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
“Lie low,” he told her. “If you want to respond later, fine, but do not interfere with the memorial service.”
Palin ignored Ailes’s advice and went ahead and released her controversial “blood libel” video the morning Obama traveled to Tucson. For Ailes, her decision was further evidence that she was flailing around off-message. “Why did you call me for advice?” he wondered aloud to colleagues.
“He thinks Palin is an idiot,” a Republican close to Ailes said. “He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”
What had been an effort to boost ratings became a complication. Employing potential presidential candidates and Glenn Beck opened the network up to criticism that it was too politicized.
Ailes also got an earful from leaders in the GOP establishment who were apoplectic that Beck, Palin, and
Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, the Tea Party–backed candidate running for the Senate in Delaware, were becoming the face of Fox News and, by extension, the Republican party.
“Why are you letting Palin have the profile?” Karl Rove said to Ailes in one meeting. “Why are you letting her go on your network and say the things she’s saying? And Glenn Beck? These are alternative people who will never be elected, and they’ll kill us.”
Ailes was inclined to listen. After Fox News gave the inaugural Tea Party rallies wall-to-wall coverage in the spring of 2009, Ailes told executives to dial back the promotion. His message, according to one executive, was: “Let’s not abandon them, because their audience is driving the ratings,
but we’re not going to have that umbilical cord connection to them. They’re on their own. So the next big iconic event that happened, there was no planned coverage. It was just planned news coverage.”
Although Ailes valued the ratings, he had a grander goal.
One afternoon not long before the midterms, Ailes told executives who sat in his office, “the network’s a success. We’re making a lot of money—that’s fine. But I want to elect the next president.”
A
S
A
ILES TOLD
F
ox
EXECUTIVES
of his desire to install a Republican in the White House, he found himself caught up in a conflict of a much more personal sort: small-town politics. It was an imbroglio that Ailes would later say he did not want. At Fox News, the steel security doors, the public relations apparatus, and the discretion of generously paid confidants kept the full measure of Roger Ailes’s paranoia and rage from the world. In his hometown, Roger Ailes was exposed.
From the outset, Ailes spoke of his residence in Garrison, forty-six miles north of Manhattan in Putnam County, New York, as an escape from the partisan front lines at Fox News.
“All I ever wanted was a nice place to live, a great family, and to die peacefully in my sleep,” he said around the time of his move. Garrison, a few other hamlets, and the neighboring villages Nelsonville and Cold Spring formed the larger town of Philipstown, although it was not very large at all: fewer than ten thousand citizens. It seemed, on the surface at least, to be an ideal place to instill in Zachary the Eisenhower values Ailes had known as a boy.
Putnam County even had a Republican bent: while voters tended to vote Democratic at the state level, the last Democratic presidential candidates to carry the county were Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Cold Spring’s downtown held on to everything Warren, Ohio, had let go. It was a vibrant civic space, dotted with well-maintained Victorian homes, quaint storefronts, and stately churches. The area appealed to Ailes’s sentimental ideas about America.
From his mountaintop aerie, an impressive nine-thousand-square-foot mansion constructed of Adirondack river stone, he overlooked triumphal reminders of the country’s might.
To the west was the spot where Continental Army troops strung a
185-ton iron chain across the Hudson to block British ships advancing upriver.
To the north were shuttered ironworks that had produced vital armaments and steam engines in the nineteenth century. Across the river stood West Point military academy.
The grand interior of his house also bore witness to American greatness. Photographs of Generals George Patton, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Dwight Eisenhower lined the walls.
Roger and Beth were good neighbors.
They attended the local Catholic church, Our Lady of Loretto, where on Sundays, Beth sometimes played the organ. They got to know the contractors who built their house, hosted a cookout for members of the volunteer fire department, and bought locally.
Leonora Burton, the proprietor of the Country Goose, a gift shop on Cold Spring’s Main Street, considered Beth “a first-rate customer who spent freely.” “I liked her and, being a hugger, sometimes gave her one,” the chatty Brit recalled. Stories circulated of Roger’s generosity.
