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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Launching Hume’s newscast at 6:00 p.m. required Ailes to juggle. He shifted Bill O’Reilly to 8:00 and Catherine Crier to 10:00. Mike Schneider’s 7:00 p.m. time slot was in flux. After clashing with Ailes, Schneider had left the channel a few months earlier. Ailes had Jon Scott and others fill in. Moving O’Reilly to prime time was an unexpectedly brilliant move.

  At the opening of his inaugural 6:00 p.m. program, O’Reilly had stated the mission that he at first was unable to execute. “How did it happen? How did television news become so predictable and in some cases, so boring?” he asked. “Well, there are many theories, but the fact is, local and network news is basically a rehash of what most regular viewers already know.” It was the breakthrough insight. The viewers Ailes was trying to attract did not want television to tell them what happened in the world. They wanted television to tell them how to think about what happened in the world—the news itself would be secondary. “Few broadcasts take any chances these days, and most are very politically correct,” O’Reilly continued. “Well, we’re going to try to be different, stimulating and a bit daring, but at the same time, responsible and fair.”

  He failed, initially. In those opening months, he attracted only a few audience members and the scorn of television critics. At forty-eight, O’Reilly was a journeyman long past his sell-by date. His career began in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and climbed the affiliate ladder: Dallas, Denver, Portland. In 1982, he was called up to the Bigs, landing a job at CBS News, where he covered the Falklands War. In 1986 he switched to ABC News. He declared to the network staffers there that he had the talent to sit behind the anchor desk. “He would say he should have Peter Jennings’s job,” Emily Rooney, who worked with O’Reilly at ABC, recalled. There was no doubt he had talent. At six-four and with piercing, glacier-blue eyes, he owned the screen. In interviews, he proved himself to be an effective interrogator.

  But O’Reilly burned hot. He harbored petty slights and made a habit of self-destructing. In one five-year period, he blew through four different television stations. “He was always in trouble with management,” Ailes said. In 1989, he bailed out of the networks altogether to anchor the syndicated tabloid program Inside Edition. There, he sensed a shift in the national media conversation. Loudmouths, from Howard Stern to Rush Limbaugh, were building massive audiences as the medium of talk radio exploded. O’Reilly, a notorious loudmouth himself, wanted a piece of the action. “I’m not sure where the business is going,” he told a friend, “but my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and man, I’m going to be there.” O’Reilly turned Inside Edition into a programming laboratory. Unshackled from the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand relativity crossfire that mirrors the journalism school ideal of objectivity, he was able to incubate the bullying Irish street cop delivery he would later master at Fox News.

  His failure at Fox’s 6:00 p.m. slot turned out to be a matter of timing. At 8:00, when many people were settling in front of the tube after dinner, O’Reilly finally connected. Like any skilled actor, he subtly calibrated his delivery to engage the full range of his audience’s emotions. With the Monica Lewinsky scandal now at his disposal, O’Reilly gave his viewers all the different reasons it was okay for them to despise the president. One evening he told Nixon White House counsel John Dean that sex with an intern was an “abuse of power.” If questions about sex seemed off limits, Dan Quayle told O’Reilly’s audience that lying shouldn’t be. “It’s important if the president of the United States committed perjury,” the former vice president said. For those who worried that condemning Clinton made a person sound like a conservative kook, O’Reilly took partisanship off the table. “You guys wanted him out since Day One,” he barked to Jerry Falwell. “Don’t care that he’s been a good president. How do you answer that?” O’Reilly heard from voices on the right and the left as he marshaled his interviews toward his unassailable conclusion: Bill Clinton was fibbing to get out of a jam. O’Reilly was there for the folks to make sure Clinton couldn’t pull a fast one.

  It made sense, on several levels, that O’Reilly would become Ailes’s brightest star. O’Reilly once remarked that their meeting was “just perfect synergy.” Like Ailes, O’Reilly had a talent for constructing a compelling personal narrative. Although O’Reilly’s father worked in Manhattan as an accountant, he presented himself as a scrappy son of Levittown, Long Island, where the local parish and the New York Mets competed for the faithful’s attentions. “It was very basic,” O’Reilly told his biographer. “It was tuna. It was hot dogs and beans. It was steak on Saturday night. It was spaghetti. It was secondhand sports equipment, movies now and then.”

  Class antagonism formed the foundation of O’Reilly’s carefully honed public image. At prep school, he was sneered at by the WASPs from Long Island’s wealthy North Shore. At Marist College, then an all-male liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, eighty miles north of Manhattan on the Hudson River, O’Reilly hung with an Irish and Italian crowd that tried to crash parties at Vassar on the fancy side of town. “I could feel those rich girls and their Ivy League dates measuring me,” he recalled.

