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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Meanwhile, NBC executives were growing increasingly concerned about Ailes’s overt partisanship. On the morning of Thursday, March 10, 1994, Ailes called in to Don Imus’s radio show to banter about politics and triggered a controversy. He told Imus that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s ongoing Whitewater corruption scandal involved “land fraud, illegal contributions, abuse of power … suicide cover-up—possible murder.” He made a reference to the popular allegation among the right wing that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide in July 1993 was actually foul play. He also called Foster’s boss, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, “that little Nussbaum, that little loser.” Referring to the president’s upcoming trip to New York City, Ailes chortled, “He’s coming up to New York today … and he’s up here because he heard [Olympic figure skater] Nancy Kerrigan’s on Saturday Night Live. She’s the only one he hasn’t hit on.” Ailes also went after the first lady, noting that of the three lawyers whom she brought to the White House—Webster Hubbell, Nussbaum, and Foster—one was under investigation by the Justice Department, “one was forced to resign … and one’s dead. I wouldn’t stand too close to her.” Before it was over, Ailes skewered his own employees. He joked that Mary Matalin and Jane Wallace, hosts of CNBC’s Equal Time, were like “girls who if you went into a bar around seven, you wouldn’t pay a lot of attention, but [they] get to be tens around closing time.”

  The Imus interview occurred at a delicate moment for NBC News. Like all the networks, NBC was negotiating with the White House to land a sit-down interview with the Clintons to discuss Whitewater, and there was fear Ailes had just torpedoed their chances.

  As Ailes did damage control, speaking with Wright and NBC News president Andy Lack, he remained silent on the matter in the press, instead dispatching Brian Lewis to handle it. Lewis launched a minor counteroffensive and told The Washington Post that Ailes’s comments were “in the context of a comedy radio show, and that’s the way it should be treated.” He added: “You know freedom of speech? Two hundred and fifty million Americans have that right.” (In private, executives knew better. “Ailes wasn’t joking,” one colleague said. “That really was what he thought of the Clintons.”)

  Jane Wallace didn’t appear in any news stories defending Ailes. “He had no right to say something like that,” she later said. “He was our boss. It was completely sexist. It was disgusting. It was outrageous. I thought it was a hideously awful thing to say.” But she, too, didn’t make it an issue with Ailes. “I didn’t say so out loud, I was working for the guy.” A few weeks later, however, Wallace quit to host her own show on FX, the start-up cable network owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

  Ailes succeeded in arresting the controversy before it metastasized into something bigger. After the weekend, NBC released a statement echoing Lewis’s talking points. Ailes’s comments “were said in the context of a comedy radio show,” according to an NBC spokeswoman. But the Imus episode revealed that inside NBC Ailes was becoming a divisive personality. He had a crucial ally in Welch and NBC’s executive vice president for human relations, Edward Scanlon, but his working relationship with Wright and Tom Rogers was deteriorating. Ailes treated Rogers like a lesser adversary and needled him in public. “Tom’s had a little trouble letting go because he basically used to run CNBC,” Ailes told a trade journal. “I think he likes to see his name in the paper … Every once in awhile, we send a disinformation press release to Tom’s office just to keep him on his toes.” Rogers was furious with Ailes’s gibe and told Wright about it. Wright asked Ailes to apologize but he refused.

  Ailes’s conflict with Rogers cleaved NBC’s cable division. “Roger has a very large ego,” Bob Wright said. Giving off the impression he was untouchable, Ailes forced executives to choose sides and made it clear there would be a price to pay for divided allegiances.

  “Who are you loyal to?” Ailes asked one senior NBC executive who worked for him and Rogers.

  “Look, I report to you both,” he said.

  From that moment Ailes treated the executive like a threat. In another conversation, Ailes told him to stay out of his team’s way or “I’m going to rip your fucking heart out!”

  One day, the executive noticed David Zaslav, CNBC’s head of affiliate sales, almost visibly shaking in an empty office at 30 Rock. He asked him what was wrong.

  “I can’t go to Fort Lee,” Zaslav responded in a hushed tone.

  Ailes had become convinced that Zaslav was plotting with Tom Rogers to undermine him. “Ailes didn’t trust David, no question about it,” an A-T staffer said. Ailes asked Scott Ehrlich, a young aide from Ailes Communications who had joined NBC, to keep tabs on Zaslav.

