NBC was determined to beat ABC and Murdoch’s News Corp into the market, but there was one thorny matter to resolve. Behind the choreographed rollout of its Microsoft partnership, the internal conflict around Ailes was never far from view. One reporter asked the executives how Ailes had reacted to America’s Talking being replaced with MSNBC. “Roger’s been involved in these discussions for some time,” replied Microsoft executive Peter Neupert, convincing no one. Ailes, Neupert claimed, would “be actively involved in this as it goes forward.”
“Fuck them,” Ailes said, pacing around his office as his assistant, Judy Laterza, and Brian Lewis looked on. “Fuck them.”
Ever since his truce with Zaslav, Ailes continued to be unable to adapt himself to the constraints of his corporate environment. He persisted in offering political advice to his old Republican friends. “I remember Dan Quayle would call all the time,” one A-T producer said. In December, Ailes’s political ties burst into public view when Vanity Fair published a lengthy article on conservative magazine publisher Steve Forbes, who was mounting a 1996 presidential campaign and had turned to Ailes for informal media advice. When The Washington Post asked Ailes about it, he lashed out. “I’m a friend,” he said. “It’s like meeting a doctor at a cocktail party. If he asks me, ‘What do I do if it hurts under my arm?’ I give him an answer.… What I do in my private life is my business, period.”
Ailes sought to put out other fires. On December 1, 1995, Ailes’s divorce entered the public record. Ten days later, his friend Liz Smith put out word in her Newsday column that Ailes was officially a bachelor. “New York hostesses are forever searching for ‘extra men’ to fill out their tables. Ladies who aren’t dead yet are forever saying that a good man is hard to find and there aren’t enough to go around. Both types will be happy to hear that Roger Ailes is a free man—divorced from his wife of over a dozen years,” Smith wrote. “Roger says he is looking for a fine woman who is not ‘high maintenance.’ (He is paying hefty alimony).”
Over the Christmas holiday, Ailes flew to his condo in Florida to strategize. During his stay, he drove over to Jack Welch’s house in Palm Beach to talk about his future at NBC. Despite their friendship, Welch backed Wright’s moves to give MSNBC to Lack, a decision he clearly understood might lead to Ailes’s departure. “We both realized there were people who didn’t want him there anymore,” Welch remembered. “We talked a lot. This was a sad thing for both of us in a way.” It was a decision Welch later regretted. “Losing Roger was tragic for the business,” he said.
When Ailes returned, his lawyers and NBC drew up a separation agreement. On January 9, 1996, Ailes and Scanlon signed the extensive paperwork. NBC agreed to pay Ailes $1 million to walk away, as well as his $250,000 incentive compensation and $100,000 in lieu of his stock option benefits. They agreed to a mutual nondisparagement clause and to release an announcement no later than January 26 and “in principle … to have NBC say favorable things about Ailes and wish continued success and … to have Ailes say favorable things about CNBC, NBC, Bob Wright and Jack Welch and wish them continued success.” The agreement barred Ailes from taking a job at CNN, Dow Jones, or Bloomberg while receiving his payout from NBC, but said nothing about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—a detail that would have historic consequence.
A week later, dozens of CNBC and A-T staffers and producers packed a studio in Fort Lee for a surprise meeting. Speculation was rife that Ailes was departing. It was confirmed when Wright showed up in Fort Lee to introduce Ailes’s replacement, Bill Bolster, the general manager of NBC’s New York City affiliate, WNBC. To Ailes’s backers, he was a rousing general and they feted him with a standing ovation when he emerged on stage. “Now look,” he told them. “I told ’em you were well behaved.… I can’t cover your asses anymore.”
Bolster acted like a man walking into enemy territory. “When Roger came out here, I kind of felt like the guy who shot Bambi’s mother,” he told the audience.
