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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  The negative press was only one problem. Pauley’s original business plan was proving to be wildly optimistic. AT&T’s exorbitant video transmission rates discouraged local television stations from buying TVN stories. In its first year, TVN was on track to lose more than $4 million. Losses ballooned to $6.2 million in 1974, and a similar amount was projected to be lost in 1975.

  One of its last hopes was technological. In 1974, Western Union and NASA had launched Westar I, the first commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, which could beam television signals to receiver dishes on the ground. Jack Wilson put together a deal, and on January 9, 1975, TVN announced its plan to become America’s first satellite news service. The theory was that the satellite would give TVN the opportunity to grow into a full-fledged network, with diverse programming, providing an alternative to the Big Three.

  The broader mission put Ailes’s TV skills to better use. He began to experiment with various news concepts, from longer documentary features, to ninety-second clips, which appealed to the “Action News” format in vogue with local stations. “I want to find out what they want and to give them what they want,” Ailes said. In his first several months on the job, he had taken a series of meetings with producers to scout potential deals. His programming ideas reflected his middlebrow, Mike Douglas sensibility. He talked with Art Rush, the manager for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, about producing a half-hour country-western show for TVN; explored adding ninety-second inserts with the advice columnist Joyce Brothers; and brainstormed specials ideas with the comedy writer Paul Keyes. Around this time, Ailes developed a new marketing tagline for TVN that previewed the cunning sloganeering he would apply to Fox News: “The Independent News Service.”

  As Ailes handled the content, Wilson worked on the business and political fronts. In the spring of 1975, he crisscrossed the country on a three-week trip to meet television executives. On his West Coast swing, Wilson spent an afternoon with Richard Nixon, newly in exile in San Clemente. The men enthusiastically discussed the mission to create a counterweight to the networks. It was what Nixon had been waiting for.

  As Nixon’s dream to dethrone the establishment media appeared within reach, Wilson hired Bruce Herschensohn, a forty-two-year-old former Nixon aide and film director, as a $200-per-day consultant, to develop more ambitious conservative news programming. Herschensohn was a true believer, with strong convictions about the role of the liberal media in politics. “It is not [Eric] Sevareid or [David] Brinkley that do the damage,” Herschensohn told Wilson. “It is the reporting of the news.”

  From his apartment on Virginia Avenue, which overlooked the Watergate complex, Herschensohn went to work on his design. Projecting an annual budget for a fully staffed newsroom at $12.1 million, he scrawled the names of people who could execute his vision: “Ailes, Self … Jack, Coors.” He sketched an organizational chart. At the top was a position marked “Philosophy,” occupied by a senior executive who maintains the message and assigns “predictable and continuing stories,” what TV executives would later call “flow.” “The ‘philosophy’ man must know more than his subordinates know, or soon he is not top man,” he wrote. It was vital that the “philosophy” enforcer operate as a macro thinker, shaping the news to help the cause. Disagreeing with Pauley, Herschensohn called on TVN to own its conservative bias. He believed that “the disguise of neutrality, and not bias itself, has been the great harm of CBS, NBC, and ABC.” He proposed that TVN producers fill out paperwork “prior to the editing and narrative writing” for each broadcast to explain how the story would advance the conservative agenda.

  Herschensohn viewed his television proposal as “a thought pattern revolution” as sweeping as the civil rights movement. “Though I disagreed with the civil rights leaders in asking for ‘everything now,’ I was wrong and they were right,” he wrote in his private notebook. He went on, “What I would hope TVN will achieve is another ‘thought pattern revolution,’ this one to put faith and strength and humanity back into our country after a period of masochism, isolationism and selfishness. I believe the way to do [it] is to throw all the dice on the table and, in fact, ask for ‘everything now.’ … We are trying to create some balance within the media. That is a very noble enterprise. Few would disagree that the media needs some balance.… TVN was invented for a purpose.”