  In the fall of 1994, Rogers and Ailes clashed over staffing decisions. Rogers approached Peter Sturtevant about Sturtevant taking a position with CNBC’s international division, an internal transfer that would get him halfway around the globe from Ailes. Their relationship had broken down over ideology and personality. “Sturtevant, I don’t want to hear about your politics,” Ailes barked at him on several occasions. Their relationship was also complicated by Beth Tilson, Sturtevant’s former deputy. She had cut off contact with him. When they passed in the office, she barely acknowledged his presence. He later became convinced she was saying negative things to Ailes about him. Sturtevant finally was transferred to the international division. While Ailes seemed happy to see Sturtevant go, he was furious that the decision was being made by Rogers at a time that didn’t suit Ailes’s purposes.

  Ailes’s relationship with Andy Friendly, who was running CNBC’s prime time, also grew increasingly dysfunctional. Ailes openly criticized him in meetings with staff, sometimes viciously.

  Meanwhile, Ailes experimented with ploys to keep the audience tuned in. Long before Fox would interweave political story lines throughout its news programming, Ailes was toying with the power of narrative to keep people watching. In late 1994, he green-lit an idea that his friend, the comedy writer Marvin Himelfarb, came up with for a soap opera called Cable Crossings that would play out in thirty-second installments at the top of the hour throughout the day. Modeled after the popular mid-1990s Taster’s Choice coffee commercials that chronicled a couple’s romance, A-T’s series took place at a fictional cable network called Starnet. Ailes made a dozen telling cameos: he played a swaggering network executive.

  As the months progressed, the climate at the A-T studios became increasingly suspicious. “Roger ran his life like a campaign,” said former A-T producer Glenn Meehan. While A-T’s programming was more populist than conservative, Ailes worried about liberals in the office undermining him. There was some truth to his concerns. A joke circulated at 30 Rock about Ailes’s network. “America is talking, but no one is listening,” it went. Dennis Sullivan, who was the co–executive producer of Pork, recalled how Ailes called him into a meeting to discuss the political leanings of Josanne Lopez, then a producer for A-T in Depth. “He described her as suspiciously dangerous because of her left-wing leanings,” Sullivan said. When Lopez was preparing to produce a special on immigration, Chet Collier called to ask her about her political beliefs. Sullivan, too, attracted Ailes’s skepticism after he showed up at the office one day wearing cowboy boots. “Roger thinks you look like an aging hippie,” a producer told him. “I never wore cowboy boots again,” Sullivan recalled.

  Frequently, the staff would not see Ailes at the office. Between his duties for Rush Limbaugh, running CNBC, and attending meetings at 30 Rock, he was spread thin. “It was a little bit like Charlie’s Angels,” said Dennis Sullivan. “Roger was running the place from his car phone.”

  In Ailes’s absence, CNBC was essentially run by Collier and Tilson. A-T staffers began to gossip about Ailes and Tilson’s closeness in the office. The two had a lot in common. She grew up in a modest household, one of five children in a Catholic family in Watertown, Connecticut. It was a strict upbringing marked by traditional values. One of Tilson’s brothers would grow up to become a priest. An
d like Ailes, who battled hemophilia and his parents’ fractious marriage, Tilson’s childhood was interrupted by tragedy. Her father passed away when she was five. Her mother instilled in Tilson an up-from-your-bootstraps ethic and encouraged her to excel in school. Tilson also shared Ailes’s childhood love of the stage. Her mom hoped she would one day perform on Broadway. But Tilson’s dream was to become a network star. In her high school yearbook, she wrote that she hoped to one day take Barbara Walters’s place. She was, like Ailes, a state school kid—she got a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Southern Connecticut State College. What she lacked in connections, she made up for in hard work. “I remember coming in on a Saturday before the launch of the network, and the two of them were both there in casual clothes. I remember seeing some sort of personal space situation, and something in their body language. It was clear to me something was going on,” one producer recalled. Others marveled at how Ailes’s dog, Jeb, a toy Yorkshire terrier, treated Tilson like an old friend. “It would run around the office and jump all over her. I thought to myself, ‘That dog knows her really well,’ ” a producer recalled. “Beth was always cleaning up the poop in the office.” Glenn Meehan also noticed the dog’s affection for Tilson. “I was in Beth’s office and the dog came in and came right to her,” he said. “I had always heard rumors, but I grew up with dogs, so I knew.”

