Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
“You don’t know how people are out to get me! I asked you for a favor and you’re turning me down.”
“First of all,” Stewart said, “there’s no mention of your son. There’s nothing in this article that would jeopardize you and your family. You’re asking me to remove what happened at a public meeting, and I can’t do that.”
Ailes repeated his claim that Stewart needed mental help. The conversation ended there. At home that night, Stewart’s cell phone rang. It was Ailes calling for the third time that day. Stewart didn’t pick up.
Later that month, Ailes’s old nemesis David Brock coauthored a new book,
The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine
, which synthesized the most damaging research that Media Matters had published over the past decade on its website.
“He was obsessed with Brock’s book,” one Fox contributor recalled. In one meeting, Ailes said he couldn’t “do anything” until it was published. Highlighting leaked emails from Fox executives, which expressed overt right-wing bias, and detailing wild on-air claims about Obama’s religion, background, and policies, the text provided Fox’s detractors with rounds of ammunition to deploy in their battle to define Ailes as a master propagandist.
In retaliation, Fox aired segments claiming Brock was mentally unstable.
Google, Media Matters, and Philipstown.info were new media antagonists. Ailes’s threats did not have the same effect on them that they did on legacy media outlets. This was especially the case with
Gawker
.
On April 10, the gossip website introduced a new series. “What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole—a longstanding, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing
Gawker
with regular dispatches from inside the organization,” the editors wrote. The columns brought about a minor media convulsion, but the show had a short run.
Within twenty-four hours, Fox executives successfully identified the Mole as Joe Muto, a thirty-year-old associate producer who’d worked at the network for eight years, and fired him.
When Muto quickly landed a low-six-figure book deal in early May to write about his exploits, Ailes decided to send a message.
Jimmy Gildea, Ailes’s security guard, told the boss he could press charges. “If this
Gawker
paid for stolen goods, it could be part of the crime, same as if somebody hires a hit man,” the former cop said. Brian Lewis wanted Ailes to let it go, but was overruled.
“I told them,” Lewis said, “but I was told that legal would be handling this from here forward. I’m like,
Okay
.”
At 6:30 in the morning on April 25, officers from the New York district attorney’s office arrived at Muto’s apartment with a warrant charging him with grand larceny and conspiracy, among other charges. They seized his iPhone, laptop, and old notebooks.
A year later, a month before his book was published, Muto appeared in handcuffs at the Manhattan Criminal Court, where he pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanor charges: attempted unlawful duplication and criminal possession of computer-related material. The judge fined Muto $1,000, ordered him to
forfeit a $5,000 fee he earned from
Gawker
for reporting on Fox, confiscated his Mac, and ordered him to do ten days of community service and two hundred hours of private service.
I
n the closing weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign, Ailes’s worldview radiated from his daily editorial meetings onto the screen.
“He likes to raise questions in chyrons,” a senior producer said, referring to the graphics and the text that appear at the bottom of the screen. “Is Obama a socialist? He tells producers that such an approach is better than simply saying Obama is a socialist.” Ailes’s anchors and pundits breathlessly inflated a panoply of administration blunders into full-blown conspiracies.
While Fox reporters did some enterprising coverage of the deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, the journalism was undermined by one host claiming it was “the biggest news story since Watergate.”
A few days before the election, the mother of Sean Patrick Smith, a State Department employee killed in Benghazi, said that Fox’s reports had caused her to believe that “Obama murdered my son.” Fox hyped the influence of fringe groups like the New Black Panther Party and pushed fears of stolen elections.
“ELECTION OFFICIALS IN BATTLEGROUND STATE OF OHIO FEAR WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD,” one on-screen banner read.
Ailes’s executives flattered him with suggestions that he go on camera and deliver the attack lines himself or even run for president. (
Michael Clemente had “Ailes 2012” bumper stickers printed and distributed around the second floor.) At some moments, Ailes demurred. “Those days are gone,” he told his team. At other moments, he indulged them. That summer, he told his inner circle at the afternoon strategy meeting that he wanted to host a talk show. His PR deputy, Irena Briganti, who was sitting in the room, advised him against it. “The media will go after you,” she warned.