  On April 30, 1975, Herschensohn submitted his programming proposal to TVN for review. It would presage many aspects of Fox News’s internal structure and programming tactics. The 179-page document, which detailed the evening newscast and other show ideas, identified twenty-eight techniques that TVN could deploy in its programming to “manipulate” the audience. Herschensohn explained terms like Pretense Balancing, the goal of which is “showing ‘all sides’ of a particular story when, in fact the balance is tilted.” The Hold Frame holds a subject “in a flattering or unflattering position” (depending on the agenda) and gives “the impression of ‘catching an event,’ or ‘catching a person.’ ” Catch Phrases are easily remembered words “which seem to be factual though they are, in fact, editorializations.” Repetition, the last concept on the list, creates a news event through repeated assertion. “The creation of the most important story today” becomes “the truly most important story a week from today.” (“We can send a newsman and a camera crew over to the Capitol and talk to a congressman or senator about ‘the story.’ If the congressman or senator is willing, we can create news in an instant. Most are willing,” he wrote.) Repetition, Herschensohn wrote, is “the oldest and most effective propaganda technique.”

  Ailes would have read Herschensohn’s memo when Wilson circulated it for review. “With a nightly news package we can create ongoing stories of importance,” Herschensohn wrote. (Fox would do the same with sagas such as the “War on Christmas,” “Obama’s Czars,” “Fast and Furious,” and “Benghazi.”) Herschensohn encouraged conservatives to identify whipping posts that played to their audience’s resentments. “Whereas others selected the CIA and the FBI, we can take HEW and HUD,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (Fox would later take on the United Nations and the Environmental Protection Agency.) Herschensohn proposed filling the network with a slate of former Nixon officials. “Staff Possibilities” included Frank Shakespeare, Ken Clawson, Bill Gavin, Dwight Chapin, Stephen Bull, and even Nixon’s daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower. (Fox News would become a way station for former Republican politicians and officials.) “Sex Appeal” needed to accompany the presentation of the news. “This is one of the most important elements which we should not ignore, and network news has ignored,” Herschensohn wrote. (Fox would not make that mistake. Anchor Bob Sellers remembered Ailes once calling the control booth. “I was doing the weekend show with Kiran Chetry. He called up and said, ‘Move that damn laptop, I can’t see her legs!’ ”)

  The ambitious programming slate, however, far outpaced where TVN was as an actual business. The dish to receive the network’s satellite signal cost $100,000, more than stations were willing to pay. And at a choreographed rollout ceremony, the demonstration failed. With the project faltering, Herschensohn soon left to produce a bicentennial film for NASA and to write a book of media criticism he titled The Gods of Antenna.

  Wilson had reached an impasse. By September 1975, TVN had lost $14.6 million, and Joe Coors was growing impatient. The scourge of big government was making Coors feel far less charitable. After his father died in 1970, the family had to pay a sizable estate tax. During a board meeting on September 25, Robert Pauley scribbled in his notes that management’s mood of late was a “feeling of desperation.” A few days later, the board decided to shut TVN down. On October 3, Wilson sent a letter to Nixon to inform him of the board’s decision. “After the pleasant time we shared together in your office, you must know how distressed I am at this time. In spite of those emotions, however, none of us at TVN need have the slightest hesitation to hold our heads high. E
very man and woman gave their utmost to this effort,” he wrote. “Among those who worked the hardest and were most responsible were former associates of yours, Roger Ailes, Steve Bull and Bruce Herschensohn.” The failure, Wilson explained, was actually confirmation that the free market had worked. “The Coors people believe so deeply in freedoms of the press that they were willing to take big risks. Although TVN was not able to survive and prosper at this time in history, it is still better to have tried under the free enterprise system than to have arbitrarily handed over the responsibility of news balance to existing agencies, or worse yet, to big government,” he wrote.

  Ailes did not wait for the inevitable—he quit in late September. His stated reason was outside meddling. The board had brought in consultants, including John McCarty, who had gotten Ailes the job. “Roger objected to their presence,” Pauley wrote in his notes. He spent just under a year as news director, but absorbed many important precepts in that brief time. Bob Pauley, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-five, lived long enough to see his vision of a right-wing network realized. “He believed all news should be fair and balanced. That was his phrase,” Barbara Pauley said of her husband.

