The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (67 page)

This book is based on interviews with 614 people who have worked with Roger Ailes and observed him at close range at various points in his five decades in public life. In addition, I have relied on contemporaneous notes, emails, calendars, letters, court filings, deposition transcripts, corporate documents, White House memoranda, and secondary sources, including videotapes, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and books. Wherever possible, I have confirmed the facts with a minimum of two sources. Dialogue, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist James B. Stewart has written, is a type of fact, like the color of a wall or the make of a shirt. Where I have detailed the emotional states or thoughts of characters, the descriptions are based on interviews with either the principals themselves or people who had conversations with them about what they thought or felt. Before this book went to press, a team of two fact-checkers, Cynthia Cotts and Rob Liguori, spent a combined 2,098 hours vetting the manuscript for accuracy and context. They did a phenomenal job. Any errors or omissions that remain are my responsibility alone.

Roger Ailes did not participate in this book, notwithstanding my numerous attempts over two and a half years to arrange a sit-down interview. He discouraged sources close to him from speaking with me and went to elaborate lengths to obstruct my reporting. Through surrogates, Ailes attempted to create a counter-narrative about my journalism. “From what I understand, you’re preparing a personal dossier about Roger,” his attorney, Peter Johnson Jr., told me in December 2011. When I asked to interview Johnson two months later, he threatened legal action. “What the hell am I going to talk to you about? I may wind up suing you, for Christ’s sake.”

Around the office, Ailes spread odd, inaccurate stories about this book, telling his executives, for instance, that I was being secretly paid by George Soros to write it. “There’s a lot of liberal, George Soros money behind him,” Ailes told his brother, Robert, who relayed the conversation to me. In 2012 I received a fellowship at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., that received .5 percent of its funding from Soros that year. James Pinkerton, a Fox News contributor and former Republican operative, was for years a New America fellow.

Fox News’s head of programming, Bill Shine, encouraged Fox personalities to post derogatory comments about me on Twitter. Andrea Tantaros, co-host of
The Five
, tweeted that I was a “harasser” and a “Soros puppet.” Sean Hannity called me a “phoney journalist” [
sic
]. Karl Rove wrote about my “disturbing habit of misinterpreting anything Fox News related.” In a Foxnews.com column, Fox political analyst Patrick Caddell called me an “embarrassment to the journalistic trade.”

Conservative websites also participated in Ailes’s campaign. From December 2012 to May 2013, the website
Breitbart News
posted a series of columns, many of them anonymously written, totaling more than 9,250 words that described me as a “Soros-backed attack dog,” a “harasser,” and a “stalker.” On December 21, a
Breitbart
column quoted a “Fox source” saying “Gabe Sherman is Jayson Blair on steroids,” a reference to the disgraced former
New York Times
reporter who fabricated articles and abused drugs. As it happened, two days earlier, Bill Shine told Ailes in a meeting that I was like “Jayson Blair.” When I asked Shine if he was behind the
Breitbart
smear, he declined to comment.

Another way Ailes sought to shape his narrative was to release his own book. In December 2011, I learned that Ailes was moving forward with his memoir. He wanted to title the book
Fluke
, a riff on his improbable, Horatio Alger career. But shortly after the New Year, Ailes unexpectedly put the memoir on hold. Instead, he invited Zev Chafets, an Israeli-American journalist in his mid-sixties who had recently published a glowing biography of Rush Limbaugh, to write an authorized biography.

Ailes’s decision to collaborate with Chafets was at odds with what his PR department told me when I first approached Fox News the previous January about writing this book. I had been covering media full-time for almost a decade, first at
The New York Observer
and then for
The New Republic
and
New York
magazine. In a meeting at the News Corporation cafeteria in January 2011, Brian Lewis and Irena Briganti informed me
that Ailes had turned down multiple interview requests from book authors over the years. “You might get a few disgruntled former employees to talk, but that’s it,” Lewis said. I replied that I would press ahead with my research, and that I remained hopeful that Ailes would eventually speak with me. A few weeks later, Lewis contacted me with good news. Ailes would meet for an off-the-record conversation to discuss the book. But twenty-four hours before our sit-down, Ailes canceled and did not offer an alternative date.

In the spring, Lewis presented me with a condition. Before Ailes even agreed to “think” about speaking with me, Lewis said, I must agree to refrain from using any background quotes or anecdotes that Ailes could consider “negative.” I told Lewis that while I agreed that on-the-record sources should be the bedrock of reporting, I could not agree to such a blanket deal, as Ailes might retaliate against people whom he deemed to be disloyal.

In the course of my reporting, I spoke to Ailes twice at public events, both of which encounters were illuminating of his character. On the evening of April 11, 2012, I attended a party hosted by
The Hollywood Reporter
at the Four Seasons restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, where Ailes was being honored along with media industry luminaries such as CBS CEO Les Moonves and
Today
anchor Matt Lauer. As Ailes and his wife, Beth, entered the restaurant’s Grill Room, I approached them and introduced myself.

“I don’t want to be rude, but you know what? I don’t want to talk to you,” he said.

“I understand,” I replied.

“I don’t think you
do
understand,” Beth added over his shoulder.

“No, you don’t,” Roger said. “Look, leave her paper alone. You’re harassing her. I don’t care what you do to me.”

I was taken aback. The subject of my book was Roger, not Beth.

“I’m just a reporter, Mr. Ailes.”

“No, no, no. You’re a
harasser
,” he shot back.

“Roger, he’s got his recorder on,” Beth interjected, then looked at me. “You’re trying to make a
buck
off my husband.”