So when Ailes wanted to get his message out, he often turned to his lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., who took to
Fox & Friends
to spread it. In private, Johnson spoke of Ailes like a father. Johnson told a Fox colleague Ailes thought of him as a son. Owing to his special status, Johnson was allowed to use the teleprompter to read from scripts, a perk that was normally reserved for Fox hosts. “He can load a script directly into the teleprompter. So it’s not even Ailes unplugged. It’s Ailes plugged in,” one
person familiar with the matter said. Johnson served up frightening scenarios filled with Muslim extremists and Occupy Wall Street anarchists and overreaching government bureaucrats, lacing his commentary with Nixonian bogeymen.
On the day before Obama and Romney squared off in their final debate on foreign policy, Johnson discussed the situation in Benghazi. He speculated about whether Obama had known about the attack early enough to have ordered military action to save the Americans who were killed. “If he did nothing, then that is the shame of America,” Johnson said. “I have no evidence for this,” he mused, but “were these people expendable as part of a Mideast foreign policy?”
On the afternoon of November 6—Election Day—Ailes had lunch with Karl Rove, who still believed in a Romney win. Few Fox pundits had stumped as hard as Rove had for the candidate.
Rove’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, had vowed to spend up to $300 million to back conservatives in the 2012 political campaigns.
“Hell, maybe Karl’s right,” Ailes said later that day.
At 5:00 p.m., Ailes assembled his network’s election team in the second-floor conference room to discuss the night’s coverage. “Guys,” he told them, “no matter how it goes, don’t go out there looking like someone ran over your dog.” But as Fox’s exit poll team presented the numbers, Ailes came undone. “They weren’t good for Romney,” a person in the room said. “Roger started arguing about how the sample skewed toward liberals.” Ailes said, “Liberals like to share their feelings, and conservatives work, so they don’t vote until later.” Arnon Mishkin, the head of Fox’s decision desk team, told Ailes that the data accounted for a sample skew. It appeared that Romney was going to be trounced. Worse, so-called late deciders were breaking for Obama.
“Thank you, Chris Christie,” Ailes grumbled. He was still furious that Christie had given Obama a bipartisan photo op on the New Jersey coastline after Hurricane Sandy.
“Actually, that’s not true,” Mishkin said. “We asked people that. There’s no data in the polling to suggest that Sandy hurt Romney.”
“Well, hugging the guy couldn’t help people feel good about Romney either,” Ailes countered.
Data was no substitute for what his gut told him. “Everyone left that room with the knowledge that Roger didn’t believe the polls,” a participant said. His opinion would be channeled on-air later that night, with embarrassing consequences.
About an hour later, Ailes settled into a plush chair in the Fox Sports
Suite. A couple hundred people, including Rupert Murdoch, mingled in the room snacking on sushi and lamb kabobs.
One Fox executive recalled he made sure to avoid eating the raw fish in front of Ailes. “Sushi is liberal food,” he explained. The election coverage played out on eight flat-screen televisions mounted on the wall. Around 8:00, Beth arrived. The
PCN&R
was going to press that night. She sat beside Ailes reviewing the week’s edition on her iPad. Shortly before 11:00, with Romney’s chances fading, Roger and Beth called it a night. “I want to kiss Zac good night before he goes to sleep,” Ailes told a journalist, trying to put the best spin on the outcome. “If Romney wins, it’s good for the taxpayers. If Obama wins, it’s great for our ratings.”
Downstairs, Arnon Mishkin and Fox’s number crunchers were preparing to call Ohio for Obama. “Let’s remember this is Fox News calling Ohio. This will say something beyond Ohio going for Obama,” Mishkin told Fox brass. Fox executives told Mishkin to get the numbers right and ignore the politics: “If we think Ohio has gone Obama, we call Ohio,” said a Fox News executive.
Bret Baier announced the call on set. “That’s the presidency, essentially,” he said. Instantly, Fox phones lit up with angry phone calls and emails from the Romney campaign, who believed that the call was premature. After Baier’s Ohio call, Rove took their complaints public, echoing Ailes’s earlier comments, and conducting an on-air primer on Ohio’s electoral math to dispute the outcome. With the network divided against itself, senior producers held a meeting to adjudicate. The decision desk stood their ground. They knew how momentous the call was. In the end, producers had to find a way to split the difference. Megyn Kelly walked through the newsroom to interview the decision desk. “This is Fox News,” a person in the room said, “so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.”
