The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Copyright © 2014 by Gabriel Sherman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to St. Martin’s Press for permission to reprint excerpts from The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly by Marvin Kitman, copyright © 2007 by Marvin Kitman. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9285-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64409-5

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Gregg Kulick

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigrams

  PROLOGUE “THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD”

  ACT I

  ONE “JUMP ROGER, JUMP”

  TWO “YOU CAN TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF ANYTHING”

  THREE THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

  ACT II

  FOUR SELLING THE TRICK

  FIVE REA PRODUCTIONS

  SIX A NEW STAGE

  SEVEN THOUGHT PATTERN REVOLUTION

  EIGHT RISKY STRATEGY

  ACT III

  NINE AMERICA’S TALKING

  TEN “A VERY, VERY DANGEROUS MAN”

  ELEVEN THE AUSSIE AND THE MIDWESTERNER

  TWELVE OCTOBER SURPRISE

  THIRTEEN THE RIGHT KIND OF FRIENDS

  ACT IV

  FOURTEEN ANTI-CLINTON NEWS NETWORK

  FIFTEEN THE CALL

  SIXTEEN HOLY WAR

  SEVENTEEN QUAGMIRE DOESN’T RATE

  EIGHTEEN “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS POWER?”

  ACT V

  NINETEEN SEARCHING FOR A NEW CAST

  TWENTY COMEBACK

  TWENTY-ONE TROUBLE ON MAIN STREET

  TWENTY-TWO THE LAST CAMPAIGN

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  “Television rarely, if ever, tells the whole story.”

  —ROGER AILES

  PROLOGUE

  “The Most Powerful Man in the World”

  On the evening of December 7, 2011, Roger Ailes found himself in enemy territory: mingling with journalists in the East Room of the White House at a holiday party hosted by the Obama administration. As the chairman and CEO of Fox News, Ailes was effectively the most powerful opposition figure in the country, with a wide swath of the Republican establishment on his payroll. The reception was studded with East Coast news anchors, Ivy League journalists, and Democrats—the kinds of people Ailes had built his career by attacking, and the kinds of people who Ailes believed had it in for him, too. Though Ailes had spent more than four decades in Washington, D.C., and New York City, he still saw himself as a scrapper from a small town in a flyover state who’d had to fight for everything he had. When asked by one reporter what his antagonists thought of him, he replied, “I can pretty much pick the words for you: paranoid, right-wing, fat.”

  But Roger Ailes believed in the importance of American institutions, and in the sacredness of the presidency, which was why he’d brought his eleven-year-old son, Zachary, along to meet the president. And the White House was a place where Ailes had long been comfortable. He had been going there since he was a twenty-eight-year-old television adviser who’d helped Richard Nixon become president by making the famously stiff, dour man seem warmer and more human on screen.

  Ailes and Nixon met in Philadelphia in January 1968. Nixon, about to embark on his second presidential campaign, was in town to appear on The Mike Douglas Show, an afternoon variety program watched by seven million housewives across America. Ailes, who was the show’s executive producer, understood the revolutionary power of the medium in ways that the politician did not. “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” Nixon told Ailes off-camera. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes shot back, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.” Ailes would help to re-create Nixon, and Nixon, in turn, re-created Ailes. “I never had a political thought,” Ailes recalled, “until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon presidential campaign.” He imbibed Nixon’s worldview, learning how to connect to the many Americans who felt left behind by the upheavals of the 1960s, an insight Ailes would deploy for political advantage, and, later, at Fox News, for record ratings and profits.

  “Roger was born for television. The growth of television paralleled his whole life,” said the journalist Joe McGinniss, whose landmark book about the 1968 election, The Selling of the President, turned Ailes into a star political operative. As a pugnacious television adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and then as the progenitor of Fox News, Ailes remade both American politics and media. More than anyone of his generation, he helped transform politics into mass entertainment—monetizing the politics while making entertainment a potent organizing force. “Politics is power, and communications is power,” he said after the 1968 election. Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate, drawing sharp, with-us-or-against-us lines, demonizing foes, preaching against compromise.

  At the prescribed time, Ailes hobbled with Zachary to the rope line to see the president. At seventy-one, his body was failing him. The proximate problem was arthritis, but it was his hemophilia that had accelerated it. He had suffered from the debilitating condition since he was a little boy. Over time, the disease caused blood to pool in his knees, hips, and ankles. Though the swelling ravaged his joints, he was stoic about the problem—on occasion he’d sit through a meeting, his shoe filling up with blood from a cut. His pain became a kind of badge. “The difference between pros and amateurs is that pros play hurt,” he once said. Ailes displayed a certain fatalism, perhaps a result of his medical history. A couple of weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he told a reporter, “Most people think I’ll be dead before I’m 35.”