Many of the producers in the room were understandably nervous. The loyalists in Ailes’s camp at A-T and CNBC recognized that, with their patriarch and protector exiting, Tom Rogers and Zaslav would soon move to purge the ranks. “It’s an awkward day for me,” Wright said to the assembled crowd. “We obviously have a difficult situation with the transition of America’s Talking to Microsoft-NBC. That’s not a secret.” He papered over the tumult of the preceding months. “Even in a business where people are getting along, sometimes you have problems, and decisions are made by one party or another, and you have to accommodate that,” he said. What Wright did not say was that Zaslav’s allegations of anti-Semitism played a role in Ailes’s departure. “That was one reason,” Wright later said. “The reality is that Roger left and David stayed.”
Ailes’s run at NBC would leave its mark on the company and on the careers of nearly everyone who found themselves on either side of the chasm. Tom Rogers left NBC in 1999 to become the CEO of the magazine publisher Primedia and later the CEO of TiVo. David Zaslav followed Rogers as president of NBC Cable and would remain at NBC until 2006, when he was named CEO of Discovery Communications, parent company of cable channels including Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, and later Oprah Winfrey’s channel, OWN. In 2011, he earned $52 million, making him the country’s second-highest-paid television executive.
In the weeks before his departure, Ailes tried to save Beth Tilson’s job, but was unsuccessful. Tilson left the company. As for Ailes’s next move after NBC, he was coy. Speculation was rampant in the press when news broke of his resignation. The New York Daily News reported on talk that Ailes was in discussions with GOP presidential hopefuls Bob Dole and Phil Gramm about the 1996 primary, chatter Ailes was quick to splash water on. “Not a chance,” he told the paper. But the truth was that even as he was negotiating his exit, Ailes was already well on his way toward lining up his next leading role. Earlier that fall, having learned that Rupert Murdoch was gearing up to challenge CNN, Ailes called him. Murdoch’s secretary told him that Murdoch was returning from a business trip and would see Ailes that very afternoon. After their meeting, Murdoch decided that Ailes was the one to get the job done.
ELEVEN
THE AUSSIE AND THE MIDWESTERNER
LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after leaving NBC, Roger Ailes stood at a press conference alongside Rupert Murdoch in front of a crush of reporters and cameras at Murdoch’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters and officially announced that News Corp would be the third entrant in the cable news sweepstakes. Ted Turner’s cable news pioneer was struggling, having failed to find long-term solutions to its strategic programming challenges in the years after the 1991 Gulf War. The ongoing O. J. Simpson murder trial remained a boon to ratings. But the tabloid saga was a source of concern for CNN purists, who were frustrated that major international headlines—the downing of American Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, and ethnic strife in the Balkans—failed to entice viewers. In a break from Turner’s starless anchor philosophy, CNN president Tom Johnson tried several times in the mid-1990s to infuse the network with broadcast news glamour, extending feelers to Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings. Each of them turned him down.
Murdoch certainly spotted a weakened prey. But the hunt was risky, involving huge capital outlays and intense competition to win slots with cable providers. News Corp had been exploring the possibility for the better part of a decade, with little success. But Murdoch, as always, was an optimist. “The appetite for news—particularly news that explains to people how it affects them—is expanding enormously,” he told reporters at the press conference introducing Ailes. “We are moving very fast for our news channel to become a worldwide platform.” The channel, Murdoch announced, would launch by the end of 1996 and be made available on cable and satellite, and its chairman and CEO would be Roger Ailes—a man of “entrepreneurial spirit.” “We would expect that our running costs of Fox News, from doing magazine shows for the network to a full, 24-hour news service, will come in at less t
han one hundred million a year,” Murdoch boasted.
When it was his turn to speak, Ailes expressed admiration for his new boss: “When everybody says you can’t do it, you get up the next day and find that Rupert Murdoch has done it.” Echoing Murdoch, he sketched a lofty vision for his news network even as he was self-consciously evasive about how he would pull it off. His first priority, he said, would be to “look at the resources, look at the dollars, look at the people, and try to figure out how to put it together in one dynamic news organization.” It would appeal to the “younger demographic” of Fox stations. “We’re not starting up a reactive news service in any way,” he stressed.
