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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  It worked. Murdoch’s preemptive strike spooked the industry. Less than a month after the convention, ABC’s parent company, the Walt Disney Company, pulled the plug on the ABC cable news channel. “It became more and more apparent as we looked at the numbers that there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, told Bill Carter. He did not hesitate to blame Murdoch in the pages of the Times. “We couldn’t believe that offer of $10 a subscriber,” he said. “It’s the same thing he did in escalating the costs of football rights and station values.”

  Ailes gloated. “Now we’ll be getting résumés from ABC as well as NBC,” he boasted to USA Today. Dozens of CNBC and A-T executives, producers, and anchors had already joined Ailes at Fox News. Judy Laterza, his seasoned assistant, was there. So was his Mike Douglas mentor, Chet Collier. Ailes Communications staffers, including Kathy Ardleigh and Scott Ehrlich, who had followed him to CNBC, followed him to News Corp. CNBC pressman Brian Lewis became his spokesperson. In December, he’d completed a master’s thesis in communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University that had been inspired by Ailes. (“The News Media: The Modern Day Electoral College,” he titled it.) CNBC CFO Jack Abernethy left to do the same job for the new cable channel. CNBC ad man Paul Rittenberg became head of Fox’s advertising sales. And, after peppering Ailes with requests to join the new network, Steve Doocy got a job as a weatherman and “man on the street.” In all, eighty-two former A-T and CNBC staffers would decamp to News Corp. That spring, NBC CEO Bob Wright called Ailes to complain about the staff defections. The conversation was brief.

  “You’ve been poaching my people,” Wright said.

  “It isn’t poaching; it’s a jailbreak!” Ailes roared.

  In the press, Zaslav continued to provoke Ailes. “Our view is we wish Rupert luck,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a story published on May 7. “We don’t see his service as a competitor.… We’re launching with a real news and information service. We already have deals for distribution with the top 100 multiple system operators.” A few weeks later, Ailes struck back. On Friday, May 31, Justin Manus, an attorney representing Ailes, sent a letter to Ed Scanlon threatening legal action. In it, Ailes accused Zaslav of dirty tricks that were designed to damage Ailes’s ability to sell Fox News to the cable industry. “It has come to our attention that David Zaslav of NBC has been showing Cable Operators a carefully edited video of the start-up problems of the A-T Network, and telling them that these problems were created by Roger Ailes.” Several days later, NBC’s general counsel, Rick Cotton, fired back in a letter, denying any wrongdoing.

  While Ailes and NBC traded legal letters, the war was shifting to a strategic piece of terrain, as News Corp and NBC sought to win over Time Warner Cable, the most important cable distributor in the country. The system reached 11.5 million domestic cable viewers, but, more important, it was the gateway to Manhattan, the media capital of the world, inhabited by the Madison Avenue advertisers who controlled the flow of billions of marketing dollars. Time Warner Cable had a monopoly on New York City’s one million cable subscribers. Adding complexity to the negotiations, because Time Warner had merged with CNN’s parent company, Turner Broadcasting, in 1995, it was against the company’s interest to introduce into their market a competitor to CNN.

  In early June, Murdoch and Chase Carey lunched with Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin and Time Warner president Richard Parsons in Murdoch’s private dining room. Murdoch and Carey explained that because Manhattan was so important for Fox News’s launch, News Corp would pay handsomely for access. Murdoch was offering Time Warner $125 million—more than $10 per subscriber—to carry Fox News. Levin and Parsons were noncommittal. After the lunch, Murdoch followed up with a confidential two-page letter to Levin. Murdoch portrayed Ailes’s channel in lofty terms. It was a sales pitch that clearly oversold the middlebrow product Ailes was actually planning to roll out. Fox, Murdoch promised Levin, would be a “high quality” news channel “designed to provide more information to viewers than any current news on the air.” Remarkably, Murdoch even promised Levin that Fox News would carry “more news than talk programming,” a direct contradiction to the vision Ailes and Chet Collier had for the channel.