  TVN, while largely forgotten, was a crucial breakthrough in the birth of cable news. After the company folded, Reese Schonfeld founded the Independent Television News Association, the first satellite-delivered TV news service. In 1976 at a television industry conference, Schonfeld ran into a profane thirty-something billboard magnate with a penchant for sailboat racing and beautiful women. A born dreamer, he was transforming his Atlanta-based outdoor advertising company into a pioneering television enterprise. In December 1976, he launched the first channel distributed nationally by satellite and soon hired Schonfeld to create a twenty-four-hour news channel. His name was Ted Turner, and the channel was CNN.

  After TVN, Ailes had to regroup. Having wisely retained ownership of his consulting company, he glided back to the liberal world of the theater. In the spring of 1975, he teamed up with Bloomgarden on the production of Bledsoe, a drama about a self-absorbed American novelist in Rome who falls in love with a nun while being treated for cancer. Considering that the play was written by Arnaud d’Usseau, a blacklisted playwright and screenwriter who had moved to Europe after clashing with Joseph McCarthy, Ailes scooped up funding from an unlikely source: Joe Coors. In return for 18 percent of the net profits, Ailes persuaded Coors to invest $81,000. Coors insisted that his investment remain a secret. When Ailes sent the check to Bloomgarden, he laid down the terms. Coors requested that he not be publicly acknowledged as a backer, and “would appreciate all efforts we make to avoid unnecessary vulgarities in the script,” Ailes wrote. “I’m sure you understand.” Coors’s investment came too late. The production of Bledsoe, which had been plagued by problems and cast changes for two years, was abandoned.

  Though Bledsoe was called off, Ailes had another premiere that fall to look forward to. On the morning of September 4, 1975, a throng of reporters packed into Ailes’s office on Central Park South to view The Last Frontier, his TV special with Bobby Kennedy Jr. In the run-up to the film’s release, Ailes was a nervous wreck about Ethel Kennedy coming to the screening. “I hope his mom likes the movie,” Rosenfield remembered Ailes saying. “What’s not to like?” It went well enough that Ailes pitched Kennedy on making additional wildlife programs together.

  Though Kennedy lost interest in the project, enrolling in law school, he stayed in contact with Ailes. In November 2005, Fox News aired The Heat Is On, Kennedy’s one-hour documentary about climate change. Accompanied by a Fox camera crew to Glacier National Park, Kennedy showed the precipitous retreat of the ice pack in recent years. “Those guys were absolutely convinced,” he recalled. A few months later, after Kennedy’s documentary was widely criticized on the right, Fox aired another documentary, titled Global Warming: The Debate Continues.

  In his private conversations with Ailes, Kennedy struggled to find traces of the adventurous young man he had shared a tent with decades earlier. “Roger believes that ends justify the means. Which was a Nixonian idea. It’s the idea that everybody does it, that the world is really a struggle for power. That justifies a lot of the things he’s done at Fox News,” Kennedy said. “His views are sincere. He thinks he’s preserving the American way of life. In his heart, he thinks America is probably better off being a white Christian nation. He’s driven by his own paranoia and he knows how to get in touch with his own paranoia. He makes Americans comfortable with their bigotry, their paranoia and their xenophobia.”

  Even as he chased his show business dreams, Ailes never fully abandoned politics. In 1976, he took on multiple campaigns. He worked for moderate Republican congressman Alphonzo Bell Jr. in California. And in Maine, Ailes advised a wealthy lawyer named Robert Monks, who was running a long-shot Senate campaign against the popular incumbent and 1972 presidential candidate, Ed Muskie. A product of St. Paul’s, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School, Monks was a conservative in the mold of Joe Coors, espousing hard-line positions against the social safety net. Ailes, not yet the archconservative he would become, recoiled at Monks’s antigovernment fervor, which he saw as elitism of another stripe. “This guy has got to learn some empathy,” Rosenfield remembered Ailes saying. “Roger said, ‘You can’t be against Social Security. If you want to run for public office in a position of responsibility, drop it!’ ” Ailes took it upon himself to teach his client a lesson.

