Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
Roger’s demands on Lindsley grew more controlling. One night, Lindsley got a call on his cell phone. Roger told him that the security alarms in the compound had been tripped. Roger, who was out of town and couldn’t make it to the house, told Lindsley to race up to the mountain and stop the intruders.
“What if they’re armed?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ailes said. “Go up there!”
Lindsley arrived at the Ailes compound before the police did. Ailes stayed on the cell phone with Lindsley as he walked through the dark and empty mansion. He told Lindsley to flip on different lights to scare off any burglars. It turned out to be a false alarm.
In early March, Ailes arrived at the
PCN&R
office to stage an intervention
of sorts and quell another staff rebellion. He met with Haley and Panny one-on-one. “I have two thousand employees at Fox, yet this small newspaper is the cause of all my headaches,” Ailes said. “I’m sick of the drama in this office.” He doled out to the young journalists kernels of self-help wisdom, iterations of lines from his book,
You Are the Message
.
The last week of March, Beth showed up on the warpath. She told Haley to stop coming in to the office and work from home, filing cover stories as usual. He did not know if he was being fired or not. She criticized Lindsley and Panny as well. It was the final push that the three needed. While Beth stepped out, Haley looked to his friends and nodded. They gathered up their things and walked out of the newsroom. Lindsley wanted to get the hell out of Cold Spring. Haley agreed to drive him to Washington, D.C., that night to see friends. As they drove out of town, they saw a dark Lexus SUV heading in the opposite direction. Beth was behind the wheel. Haley floored it and did not stop for miles.
The young journalists had reason to fear Ailes. When Panny went back to the office a few days later to offer her resignation in person, Roger and Beth screamed at her for an hour. They accused her of spreading dirt about them and asked her to sign a nondisparagement agreement that they had already prepared. Panny refused to look at the document and left. After a few days in D.C., Lindsley returned to his apartment in Cold Spring and noticed strange cars parked out front. As he drove to lunch that day, he saw a black Lincoln Navigator in his rearview mirror. He stopped his Jeep at a red light. When he saw the Lincoln swerve off the road into a construction site, he floored the gas as soon as the light turned green and headed back toward his apartment. Back in Cold Spring, Lindsley spotted the SUV on a side street and decided to turn the tables. He drove straight toward it. The Lincoln sped off. After a few blocks, his pursuer pulled over. Lindsley drove up alongside the driver and recognized him as a News Corp security officer. Later, Lindsley called the agent and asked if he was sent to follow him. He said Ailes told him to.
Peter Johnson Jr., who was taking over for his father as Ailes’s lawyer, sent the reporters a flurry of threatening emails and certified letters. They contained a nondisparagement agreement and a list of potential charges Roger and Beth were considering filing. Lindsley barraged Haley with panicked text messages. “The world’s fucking ending!” he wrote in one.
In April 2011, a few weeks after the walkout,
Gawker
reported a detailed account of the spying episode. Brian Lewis refused to comment for the story.
“I hate everything that goes on up there,” he told people. None
of the former
PCN&R
staffers were quoted by name in the article. But Beth blamed Lindsley. As soon as
Gawker
posted its story, Beth released a nasty statement attacking Lindsley as if he were the source: “These rambling allegations are untrue and in fact not even reality based.”
When Ailes walked into a meeting at Fox that week, he told his executives, “Lots of stuff is out there. None of it is true.” In future meetings, Ailes did not utter Joe Lindsley’s name.
The saga provided another example of how Ailes wielded power. The fear that swept through the
PCN&R
office was every bit as visceral as the panic experienced by CNBC executives during Ailes’s tenure.
In the spring of 2011, after moving out of his apartment in Cold Spring, Lindsley traveled around the East Coast staying with friends. He began running again and got back down to his high school weight, eventually taking a job as a writer for Foster Friess, the conservative billionaire. He helped Haley get a job with Friess as well. Panny went on to work as an editor at
The Daily Voice
, which serves Connecticut, New York, and western Massachusetts. Lindsley’s uncle, a lawyer in Ohio, handled Peter Johnson, and the threatened legal action never materialized.