  Despite the turbulence with Rogers and others at 30 Rock, Ailes was accomplishing the image makeover he had sought since he had bailed out of organized politics three years earlier. In the fall of 1994, the journalist Nancy Hass began working on a profile of Ailes for The New York Times Magazine. At first Ailes resisted her requests for an interview. But Brian Lewis convinced Ailes to cooperate. Ailes professed to Hass that he had abandoned politics for good. “People think I stayed in politics because I wanted conservatives to run the world,” he told her. “Actually, it was the money.” Besides, Ailes explained in remarks that would have future resonance, television was bigger than politics. “This is the most powerful force in the world,” he said in his office, as he scanned a pair of monitors playing CNBC and A-T. “Politics is nothing compared with this.”

  The article presented Ailes with a major opportunity to position himself to a national audience as a media mogul, a fully formed CEO, and a future heir to Wright’s job running NBC. Ailes’s powerful allies in media and politics provided quotes to Hass that read like blurbs on a book jacket. “I wouldn’t want to be in the voting booth with him,” Dick Ebersol told her, “but there’s no one else I’d rather be in the control room with.” Former Fox Broadcasting CEO Barry Diller said, “The important thing about Roger Ailes is that he has an uncanny knack for knowing what works.” The quotes from Jack Welch were the ones that later stood out the most to executives at NBC. Hass interviewed Welch by phone from Brian Lewis’s office in Fort Lee. Welch told her that Ailes’s performance at CNBC was “utterly astonishing” and added that Ailes’s hiring “may well turn out to be the smartest thing Bob Wright has done in his career.” Hass reported on the speculation inside NBC that Ailes was being positioned to succeed Wright. In an interview, she asked Wright about it. “If you had asked me five years ago whether Roger Ailes could run a network, I would have said no,” he told her. “Back then, most people thought that we needed corporate types to maintain the franchise. Today, it’s obvious that what we need are risk takers.”

  The feature story, headlined “Embracing the Enemy,” was published on the second Sunday in 1995. “It was taken internally as Roger positioning himself not only to succeed Bob as CEO of NBC, but to cause it to happen sooner,” an A-T staffer said. Ailes’s tensions with Rogers and Zaslav were hinted at. “Roger sees everyone as either for him or against him,” an anonymous NBC executive told Hass. The article’s publication proved to be the turning point in Ailes’s career at NBC. “You can paint the arc of Roger’s Q-score at NBC,” the A-T staffer said, referring to the measurement television executives use to assess popularity. “The apex was right before that article.”

  TEN

  “A VERY, VERY DANGEROUS MAN”

  AILES HAD CHOSEN AN INOPPORTUNE MOMENT to launch a campaign for Wright’s job. While Ailes was talking himself up to The New York Times, Wright was pushing NBC in a direction that would ultimately freeze Ailes out of the NBC hierarchy. Five days after the profile hit newsstands, in January 1995, Bob Wright and Jack Welch flew on NBC’s corporate jet to DeKalb Peachtree Airport, outside Atlanta. From there, they drove to Buckhead, the tony Atlanta suburb, for a secret meeting with CNN founder Ted Turner at the Ritz-Carlton. Since the early 1980s, Turner had held on-and-off talks with NBC about merging. This round was the second time in two years that the executives had discussed a deal. The more recent courtship began several weeks earlier, when Turner reached out to NBC. Ever since CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War, CNN had swelled into a global mega brand. The network’s operating income would hit $350 million in 1995, nearly double that of 1990. A deal with CNN would make NBC the most serious cable news contender in the business.

  As the men talked, Turner paced the room. They argued over the valuation of Turner’s company. Turner continued to flit back and forth, as Wright tried to break through to Turner. He was accustomed to Turner’s manic behavior, as the two men had been close since the 1970s. But Welch, who barely knew Turner, found it disconcerting. Sensing Welch’s hostility, Turner feared, as he later recalled, “if we ever were to do a deal I’d be just another employee of General Electric.”

  After ninety minutes, Turner abruptly ended the meeting. “You know what? I don’t think I want to do this,” he told them.