One was that, upon hearing about a store owner who had fallen on hard times, he extended a personal loan.
Buying
The Putnam County News & Recorder
, in the summer of 2008, was Roger and Beth’s first public endeavor in their adopted town.
Founded in the mid-nineteenth century as the Cold Spring
Recorder
, the weekly newspaper was like the community itself: an artifact from a bygone age. The previous owner and publisher, Brian O’Donnell, kept production methods antique.
In a one-room office, housed in a former barbershop on Main Street, staffers laid out the paper with scissors and glue. Under O’Donnell’s steady ownership, the
PCN&R
, or simply “the paper,” as it was affectionately known by residents, was a quirky, if reserved, information source.
“It covered the 4-H Club and the kids’ activities at the school,” said Elizabeth Anderson, the founder and managing director of the investment firm Beekman Wealth Advisory, and a part-time resident of Philipstown.
Letters to the editor—the paper’s liveliest section by far—were welcomed, but there were no editorials.
When citizens complained that the paper ignored divergent points of view, O’Donnell responded that it was
their
job to express them at public meetings, not for him to stir them up.
Ailes described Philipstown as a bastion of traditional America. In a certain sense, he was right. Many of the town’s contractors and restaurant owners were the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish and Italian immigrants who had found work in the local foundries. Other residents had ancestors living in the area since before the nation’s birth. But that
was only part of the town. In the second half of the twentieth century, a different kind of settler had arrived: the college-educated urbanite who idealized country life.
In the 1960s, when Consolidated Edison, the electric utility, proposed building a power station on the face of Storm King, a 1,340-foot domed mountain that rose like a carapace above the banks of the Hudson River, a coalition of newcomers filed a lawsuit, forming a counterweight against local businesses that supported the development.
The ensuing legal battle played out in the courts until Con Ed settled and abandoned the project in 1980.
The landmark victory, coming at a time when the Reagan administration was seeking to dismantle environmental regulation, emboldened citizens across the country to speak up in local development matters and helped spawn the modern environmental movement.
In Philipstown, a host of preservation groups took root. They fought to preserve the community’s bucolic character and acquired land in trust from Gilded Era estates that had fallen into disrepair.
After 9/11, residents saw a new wave of city dwellers moving in. Along with their politics, they brought their own back-to-the-land ethic with all the predictable signifiers. The number of Priuses and Subarus parked in the lot at Foodtown increased, as did the variety of heirloom produce at the weekend farmers’ market. It was this growing population that sustained local groups like
the Garrison Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to applying “the transformative power of contemplation to today’s pressing social and environmental concerns.”
It all added up to a rich brew of clashing sensibilities that bred resentments. The contours of the conflict traced the same lines that had defined the old battles of the Nixon years. For a long time, these passions bubbled at a low simmer. With the pages of the
PCN&R
now at their disposal, the Aileses were about to turn the temperature up.
O
ne morning in July 2008, Brian O’Donnell called the employees of the
PCN&R
to the newsroom to meet Roger Ailes and his wife. The staff was on edge. “Has he even
seen
this place?” one employee asked O’Donnell. Although Beth was taking the title of publisher, Roger did most of the talking that day.
They could keep their jobs, he said, but there would be “new” rules.
“The first one was, ‘Don’t badmouth your employer,’ ” reporter Michael Turton, an affable Canadian, recalled. “In all the places I’ve worked, including on farms, I’ve never been told not to.” Roger’s second
proviso was to “get both sides of the story.” “He was talking about the name the
News & Recorder
,” Turton remembered, “and he said the ‘Recording’ part was fine, but he didn’t think the ‘News’ part was up to snuff.”
In public, Roger and Beth maintained that the
PCN&R
would not become Fox News. But Roger communicated other intentions privately.