Roger and Beth did their best to disappear the three journalists. Shortly after Lindsley left, he discovered that their bylines had been erased from the
PCN&R
archives. On the online version of dozens of articles they had written, the author field stated simply: “Staff Reports.”
On January 31, 2011, a week after Boyer’s Cold Spring article was published in
The New Yorker
, Tina Brown announced that she was hiring Boyer as a senior correspondent for
Newsweek
and
The Daily Beast
. It was an inauspicious move for Boyer.
On October 18, 2012, the same day
Newsweek
announced it would fold its print edition by year-end,
Boyer found a new job. “I have followed Peter’s work throughout his storied career,” Roger Ailes said in a statement to the press. “He’s a talented and insightful journalist who will add weight and depth to our investigative reporting.” Boyer, Fox’s newest editor-at-large, was welcomed to the family.
M
ARCH
2011
WAS A TURBULENT MONTH
for Roger Ailes. Joe Lindsley had just walked away. He was also losing his biggest star of the Obama era.
On Monday afternoon, March 28, Ailes called Glenn Beck to his office to discuss his future at the network. He had spent the better part of the weekend in Garrison strategizing how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Beck, the situation was exhausting, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session. Beck had already indicated his willingness to leave.
“You’ve got to be crazy. No one walks away from television,” Ailes said.
“I may be,” Beck replied.
Ailes asked Beck’s producer, Joel Cheatwood, to translate. “What the fuck is he doing? Does he want a raise? Tell me how much.” Beck’s people held firm.
Moving him out the door without collateral damage was proving difficult.
“Let’s make a deal,” Ailes told Beck flatly.
During a forty-five-minute conversation, the two men agreed on the terms: Beck would give up his daily 5:00 p.m. program and appear in occasional network “specials”—but even that didn’t solve their problem. They haggled over how many specials he would appear in. Fox wanted six a year, Beck’s advisers wanted four. At another sit-down, Beck choked up as he talked about his bond with Ailes over right-wing politics and history. But Ailes threatened to blow up the talks, saying that Beck’s advisers were jerking him around. “I’m just going to fire him and issue a press release,” he snapped to a Fox executive.
The relationship had been strained since Beck joined Fox.
In early 2009, Fox News executives denied a request from Beck’s production team to allow Beck’s head writer and close friend, Pat Gray, to accompany Beck to the Fox News studio for his daily program. At CNN, it had never been an issue for Gray to join Beck at the studio; in fact, Beck leased space for his entire staff at the Time Warner Center. Beck wrote an email to Ailes stressing that Gray was a key writer for the show and that his presence in the studio was important. Ailes responded that he did some checking and it was against the “policy” to give out a building pass. In private, Ailes expressed wariness about Beck’s staff. “I don’t want too many of his people here,” he told an executive.
Things took a turn for the worse as Beck gathered 300,000 of his devoted followers in front of the Lincoln Memorial for a “Restoring Honor” rally—scheduled for the August 2010 anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Fox executives showed little enthusiasm.
“I’m going to D.C. in case something happens, and we have to react,” Bill Shine told a colleague the day before. “We’ll probably do a cut-in during the news.” In the end, Fox gave the event scant coverage; CNN actually seemed to cover it more.
Ailes praised Beck in a meeting with his executives afterward—“I don’t know anyone else in the country who could have done that”—but Beck could not understand why Ailes did not actively promote an event that drew so many potential Fox viewers.
Brian Lewis was selling Ailes on the idea that
Beck, who had graced the covers of
Forbes
,
Time
, and
The New York Times Magazine
, was amassing a power base independent of Fox.
“Beck had his own PR apparatus and Brian resented that,” a colleague said, “so Brian one day explained to Roger during a meeting called on a completely other topic, that Glenn’s problem was that he felt he was bigger than Fox.” Ailes agreed: talent should never eclipse the brand. “From that day on, that was Roger’s theme with Glenn: he didn’t appreciate the platform Fox had given him and needed to be pushed out,” the colleague said.
Tensions continued to escalate when, a few days after the rally, Beck launched
The Blaze
, a conservative news website.
Fox executives told Beck he couldn’t promote his new venture on air.