Murdoch acknowledged his immediate challenge was finding room for the channel on the country’s crowded cable dial. Nevertheless, he expressed confidence, hinting that if the cable systems didn’t make room for it, he would retaliate by depriving them of his sports programming. “I don’t think people will want to lose [NFL broadcasts],” he said in a not-so-veiled threat.
The channel was not only a business venture; though politics weren’t mentioned in the press conference, the seeds of what Fox would become were present. Ailes said that it “would like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking.” He hinted at the doublespeak that would so antagonize liberals in the years ahead. “I left politics a number of years ago,” he said. In words that would hark back to TVN’s hidden agenda, Ailes said: “We expect to do fine, balanced journalism.”
Murdoch’s grandiosity was of a kind he’d backed up many times before. By the time Roger Ailes arrived at News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch had become, on the eve of his sixty-fifth birthday, the most powerful media mogul of the century. From a single Australian afternoon tabloid of modest circulation, which he had inherited at age twenty-one, Murdoch built a publishing and entertainment company with revenues of $9 billion, controlling the distribution of newspapers, books, movies, and television programming consumed on six continents. He had owned at one time or another more than two dozen magazines and more than one hundred newspapers, from the Daily Mirror in Sydney to the News of the World, Sun, and the London Times in Britain, to the New York Post, Boston Herald, and Chicago Sun-Times in the United States. He owned and operated a dozen American television stations and held the exclusive rights to televise some of the most lucrative sports franchises in the world. HarperCollins, the publishing house, and Zondervan, a large publisher of religious books, belonged to him. Among his holdings in Hollywood, he counted the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation and the Fox Broadcasting Company. Investing early in satellite television, Murdoch had amassed a 40 percent stake in the British Sky Broadcasting Group, a 50 percent share of VOX in Germany, and full ownership of Star TV in Hong Kong, his outpost at the doorstep of China’s vast media frontier. What Murdoch had created at News Corp was not merely a company but a kingdom—a virtual state unto itself.
Where he reigned, Murdoch could seem more influential than the politicians who populated the pages of his papers, using his media as a weapon to promote allies and to punish enemies. In Britain, he had provided crucial backing to Margaret Thatcher; in Australia, he’d cashiered a prime minister, Gough Whitlam—whom he’d helped to elect only three years earlier. And in New York, he’d used the New York Post to help elect Mayor Ed Koch.
Outside New York, however, Murdoch was confronting the limits of his power in the United States. The three American newspapers of national influence—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—were, frustratingly, beyond his reach. The dynastic families who owned them had no interest in selling. Despite Murdoch’s ambitions, his American papers were never going to elect a president. “If you are an arch-conservative, fighting a world of left-wing journalists, particularly in this country,” said a News Corp executive at the time, “wouldn’t you want to have another influence, another say?”
In America, television made presidents. With its deeply ingrained car culture and suburban sprawl, America lacked the concentrated newspaper readership that existed in Britain. Television, as Joe Coors and other conservatives had discovered, was the medium that reached the masses. In the spring of 1985, Murdoch made a deal to purchase the largest existing collection of independent broadcast stations from Metromedia for about $1.4 billion. The investment gave Murdoch control of seven television stations in America’s biggest markets, which he planned to string together to form the country’s fourth broadcast network. But for the deal to be approved by regulators, he would have to give up his Australian citizenship and become an American. In fact, for Murdoch, the more painful consequence of the television transaction may have been the forced sale of his charmed New York Post, which he sold in 1988, due to regulations that prevented a single owner from controlling both a newspaper and television station in a given market. (When the regulations were lifted a few years later, he bought it back.)