  As a young man, Ailes had the striking features of an actor, with dark eyebrows over wide-set eyes and a sly, confident smile. But these days he looked more like Alfred Hitchcock. He was resigned to his girth, rationalizing it as beyond his control. “It’s not that I eat too much,” Ailes would say. “It’s that I can’t move.” Which wasn’t strictly true. During the 1988 presidential campaign, when his weight was ballooning, colleagues observed Ailes inhaling Häagen-Dazs ice cream. At rare moments, Ailes expressed vulnerability about his body image. “Photo editors are sadistic bastards,” he told a journalist around this time. “And photographers always make me look heavy.”

  Mainly, his appetite was in keeping with his no-bullshit attitude—you’re hungry, you eat—but it could also be seen as a metaphor for his gargantuan ambition. “I’m never going to be one of those $25,000 a year guys,” he’d vowed at the outset of his career. He also knew what this goal might cost him. “I think I’ll lead an unhappy life, in terms of what most people consider personal happiness,” he said. “Personal unhappiness causes you to work harder, and working harder causes more personal unhappiness.” He married three times and did not become a father until an age when most people think about retirement. He denied himself th
e American ideal of happiness—“home, family, the 9-to-5 job, a good golf score, three weeks paid vacation, a new car”—in the service of his career.

  Money and power were one thing, important measures of success especially to someone from middle America, and Ailes liked to keep score. But another reason he worked so hard was that he saw himself as a field marshal in an epic battle to defend the American dream against the counterculture. “Revolutionaries want to take away from people who have. They don’t want to create. They get in gangs for support,” he said. All of his tactical genius as a political consultant—dismembering Michael Dukakis as soft on crime in the service of George H. W. Bush, for one—was driven by his urge to defeat them. Fox News itself, immensely profitable business though it was, was a continuation of his politics by other means. “A lot of the time Roger sees himself as holding back the tide. And a lot of the hysteria around him is people thinking he might be able to,” said David Rhodes, who spent twelve years working at Fox and in 2011 became the president of CBS News.

  For Ailes, Obama’s meteoric ascent onto the national stage was yet another triumph of the counterculture and the liberal news media. “People need to be reminded,” Ailes told Fox News executives around the time Obama declared his candidacy, “this guy never had a job. He’s a community organizer.” A few days after Obama’s historic election, Ailes remarked during his morning editorial meeting, “There’s no reason to have a civil rights movement anymore, since there is a black man in the White House.” Obama’s victory changed the mission of Fox News. “When he started the channel, it was a campaign against CNN. But it is now less about the competition and more about the administration,” a former senior Fox producer said. “He honestly thinks Obama has set back the country forever. He feels like he is the only one out there who can save the republic. He has said it.”

  Ailes’s battle did not end when he left the office. At his weekend estate in Putnam County, some forty miles north of New York City, Ailes bought the local newspaper and used it to advance his agenda. He complained to neighbors that Obama refused to call Muslims “terrorists.” He told them that Obama was using the stimulus as a “political tool” in order to buy his reelection in 2012. Obama pushed green energy, when in fact climate change was a “worldwide conspiracy” spun by “foreign nations” to gain control of America’s resources.

  Ailes even told his advisers that if Obama were reelected, he could be prosecuted and jailed, like a political prisoner. During a forty-five-minute meeting at Bill Clinton’s foundation in Harlem, Ailes told the former president that he might emigrate to Ireland, and had explored acquiring an Irish passport.

  And yet, in the halls of the White House, Ailes kept these feelings to himself. As he walked up to Obama to shake his hand and pose for a photo, he faced a very different politician than the one he’d first met in the summer of 2008. At the time, Obama was a candidate who believed in his ability to overcome the grievance politics of the past through the force of his personal narrative. He told his aides he thought he could win over Fox’s audience—and even Ailes himself—by reasoning with them. Now, nearly three years into his first term, Obama had learned—often the hard way—that his vision of harmony was a pipe dream.

  On the rope line, Obama greeted Ailes and his son.

  “I see the most powerful man in the world is here,” Obama said.

  Ailes grinned. “Don’t believe what you read, Mr. President. I started those rumors myself.”

  Whatever President Obama intended to convey, there is no denying an essential truth in the remark. Roger Ailes has the power, more than any single person in American public life, to define the president. For many Americans—admittedly and patently not the ones that voted for him—the Obama they know, the one they are raging against, is the one Ailes has played a large role creating.

  All of Obama’s efforts as a conciliator cannot change the fact that conflict is intrinsically more interesting than consensus. And political conflict has never been more compelling than on Ailes’s Fox News. His channel is a self-contained universe, with distinctive laws—“fair and balanced”—and sometimes its own facts. Though marketed as an antidote to the epistemic closure of the mainstream media, Fox News is as closed off as the media world it proposes to balance—Ailes’s audience seldom watches anything else. They have been conditioned by Fox’s pundits to see the broadcast networks, CNN, and MSNBC as opponents in a grand partisan struggle.