At times,
The Blaze
undermined stories that Fox pushed, like its piece debunking conservative provocateur James O’Keefe’s NPR sting, which had received wall-to-wall coverage on the channel. After the New Year, the cold war turned hot.
Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, hired an executive from
The Huffington Post
to run
The Blaze
, and later poached Joel Cheatwood from
Fox. The moves signaled Beck’s ambition to build a conservative media empire of his own—a clear encroachment on Ailes’s turf.
Brian Lewis retaliated by having his department tell the entertainment news website
Deadline Hollywood
that Cheatwood had earned $700,000 a year at Fox, a low-ball figure that was designed to damage his earning potential at future jobs. “Joel lost Roger’s respect and trust a long time ago,” an unnamed Fox “insider” told the website.
Reporters began highlighting that Beck’s ratings had been slipping and that progressive groups had orchestrated an advertising boycott of his show. But ratings for his time slot were still nearly double those from before he joined the network, and Fox simply shifted the advertising inventory to other programs.
On April 6, Fox and Beck announced the breakup. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes did not want a public meltdown to alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers. Most of all, he didn’t want Beck’s departure to be seen as a victory for the liberal media; that would ruin the most important story line of all.
B
y the time of Beck’s departure, Ailes had been spending considerable energy discussing the consequences of an Obama reelection. For the past two and a half years, he had committed himself to blocking the Obama agenda.
When the Affordable Care Act passed the previous March, “he went apeshit,” a senior producer said. Ailes instructed his producers to book former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey, a conservative health care advocate who popularized the notion of “death panels.” “He said she was the best person to talk about this,” the senior producer recalled. “He even gave her a prop: a giant stack of papers of the law itself.”
And so Ailes set out to recruit a viable Republican candidate.
In the summer of 2010, he invited Chris Christie to dinner at his home in Garrison with Rush Limbaugh. Like much of the GOP establishment, Ailes fell hard for the New Jersey governor. They talked about pension reform and getting tough with the unions. Ailes saw in Christie a great candidate: an ordinary guy, someone you’d be comfortable talking to over your back fence. But Ailes may have seen something else. Christie had Fox News television values with a ready-made reel. And, of course, Obama versus Christie was a producer’s dream: black versus white, thin versus fat, professor versus prosecutor. Maybe, just maybe, Ailes could laugh all
the way to the White House
and
the bank. Nevertheless, Christie politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run. Christie joked at dinner that his weight was an issue.
“I still like to go to Burger King,” he told the three rotund conservatives.
In April 2011, Ailes sent Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland to Kabul to make a pitch to then-General David Petraeus.
“He adored Petraeus,” a senior producer said. “When Moveon.org put the ‘General Betray Us’ ad in the newspapers in 2007, Roger said it was treasonous and we reported it as such.” Ailes had already told Petraeus that if he ran for president, he would quit Fox News to run the campaign. War hero presidents were especially impressive to Ailes. It was why he spoke almost daily to George H. W. Bush. “The big boss is bankrolling it,” McFarland told Petraeus, referring to Murdoch. “Roger’s going to run it. And the rest of us are going to be your in-house.” But Petraeus also turned Ailes down. “It’s never going to happen,” he told McFarland. “My wife would divorce me.”
Around this time, Ailes set up a meeting with David and Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialists who were financing a phalanx of right-wing groups to defeat Obama. Ailes had never met the brothers, and both sides expressed that it would be a good moment to sit down. Charles Koch flew to New York for the meeting. But Ailes, for unclear reasons, canceled. “Charles was miffed,” one conservative familiar with the meeting explained. Perhaps Ailes recognized that if details of the gathering leaked it would further cement his image as a conservative kingmaker, a fact he was working overtime to dispel.
“Listen, the premise that I want to elect the next president is just bullshit,” Ailes told a reporter. “The idea that I’m grooming these Republicans is just wrong.” Though the meeting was called off, Ailes’s interests were aligned with those of the Kochs.
In the winter of 2011, Ailes had called Chris Christie, the Kochs’ preferred candidate, and implored him for a second time to run. Christie turned him down again.