  When Monks was campaigning in Augusta, Maine, Ailes spotted some children playing on the lawn in front of the capitol. Because they appeared to be poor, he thought they would be useful for a commercial and he sent Rosenfield to go talk to them. “Roger said to me, ‘see if those kids will take you home with them and ask whoever the parents are if they would agree to have a conversation about our candidate,’ ” Rosenfield recalled. “So I went back, and they lived in a kind of tenement, and they were white, and it was just a woman, there was no man in the picture. I knew I’d found what it was that Roger was looking for.” The next day, Ailes brought Monks to the woman’s house to film him explaining his anti-welfare positions. Monks “freaked out,” Rosenfield remembered. “This woman explained her situation and she says she’s disabled and she’s alone and she has several children and she’s unable to work because she’s bedridden for six months of the year. And I’ll never forget, she said the worst time is Christmas because I don’t have enough money to buy them gifts. And Roger said to Monks, ‘Go ahead, explain your position, go ahead and tell her how you’re against any kind of help from the government.’ He couldn’t do it. I don’t think he’d ever met anyone like that in his life. He was speechless. That was the kind of education Roger would give a candidate.”

  When crossed, Ailes was an unforgiving teacher. During one town hall meeting, Monks said again, according to Rosenfield, that “there is too much government and people should be able to take care of themselves.” On the street afterward, Ailes had Monks by his lapels up against the wall. “He had him there saying, ‘if you ever fucking do that again,’ ” Rosenfield, who witnessed the scene, recalled. Monks later did not recall any dispute with Ailes over Social Security and welfare, but called Ailes a “genius.” (Monks lost to Ed Muskie by more than a 20 percent margin.)

  In these moments, Ailes was honing a reputation that would endure throughout his career as a political operative. He was a ruthless competitor who would lay himself down for his clients. His ads became known for incisively dissecting the opponent with biting wit. “Roger liked thirty-second spots, because he would say, ‘are you for this or against this?’ ” Rosenfield said. “There’s no time to nuance your way out of it.”

  In exchange for his determination to win, Ailes demanded that his clients give him ultimate control, reversing the client-consultant relationship. The candidates worked for him. One time Monks brought a Harvard friend to review a campaign commercial Ailes had cut.

  “To be honest, I don’t like it,” the friend told Monks. Ailes turned to
face the men.

  “One of us—him or me—is gone. You have 10 minutes to decide which one it is,” he said and walked out of the editing room.

  “Is he kidding?” Monks asked Rosenfield, who was standing off to the side.

  “No, he’s not kidding.”

  Monks was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said turning to his friend, “but you have to leave.”

  Ailes was also expanding his business into the emerging field of business communications. By the late 1970s, corporate America was shedding its fusty, paternalistic image. The greed-is-good ethos of the 1980s was just around the corner, and CEOs were beginning to become celebrities. Ailes said these businessmen needed a “psychological adjustment” to life in the spotlight and he wanted to get a foothold in this new market. He developed a $4,000 seminar that included twelve hours of coaching, or, for a $10,000 retainer, clients could get twenty-five to thirty hours of advice. In short order, his Central Park South studio became a boot camp for executives from companies such as Polaroid, Philip Morris, and Sperry Rand. In October 1983, he would incorporate Ailes Business Communications, Inc., which he merged two years later with his company.

  Ailes’s adventures in the world of show business—and liberals—were winding down. He traveled to Rome to produce a TV special on the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, one of his last attempts at packaging highbrow culture. When he came back, he told Rosenfield how he had to boss Fellini around on the set to get him to do what he wanted. “I remember thinking, you told Fellini off? You’d be the only person on the face of the earth who told Fellini off.”

  On September 20, 1976, Bloomgarden died of a brain tumor at his Central Park West apartment. About a year later, Rosenfield told Ailes he was leaving to make it as a director. Ailes took Rosenfield’s decision hard. During an interview to promote their final collaboration, Present Tense, a musical Rosenfield had directed and co-written, Ailes refused to acknowledge him. “He never mentioned my name,” Rosenfield said. He only said “the director.”