  On Fox News, the tedious personages of workaday politics are reborn as heroes and villains with triumphs and reverses—never-ending story lines. And the beauty of it is that Ailes’s viewers—the voters—are the protagonists, victims of socialist overlords, or rebels coming to take the government back. The viewers, on their couches, are flattered as the most important participants, the foot soldiers in Ailes’s army.

  In the early years of Fox News, Ailes kept a healthy distance between his own worldview and the product that ultimately ended up on the air. The network’s original blueprint was more tabloid and populist than baldly conservative. When the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch hired Ailes in 1996 to launch Fox News, the media establishment wrote the effort off as a joke. Ailes, never one to heed criticism, turned the channel into a powerhouse that would earn more money than any other division in Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2002, Fox passed CNN as the number-one-rated cable news network; within seven years, its audience more than doubled that of CNN and MSNBC, and its profits were believed to exceed those of its cable news rivals and the broadcast evening newscasts combined. In 2012, a Wall Street analyst valued Fox News at $12.4 billion. With numbers like that came privileges, and Ailes wasn’t afraid to press his advantage. “No one could rein Ailes in,” said a former News Corp executive.

  Even Rupert Murdoch. It did not matter that Murdoch’s romance with Ailes, which had burned hot at the beginning of their collaboration, had begun to cool after a decade. “He’s paranoid,” Murdoch told Ailes’s friend Liz Smith, the gossip columnist. For all his right-wing bona fides, Rupert Murdoch himself was a pragmatist whose political commitments changed according to the needs of his business. In 2008, Murdoch even contemplated supporting Obama in the pages of the New York Post instead of the Republican, John McCain. When Ailes caught wind of the possible endorsement, he threatened to quit. It was a game of brinkmanship that Ailes won. Murdoch promised Ailes complete editorial independence and gave him a new five-year contract to stay at News Corp. In September, the Post endorsed McCain.

  At times, Murdoch even sided with Ailes against his children. In 2005, Murdoch’s older son, Lachlan, left the company after clashing with Ailes, among others, over management decisions. In 2010, Murdoch cut off contact with Matthew Freud, the husband of his daughter Elisabeth, after Freud told The New York Times, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.” In 2011, during the height of the phone hacking scandal at News Corp’s London tabloids, James, the younger of Rupert’s sons and no fan of Fox News, saw his chances to succeed his father implode. “He’s a fucking dope,” Ailes told a friend over dinner.

  The more the hacking crisis engulfed the company, the more Murdoch relied on Ailes’s profits. “They all hate me, I make them a lot of money and they go and spend the money,” Ailes said to Bill Shine, Fox’s head of programming. Ailes took a certain pleasure in watching News Corp executives face lawsuits and criminal prosecution over the scandal. “He was delighted it was happening,” an executive recalled. “He said, ‘It’s nice to not be the only bad guy in the company.’ ”

  Ailes’s ego and temper, of the sort that sidelined lesser players, were tolerated. He openly bad-mouthed News Corp board member John Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, who suggested programming ideas to him. “I’m not going to have some fucking liberal tell me how to program my network,” Ailes
told Bill Shine.

  But Ailes’s true interest was national, not corporate, politics. “I want to elect the next president,” he told Fox executives in a meeting in 2010. If there was anyone in America who could deliver on such a boast, it was Ailes. At Fox News, he had positioned himself as the closest thing to a party boss the country had. In the spring of 2011, Fox employed five prospective Republican presidential candidates, and no serious Republican could run for president without at least seeking Ailes’s blessing. “Every single candidate has consulted with Roger,” one top Republican said. The challenge was that the field of candidates Ailes had assembled in the Fox studios, excellent entertainers though many of them were, were not deemed up to the job of a successful White House run. Although Ailes told one Fox contributor that even his security guard would make a better president than Obama, Ailes did not see any winners among his pundits. “He finds flaws in everyone,” said a confidant. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich was a prick; former senator Rick Santorum was a nobody; former governor Mike Huckabee couldn’t raise a nickel; former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was an idiot. And the two adults in the room, unaffiliated with Fox, former governors Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, were less than impressive.

  In a meeting at Fox News, Ailes flatly told Huntsman, “You’re not of our orthodoxy,” citing his stance on climate change. (“To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy,” Huntsman had tweeted.) After finishing third in the New Hampshire primary, Huntsman dropped out of the race. Over the course of his candidacy, he had only banked four hours and thirty-two minutes of Fox face time. By comparison, pizza mogul Herman Cain, who was a candidate for a similar length of time, notched eleven hours and six minutes.

  To win the White House, Ailes would have to harness the circus he’d created to a candidate with crossover appeal, and he worked assiduously to recruit one. Ailes twice encouraged the brash New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, to run. Ailes also sent an emissary to Kabul, Afghanistan, urging General David Petraeus to jump into the primary. Both decided to sit out the race.