Having muscled onto the American airwaves, Murdoch set about building the Fox Broadcasting Company into a juggernaut. Industry executives dismissed his early effort. NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff once sniffed that Murdoch ran “the coathanger network” because of the number of second-tier stations he owned. Within five years, however, the network was profitable, fueled by surprise entertainment hits like Married … with Children and The Simpsons. But they lacked news coverage, the crucial lever Murdoch pulled to gain political influence. A year before launching the Fox broadcast network, Murdoch lobbied Ted Turner to sell him CNN, but Turner rebuffed his overture. In 1992, Murdoch began hiring an army of men and women to build a television news division. They waged battles on many fronts. Some worked on a newsfeed service, not unlike TVN, for Fox’s local affiliates. Some developed programming proposals. One idea was a Sunday public affairs show in the style of Meet the Press. Another was a 60 Minutes–style prime-time newsmagazine. Others discussed the feasibility of a cable news channel to take on CNN. In 1994, Murdoch secured distribution by acquiring a 20 percent stake of New World Communications, the media company controlled by financier Ronald Perelman. The deal made News Corp the country’s biggest operator of local television stations. What Murdoch lacked by 1995 was a visionary collaborator, someone who could bring logic and order to his acquisitions. Ailes had spent the past three decades preparing for the role.
Though separated by class and culture, Ailes and Murdoch were men of the same mind. The self-appointed elites of journalism elicited their unbridled disgust. Watergate particularly stung, and Murdoch spoke of it in Ailesian terms, long before the two met. “The American press might get their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon,” Murdoch told a friend, “but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.”
As Murdoch came of age, he, like Ailes, developed an antiauthoritarian streak. He cast off his father’s conservative politics, adopting the self-conscious pose of a leftist—a limousine liberal before the term was coined. When he shipped off to Oxford, “Red Rupert” proudly displayed a bust of Lenin on a mantel in his room. Though uninspired in the classroom, Murdoch was a student of power. When he was nineteen, he accompanied his father, Sir Keith, a lauded war correspondent and newspaper executive, to the White House to meet Harry Truman. On the same trip abroad, he met New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger at Hillandale, his family’s estate in Connecticut. John F. Kennedy would later grant him a private audience. The printed word was Murdoch’s gateway to power. In a world that was increasingly controlled by television, Ailes was the ideal partner.
As adults, Ailes and Murdoch let their work consume them, a habit that would weigh on their families. Both would marry three times. They showed little interest in hobbies or sports. But when they did play, they competed fiercely. Ailes jumped out of airplanes, endured bruises during office games; Murdoch, though modest in skill, “played his heart out” against his executives on the tennis court at Cavan, his forty-thousand-acre estate in the Australian countryside. On the ski slopes, he was “clumsy” but “h
ad an obsession with finding the most difficult route down a slope,” recalled Andrew Neil, the British journalist who edited Murdoch’s London Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994.
Their desire to win drove their aggressive and at times ruthless approach to business. Ailes ran campaigns that others could not stomach. Murdoch did not ask for permission to buy things and blithely broke sacred promises. Their risk taking, at times, brought on near-career-ending disasters. Murdoch’s brush with bankruptcy following a debt crisis in the early 1990s was as dire as the train wrecks in Ailes’s career. But both men always managed to walk away.
The strongest bond between them was politics—the Australian’s abiding passion. “Murdoch loved to be part of the political game. He couldn’t help himself,” John Menadue, a former general manager of Murdoch’s Sydney papers, wrote in his memoir, Things You Learn Along the Way. Murdoch’s ideology was reflexively more anti-establishment than Ailes’s politics when the two met. Murdoch, for one, loathed Ailes’s hero, George H. W. Bush. In 1988, Murdoch’s preferred Republican was the televangelist Pat Robertson. “You can say what you like,” Murdoch told Andrew Neil at the time, “he’s right on all the issues.” Four years later, Murdoch voted for billionaire third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot. On a deeper level, however, Murdoch and Ailes shared a more primitive ideology: winning. Which is why Murdoch could easily back a liberal like the Australian Gough Whitlam and a union buster like Margaret Thatcher; and Ailes could transform a country-club Republican like George Bush into a heartland populist.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 23