“He said the community needed more of a speaking to,” said local journalist Kevin Foley, who was once a
campaign volunteer for Democratic governor Mario Cuomo and a deputy superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department. Shortly after buying the paper, Roger invited the fifty-seven-year-old Foley up to the mountain several times to interview for the top editing job. He spent much of the time monologuing about the ills afflicting his adopted home. He said he would never send Zachary to the public school because it was overrun with liberalism. At his window, he pointed at an outdoor sculpture exhibit at Boscobel House and Gardens, a half mile in the distance. “Do you think they have the right to block my view?” Roger asked. “Isn’t it their property?” Foley asked. “It’s not their property! It’s a nonprofit! They get tax breaks!” Roger replied. He spoke of his security more than once. “He worried about his kid and his wife and said he wouldn’t want anything to happen to them because of what he was,” Foley recalled. Roger told him his German shepherd, Champ, helped protect them. “He said, ‘I let the dog out of the car when we come here. The dog gets out first. He’s trained to patrol the whole grounds and report back before we get out.’ ”
Foley quickly lost interest in the job, and Ailes lost interest in him.
Later that summer, Ailes hired Maureen Hunt, a Fox News human resources employee and Philipstown resident, to edit the paper, but
she didn’t last long.
A
s summer turned to fall, political issues began to arise.
Alison Rooney, the copy editor, at first found reasons to be optimistic about the ownership change. She liked using the new computers to put out the paper and looked forward to the newsroom moving into a renovated two-story building on Main Street.
But that honeymoon ended when Rooney laid out a press release from the Garrison Art Center that described a work invoking the “mythological story” of the virgin birth.
After the release was published, the priest of Our Lady of Loretto wrote a letter to the editor, and Beth Ailes lit into Rooney.
A few weeks later, Rooney got another
dressing-down as she formatted a promotion of the high school’s upcoming production of
Urinetown
, this time from an editor who found the language offensive and removed the title of the show from the headline.
Michael Turton failed to impress. He was assigned to cover Haldane Middle School’s mock presidential election.
After the event, Turton filed a report headlined “Mock Election Generated Excitement at Haldane; Obama Defeats McCain by 2–1 Margin.” He went on, “The 2008 U.S. presidential election is now history. And when the votes were tallied, Barack Obama had defeated John McCain by more than a two to one margin. The final vote count was 128 to 53.” Reading the published version a few days later, Turton was shocked.
The headline had been changed: “Mock Presidential Election Held at Haldane; Middle School Students Vote to Learn Civic Responsibility.” So had the opening paragraph: “Haldane students in grades 6 through 8 were entitled to vote for president and they did so with great enthusiasm.” Obama’s margin of victory was struck from the article. His win was buried in the last paragraph.
Turton was upset.
“I’ve been mulling over the changes made to my article and need to voice my concern,” he wrote in an email to Hunt. “I’m also sure the article left students, parents, teachers, administration and trustees wondering how a reporter can omit the actual results when covering an election.… I know editing is part of the process, but the rationale for the omission escapes me.”
He never heard back from Hunt, but soon received
a series of accusatory emails from the Aileses. Turton had disregarded “specific instructions” for the piece, Beth wrote. Accordingly, the piece had been edited. Headline changes occur all the time, she noted. “Do you anticipate this becoming an ongoing problem for you?” A short while later, Roger weighed in. Maureen Hunt’s instructions to focus on the school’s process for teaching about elections had been “very clear,” he wrote, and Turton’s “desire to change the story into a big Obama win” should have taken a backseat. Ailes described himself as “disappointed” by Turton’s failure “to follow the agreed upon direction.”
Turton defended himself. “I would not disregard clear direction,” he replied in an email. “Had the results been exactly opposite I would have written the story in the same manner, including the results.” Beth responded cryptically, thanking Turton for his “thoughtful explanation,” which she said she would “pass on to Roger.” Soon afterward, Turton learned that Maureen Hunt had resigned.
Ailes had seen similar newsroom turbulence at TVN and during the early days at Fox. To bring “fair and balanced” to the people of Philipstown, he continued his search for someone who understood in which direction the paper was meant to take the community.