“Your entire premise is
wrong
,” Roger added, referring to a cover story I wrote for
New York
magazine in May 2011 that revealed Ailes’s efforts to shape the 2012 GOP field. “I’m not going to go into it. But I am going to tell you—leave her alone. Leave her
alone
.”

They walked off, and I ventured to the other side of the room. Half
an hour passed. I didn’t think I’d see Ailes again that evening and began to make my way toward the exit. A bottleneck around the bar prevented me from moving very far. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ailes barreling toward me. At first, I thought he must be walking to see someone else, but his eyes locked on mine. “Listen, your entire premise is wrong. It is just flat wrong,” he said, shaking his arms.

“What do you mean, Roger?”

“I’m not going to get into it. I’m just not.” He was speaking loudly now and people began to look our way. In front of us, CBS president David Rhodes was talking with Moonves and
60 Minutes
correspondent Steve Kroft. Rhodes excused himself from his conversation and approached us.

“David, how ya doing?” Ailes said, then addressed me. “You know, I have a present for you. Barbara Walters is back there. She says she’ll talk to you for your book.”

“Great, I’d love to speak with her. I’ve been trying to for months,” I said.

“But you won’t want to talk with her because she’ll only say
nice
things about me,” Ailes said.

“Listen, I don’t want to get in the middle of any of this,” Rhodes said.

“No, stay here,” Ailes barked.

“Well,” Rhodes said, “you know what Mike Wallace said once”—the veteran
60 Minutes
anchor had passed away earlier that week—“ ‘You know when people say nice things about you? When you die.’ ”

Rhodes’s stab at humor did not lift Ailes’s mood. Ailes took a step back. It was unclear now who he was addressing. “Let’s look at this for a minute: Sarah Palin? She couldn’t get elected to
anything
. Huckabee? He says to me, ‘I couldn’t raise a nickel.’ Santorum? When we hired him, no one, I mean
no one
, knew who this guy was. And Gingrich has been working here for a long time. So the idea that I’m somehow propping up these candidates is just absurd.”

“Roger, I want to incorporate your point of view,” I replied.

“No!” Ailes snapped. He pointed to Rhodes. “You’re witnessing this! You’re a witness! This is
not
an interview.”

Ailes spun around and headed off toward his table. “You don’t think if I wanted to I couldn’t get back into politics?” he said, looking back. He stopped in the middle of the room, where I caught up with him. “And what’s it with you going to Warren? I left there in 1958. Anything that anyone says there about me is
wrong
. They don’t know me.”

“I went to Warren because I wanted to figure out where you came from. You talk a lot about how you program Fox for all the small towns that have been left behind by the media.”

“That’s right. Well, you can write whatever you want. It’s because of people like me that you have the freedom to do what you do. You have freedom of the press because I defend it every day.”

He took a few more steps. “Okay, kid, that’s all I got. You’re a good reporter, but you’re wrong. You don’t get me.”

I decided to leave. Bill O’Reilly was standing alone near the way out. I walked up to him. His air was as frosty as his boss’s. “I know who you are. I have
nothing
to say to you,” he said.

At the coat check, I bumped into Roger and Beth. “Mr. Ailes, thank you for speaking with me. I’ll see you down in North Carolina.” As it happened, I was flying there the next morning to see Ailes give a speech at the University of North Carolina. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to have you barred. But it’s a public event.”

Ailes did not speak to me in North Carolina, but I encountered him briefly fourteen months later, on the evening of June 12, 2013, in Washington, D.C. I was invited as a member of the press to attend a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, where Ailes was being celebrated by the conservative Bradley Foundation. When I arrived, a young man wearing a blue blazer and a bow tie offered to show me into the reception. He asked me my name as we walked down a long corridor. When I answered, his demeanor changed. “I know who you are,” he said. I asked him his, but he did not respond. Instead, he quickened his pace.

In the reception hall, I saw the young man slalom through the crowd to the far side of the room. He approached Ailes, who was standing with his bodyguard. Ailes’s face tightened. His head turned left and right as he scanned his surroundings.

After a few moments, Ailes, the young man, and the bodyguard walked in my direction. I asked Ailes if he would have time to speak. His bodyguard pushed me aside. Ailes was several steps ahead of me when I regained my balance. He spun around and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but this is a family night!” He turned to the young man in the bow tie. “Zachary, where’s your mother?”

Despite Ailes’s concerted efforts at obstruction, many of his closest colleagues, friends, family members, and business rivals did speak to me at length and offered candid accounts of their firsthand experiences with Ailes. A large number of these people spoke on the record. Many others,
however, asked to speak with me on a not-for-attribution background basis. I granted sources anonymity in instances where they expressed credible fear for their professional livelihood. It was not an uncommon occurrence for me to hear things from sources like the following remark one prominent Fox personality made: “It would totally destroy my life if it gets out that I’m talking to you. If he even thought I
knew
you, he’d see it as a personal betrayal.” Other sources expressed concern that Ailes might be having me followed by private investigators and that my phone might be bugged and my computer hacked.

While Roger Ailes did not grant me a sit-down interview, I strove to reflect his point of view throughout this book. I relied on the thousands of quotes he has given to the press over the years on a wide array of subjects, from his childhood to his thoughts on religion, politics, and culture. Although he may not have intended it, Ailes’s confrontational response to the reporting of this book was as revealing as any comment he would have made in the course of an extended interview. It confirmed one of the defining aspects of his career: he had amassed power by harnessing television to control the images of politicians and media personalities. And so it made sense that he would seek the same degree of influence over the story he cared about most: his own.