By midnight, Rove reluctantly seemed to concede. The moment became a symbol of the denialism that had taken hold on the right in the closing days of the election.
On air, Dick Morris had predicted a Romney landslide, putting Romney’s odds of winning at 90 percent.
In private, some Fox staffers thought the network’s boosterism had become a joke. At a rehearsal on the Saturday before the election, Megyn Kelly chuckled when she relayed to colleagues what someone had told her: “I really like Dick Morris. He’s always wrong, but he makes me feel good.”
Only half of Roger Ailes’s grand plan had come to pass. While Fox’s ratings were still unchallenged, the channel had failed to elect the next
president—the circus on Fox had complicated the effort as well as assisted it. By giving airtime to the most outlandish voices on the right, Fox had helped distort the debate over the country’s future, making it easier for voters to dismiss Republican arguments. Ailes’s personal political impulses—to enlist Chris Christie, or David Petraeus—were at odds with the vivid political comedy Fox often programmed. It turned out that television and politics were different disciplines. In pursuit of ratings, Fox had sharpened national divisions—and the division had favored the Democrats. Since the Nixon administration and TVN, the right had dreamed of a television channel that could make its case with the American public, to balance the debate.
“You’re a hero to our people,” one prominent conservative told Ailes at a gala at the Kennedy Center. But in 2012, by this measure, Fox had been a failure.
After Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, Mark Rozell, the acting dean of the George Mason University School of Public Policy, and Paul Goldman, a former chairman of Virginia’s Democratic Party, wrote an essay noting the inverse relationship between the rise of conservative media and the Republican Party’s ability to win national majorities.
“When the mainstream media reigned supreme, between 1952 and 1988, Republicans won seven out of the ten presidential elections,” they reported. “Conservative talk show hosts and Fox News blame the ‘lamestream’ national media’s ‘liberal bias’ for the GOP’s poor showing since 1992. Yet the rise of the conservative-dominated media defines the era when the fortunes of GOP presidential hopefuls dropped to the worst levels since the party’s founding in 1856.” Perhaps the freak show had become too freakish.
T
he post-election soul searching that consumed the Republican Party took place inside Fox News as well. Ailes, like other GOP heavyweights, took orchestrated steps to reposition his channel in the post-election media environment, freshening story lines—and, in some cases, changing the characters.
Bill Shine sent out a directive mandating that producers needed permission from senior executives before booking Karl Rove or Dick Morris.
In February, Fox declined to renew Morris’s contract. Rove made the cut. Palin didn’t.
The previous month, the news broke that she and Fox had parted ways.
In meetings, Ailes told producers that viewers were tired of politics. Between Election Day and the inauguration, Fox toned down its coverage. In mid-December, in the immediate aftermath of the horrific school
shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left twenty children dead, Ailes told producers not to program segments heavily debating the politics of the Second Amendment.
A day after the shooting, David Clark, the executive producer in charge of Fox’s weekend coverage, sent producers instructions. “This network is not going there,” Clark wrote one producer on Saturday night. Fox also spiked a pro–assault weapon column by Foxnews.com contributor John Lott, one of the country’s most vocal Second Amendment absolutists. “They didn’t send me an e-mail. I got a call,” Lott explained. “They said, ‘This is just too sensitive.’ ” The policy wasn’t ironclad. Some pundits and anchors did discuss the politics of the tragedy. But Fox hosts would let the audience’s emotions cool before cranking up the volume of the gun rights debate.
The reprieve ended on the morning of January 21, 2013—inauguration day. The hosts of
Fox & Friends
signaled how the network felt about the opening of Obama’s second term. “As if a cold Monday in January wasn’t dreary enough, today has been dubbed—they figured this out about five years ago—‘Blue Monday,’ the most depressing day of the year,” Steve Doocy said. To help viewers cope, they welcomed to the set self-help guru Larry Winget, the “Pitbull of Personal Development.” Throughout the morning, the mood on-screen was melancholy.
“This was an unyielding, uncompromising espousal of a liberal agenda,” Chris Wallace said, following Obama’s speech.