  At the time Murdoch was pitching Levin on carrying Fox News, he was gaining an unlikely ally. Regulators at the Federal Trade Commission, reviewing the Time Warner–Turner deal, were coming to Murdoch’s aid. FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky, an antitrust scholar at Georgetown University and a vocal opponent of media concentration, was planning to ask Time Warner to carry a competing cable news network, in exchange for agency approval of the deal. The move essentially guaranteed that either Fox News or MSNBC would find long-term space alongside CNN in the crucial New York market. Given the clash of conflicting agendas between NBC, News Corp, and Time Warner, the three-way negotiations were always going to be fraught. But no one could have predicted that the competition would become as nasty as any of Ailes’s most contentious political campaigns.

  Meanwhile, Murdoch notched a major victory that sparked fear in the executive suites at NBC. On the morning of June 24, News Corp sent out a press release announcing a distribution deal with John Malone. The two men were both allies and adversaries. Malone was the one media mogul Murdoch was said to fear. Politically, however, they were in sync. “There’s a huge diversity of values in this country between what people in central Manhattan think of the values of our society and what people in Peoria think the values of our society are,” Malone, a self-described libertarian, told The New Yorker. In agreeing to distribute Fox News, Malone extracted a steep price from Murdoch: News Corp agreed to pay a rumored $200 million in return for Malone’s commitment to put Ailes’s network in ten million homes by the time of its October launch. (Ailes denied that TCI was being paid $200 million, and a TCI spokesperson claimed that the so-called incentive payment was “nothing close” to that amount.) As part of the deal, Malone was given the option to buy a 20 percent stake in Fox News.

  The concessions were simply the price of admission: no matter what happened with the Time Warner Cable talks, the Malone deal delivered enough subscribers to ensure that Ailes’s network would achieve a viable audience when it debuted in the fall. As important, Malone guaranteed that he would offer Fox News to all of TCI’s subscribers, but made no such commitment to MSNBC.

  Murdoch’s distribution coup put wind at Ailes’s back and gave Murdoch confidence to double down on television. A few weeks after Murdoch inked the pact with Malone, he negotiated an even bigger transaction with Ronald Perelman to acquire the remaining 80 percent of his media company, New World Communications, for $2.5 billion. The deal increased News Corp’s stable of corporate-owned stations from twelve to twenty-two, and ensured that Ailes would have access to the biggest chain of broadcast stations, in terms of ownership. But as Murdoch was finalizing the deal with Perelman, NBC tacked ahead on July 15, when MSNBC debuted to mixed but extensive reviews. The News Corp channel was still a chaotic mess. But Ailes always viewed long-shot odds and operational challenges as opportunities. At America’s Talking, he used them as raw material to spin an inspiring David-and-Goliath narrative about his start-up. The contest retained, for Ailes, a deeply personal dimension. From his spacious second-floor corner office at News Corp, Ailes had a clear view of Sixth Avenue toward NBC’s offices at Rockefeller Center, where David Zaslav, Tom Rogers, and Andy Lack were working against him on a channel that should have been his. It was a visual reminder that his war with NBC was far from over.

  TWELVE

  OCTOBER SURPRISE

  IN WAYS THAT ONLY BECAME APPARENT YEARS LATER, MSNBC’s debut on July 15, 1996, signified the moment when news on cable television forever changed. News was no longer just to be found in the day’s headlines. It became ever more deeply embedded in the context of shared cultural and political ideas that made viewers feel welcome and safe, while widening the chasms that separated them from people who were not like them. From the very beginning, M
SNBC spoke, very deliberately, to the coasts. MSNBC’s specific concept was to re-create on camera the vibe of an espresso bar in downtown Seattle, the home of NBC’s new corporate partner. “People are going to be on television, having coffee,” Andy Lack told NBC anchor Brian Williams, courting him to the channel over dinner. Exposed faux redbrick walls and industrial lighting transformed the America’s Talking studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, into a loftlike space where urbane twenty- and thirty-somethings chattered about the news of the day, like characters from Friends or Seinfeld. With so much casual banter, the message to the audience was that big-city life in MSNBC’s America was easy and fun, where successful people had plenty of free time to chat, and the conversation flowed from one venti latte to the next. But MSNBC’s urbane and cheerful family inevitably left a lot of America on the outside.