  The breakdown of the negotiations with Turner only increased NBC’s interest in developing a real cable news channel. The talks set off a chain reaction, resulting in a radical transformation of the cable news industry. With CNN off the table, NBC was determined to start a cable news channel of its own. And Ailes’s rivals inside NBC were moving to ensure that Andy Lack and NBC News would be in charge of it, not Roger Ailes.

  The Times Magazine article had raised Ailes’s profile in a dangerous way—just as had happened with Selling of the President. And shortly after it was published, Ailes’s opponents mobilized. One afternoon, a Rogers loyalist, who had been subjected to Ailes’s dress-downs in meetings, walked into Bob Wright’s fifty-second-floor office and shocked Wright with anguished accounts of how Ailes verbally abused and threatened subordinates. Wright called Ed Scanlon, NBC’s human resources chief, into his office right away. “Good God, Ed, you gotta hear what he has to say,” Wright told him. Shortly afterward, Wright and Scanlon visited the Fort Lee offices to observe the situation. Others came forward. CNBC’s prime-time chief Andy Friendly confided to Wright’s wife, Suzanne, that Ailes was out of control. Suzanne Wright was a powerful presence inside the network. Executives dubbed her Madam Chairman for her well-known habit of interweaving her social and professional life at NBC.

  Concerned that Ailes was out for her husband’s job, Suzanne encouraged Friendly to brief her husband on Ailes’s management issues. On Monday, March 13, 1995, Friendly sent Wright and Scanlon a confidential memorandum that leveled a litany of explosive charges against Ailes. The dramatic letter, typed in all capital letters with multiple grammar mistakes, appeared hastily prepared, a result of Friendly’s poor computer skills. “The sensitive nature of this precludes my assistant typing it,” Friendly wrote.

  Friendly’s allegations were chilling, detailing instances in which, he claimed, Ailes harangued him in meetings, encouraged him to lie to the press, and left Friendly with the distinct fear that Ailes might become physically violent.

  Given their fractious relationship and Friendly’s loyalty to Rogers, Friendly had clear motivation to challenge Ailes. But the provocative letter also reflected Ailes’s increasingly erratic behavior. “He has repeatedly forced, or tried to force my colleagues and I to lie, cover-up and use the journalistic and programming power of CNBC to promote himself or attack his enemies,” Fr
iendly wrote. Friendly asserted that Ailes called him in a panic at home at seven in the morning and told him to lie about putting his show Straight Forward on CNBC, after a newspaper raised questions about it being “another Ailes ego trip.”

  Within the boundaries of corporate culture, Ailes reacted like a caged animal. “I along with several of my most talented colleagues have and continue to feel emotional and even physical fear dealing with this man every day,” Friendly wrote. “From in my face spitting and screaming to verbal threats of ‘blowing [my] brains out’, to psycological [sic] mind games questioning my family relationships, my marriage and other highly personal, totally inappropriate topics.”

  Friendly, whose father was legendary CBS News president Fred Friendly, called Ailes “a living, breathing integrity crisis” and implored his bosses for a transfer to a position in Los Angeles. Wright and Scanlon did not take any major steps to address the allegations. “When you get into the details, it’s always ugly,” Wright later said. Six months later, Friendly quit. He took a job as executive vice president for programming at the television syndicator King World Productions, which distributed Inside Edition and game shows including Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and Hollywood Squares.

  As Ailes battled for control within the company, he fought a second front against CNBC’s competitors. In June 1995, a few months after rebuffing Wright and Welch, Ted Turner announced that CNN was planning to launch a financial news network headed up by the veteran business anchor Lou Dobbs. Ailes had tried to recruit Dobbs to join CNBC, and now felt that Dobbs had played him in a ruse to coax a better deal out of Turner. He contemplated running attack ads against CNN. One would show elderly wheelchair-bound viewers watching Dobbs’s CNN show Moneyline on a television inside a nursing home, a gambit Ailes hoped would poke fun at CNN’s aging audience. Ailes also played his hand in the press. “At this point there’s nothing Ailes would like better than the opportunity to kick Dobbs’ ass,” a source close to Ailes told a reporter. Ailes told the press that if Turner came onto his turf, he would turn America’s Talking into a twenty-four-hour news channel to compete with CNN.