  At 9:00 a.m., after a televised countdown clock ticked to zero, MSNBC went live for the first time. Following the headlines, anchor Jodi Applegate, who also anchored the Today show on weekends, talked with fellow NBC News correspondents whose faces appeared on a sleek video monitor suspended from the ceiling. Tom Brokaw, speaking from the North Lawn of the White House, hyped InterNight, an interview program airing weeknights at 8:00 p.m. with Brokaw and other NBC veterans as hosts. That evening, viewers would enjoy, he said, “a very important appointment” with President Bill Clinton, who would answer questions that had been submitted to MSNBC’s new website. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer chatted from 30 Rock about MSNBC’s coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, set to open in five days. “I want you to know that Matt and I are extremely jealous, and we’re gonna demand a cappuccino machine in our next contract,” Couric said to Applegate. Jane Pauley, the anchor of Time & Again, a history program on at 7:00 p.m., promoted a documentary about the Apollo 11 moon mission. Brian Williams, host of the 9:00 p.m. newscast, sat in front of an oversized glass map of the world that was like a prop from NASA Mission Control. “It’s been a dream around here … to have a full hour in prime time to present the news,” he told Applegate. Last to appear on the video monitor was Soledad O’Brien, live from San Francisco, where she introduced her 10:00 p.m. technology show, The Site. “Hi, Jodi,” O’Brien said. “Tell Katie and Matt if they want to borrow my cappuccino machine I’d love to have them borrow it if they ever come out to San Francisco.”

  On the day of the launch, Ailes himself fired a salvo, delineating the battle lines. “They’re basing 98% of their promotion on five of their stars,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Broadcast news glamour was liberal bias by another name. “MSNBC,” he had told USA Today the previous month, “believes in giving face time to anchors. We believe in fact time for viewers.” His point was that NBC was applying to cable news Manhattan-centric knowingness, but star power did not necessarily translate to the world of cable news.

  As NBC took out half-page ads in TV Guide, featuring pictures of Brokaw, Gumbel, and Couric, Ailes was exploring the contours and mind-set of his new audience. That winter, Ailes assigned Scott Ehrlich to commission a poll on viewer attitudes about the news media. Ehrlich hired Democratic pollster John Gorman, who had worked on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Gorman’s results confirmed Ailes’s instincts: more than half the country did not trust the news media. “It was a no-brainer,” Ailes’s brother, Robert, said. “When Roger was starting Fox, he saw that the needs of sixty percent of Americans weren’t being filled by the existing media.”

  The point of view MSNBC was selling at its launch, though not overtly political, was elitist. Its sensibility was reinforced two days later, when SNBC announced a deal to simulcast Don Imus’s radio show, a favorite of the Northeast corridor chattering class.

  On Thursday, July 18, Ailes stood in a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, California, parrying questions from journalists like a candidate before a crowd of voters at a rally. The assembled reporters received printouts of Gorman’s poll results—essentially opposition research. Only 14 percent of Americans viewed the press favorably, compared to 31 percent with respect to the Supreme Court and 47 percent with respect to the military. Furthermore, 67 percent of Americans believed television news was biased.

  Ailes’s description of his own channel focused mostly on what it was not, keeping the heat on MSNBC while avoiding being boxed in. “We’re not going to consider ourselves in the business of having to sell computers every five minutes,” he said. “Nor will we have to be in the business to tell people to turn off their television set and go to their computer to get more information.” Gone was the hype on display during his debut press conference with Murdoch, when they promised “a worldwide platform” for the channel. In Pasadena, Ailes practiced the communications art of lowering expectations. “We have not claimed we’re going to be revolutionary,” he said, knocking MSNBC. “I believe in underpromising and overdelivering.”

  But, subtly, he began to introduce the trope that would become Fox’s hallmark. “If you couldn’t give me two sides to a major issue I wouldn’t hire you because I think you might have an agenda for one side,” he said. “What I’ve said to my people in the newsroom is don’t have any fear of anybody’s ideas just because they are not your ideas.”

  If reporters were hoping for more than a few specifics, they were disappointed. There was a name: the Fox News Channel. There was a launch date: October 7. There was a schedule: live shows from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. on weekdays and, on weekends, six hours of original content. Otherwise, Ailes refrained from filling in any details of his October surprise. “It’s a very competitive climate, and we want to keep that under wraps,” he said. Unlike MSNBC, which had announced a lineup three months before its launch, Ailes did not reveal a single on-camera hire. “There is no status with Rush Limbaugh,” Ailes said, addressing hearsay that he might ink a deal with his friend to host a Fox News show.

  From the beginning, politics was more than a subject to cover. It suffused everything at Fox News. “Roger is a political animal,” a former senior Fox News producer said. “That plays into how he manages the place.” Decision making flowed from the top. Secrecy was paramount. A binary win-lose ethic governed the office. The channel’s debut was less than twelve weeks away, and things at campaign headquarters were getting chaotic.

  The construction of studio space at News Corp’s headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue was taking longer than expected and blowing through budgets. Fox leased space on the north end of the building’s lobby that had previously housed a Sam Goody record store. The street-level studio was designed to attract tourists, like the Today show’s Rockefeller Center plaza. But his team of thirty architects and engineers quickly realized that the space was unworkable. Subways rumbling underneath the building disrupted sensitive satellite signals and made sounds that were difficult to cancel out in the studio. They also were running out of room. The street-level space could only accommodate two studios. Bahman Samiian, who became a senior director, was forced to design a rotating riser that could turn ninety degrees in less than five minutes for speedy studio backdrop changes. “We had to do more than eight shows and had to ping-pong between the studios,” a staffer recalled.

  Ailes probed the allegiances of potential staff over the summer, ascertaining their ideology, ferreting out dissidents. His interview with Douglas Kennedy, his friend Bobby Jr.’s younger brother, was rocky. It was not merely his last name. The twenty-nine-year-old scion and former New York Post reporter was working for the enemy. MSNBC had recently hired him, but he was considering his options.

  “I know your background, Ailes,” Kennedy said.

  “Well I know your background, too,” Ailes returned. “I respect what your father stood for even if he had a political agenda different from mine.”

  Kennedy asked if Ailes would inject his conservative views into the news. “I have no mission, I have no intention of even looking at your stories,” Ailes said. “But I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you’ll make the effort to b
e fair on anything you cover.” Kennedy met his gaze and said he would. He was hired.

  Refusing to answer was worse than professing liberal ideas. In another interview, Ailes and Chet Collier questioned the background of Bob Reichblum, whom they were considering for the executive producer opening on the 7:00 p.m. newscast. “I’m looking at your résumé,” Ailes said. It stated that Reichblum had been the executive producer of Good Morning America. “I see here you’ve worked at a network. And you’re Jewish, so I assume you’re liberal.”

  Reichblum winced. “Two of the three things must be true,” he replied. “I’m not going to tell you which ones.”

  Ailes chuckled at the retort, but did not offer him a job.

  While Ailes turned away refuseniks, he surrounded himself with committed lieutenants who were either conservative or didn’t care. Two of the most important advisers at the channel were Chet Collier, his old boss from Mike Douglas, and John Moody, a right-leaning print journalist from Time. They were two men who in almost every respect could not have been more different. Collier was a Massachusetts liberal who had little interest in current affairs or politics. “Chet’s idea of a show is two chairs and a plant,” Bill Bolster, Ailes’s successor at CNBC, liked to joke. Collier, then sixty-nine, envisioned Fox News as a smorgasbord of talk shows, television personalities, and animals, a personal programming favorite. In addition to working with Ailes, Collier served as president of the Westminster Kennel Club and helped transform the dog show into a national televised spectacle that could sell out Madison Square Garden. The trade journal Dog News called his contribution to dog shows “without comparison.”