  O’Reilly also shared another significant Ailesian trait: he understood television news was nothing but a show. “Bill O’Reilly is one of the greatest bullshitters in the world,” Ailes’s brother, Robert, said. “He can talk about any subject, he can get the best out of his guest by taking the opposite point of view even if he doesn’t believe it.”

  O’Reilly’s sudden success at 8:00 p.m. showed Ailes that the audience was responding to the nightly melodrama. So Ailes added more supporting characters to his cast. Disgraced former Clinton adviser Dick Morris—who was exposed patronizing a $200-an-hour Washington prostitute—became a frequent on-air presence and fount of embarrassing Clinton gossip. “What do you want me to say?” he asked a producer in the green room before one Lewinsky segment. “What do you mean?” the producer asked. “Well, which side am I?” Morris said. Playing the Clinton apostate proved the most valuable role. In March 1998, Morris told the Fox audience that years earlier Bill had asked him to poll-test how a divorce would hurt his political future. “Hillary and I are having some problems and I think we may have to split up,” Morris quoted Clinton saying. “Do you think that’s going to hurt me politically?” In April, Ailes hired Morris as a political analyst.

  Several weeks later, Ailes recruited the mysterious figure who had done much to catalyze the scandal: Matt Drudge. But Drudge’s transition to television was not an easy one. Inside Fox News, he was as much an oddity to producers as he was to the outside world. “It’ll be me, a hat, and the hippest stories on the block,” he told one reporter. “I’m going to go wherever the stink is.” Lucianne Goldberg was a regular companion on his set, which one reporter described as “Raymond Chandler detective’s office,” complete with teetering stacks of faded newspapers and 1950s-style furniture. To complete the picture, Ailes even let Goldberg smoke cigarettes on air.

  In the summer of 1998, to feed his audience’s obsession with Clinton headlines, Ailes added more political news to the lineup. It was a period that marked a subtle transfer of power to John Moody from Chet Collier, who would retire a little more than a year later. In July, Ailes hired McLaughlin Group regulars Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes to host The Beltway Boys, a weekly political roundtable. A few days later, he scrapped Collier’s original lineup. Hours of hard news between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. would replace Collier’s twenty-minute talk show blocks. The new lineup premiered on July 27.

  It was auspicious timing. On the evening of August 17, Clinton spoke to the country from the White House’s Map Room a few hours after his videotaped Whitewater grand jury testimony. His four-and-a-half-minute address finally answered the American people’s singular question: he did.

  As Clinton’s presidency spiraled toward its nadir, Ailes and Fox News were rocketing to new ratings highs. On the set of Hannity & Colmes that night, the mood was ebullient. Matt Drudge called into the studio from his
cell phone to commemorate the momentous occasion. “It’s all popping. Congratulations,” Drudge said, sounding like a star player celebrating with a teammate in the end zone. “I think this has been the finest night of the network.”

  Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage of Lewinsky showcased Ailes’s unmatched ability to fuse politics and entertainment into a marketable product. His wit and theatrical flair were embedded into Fox’s programs in ways both big and small. Sometimes the channel covered the scandal as a comedy. That’s what its zany poll questions were for. “Which of the following do you think better describes Monica Lewinsky: An average girl who was taken advantage of, or a young tramp who went looking for adventure and thrills?” “What is President Clinton more thankful for this Thanksgiving? Still having a wife? Or still having a job?”

  At other points, the scandal was covered as pure soap opera. In April 1998, Fox aired exclusive video of Clinton in a hotel in Dakar, Senegal, where he was traveling on an official trip, after a judge dismissed Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit. “You see the president walking around in his suite, smoking a cigar, walking around the room, eventually beating on an African drum,” correspondent Jim Angle reported. “And at one point, he is also playing the guitar. So I think it gives you a pretty clear indication of the mood.” In another report, by correspondent Rita Cosby, Fox showed the cad getting his due: “Sources tell Fox News that the reason the couple’s recent ski vacation in Utah was abruptly cut short and they returned one day early was because they had a shouting match which left Hillary storming out of the room saying she wanted her bags.”

  Some Fox viewers kept the channel on for so long that the static Fox News logo displayed on the lower left corner of their TVs burned the pixels. Before a rotating one was introduced, even when they turned off their sets for the night, the outlines of the graphic remained tattooed to the dark screens.

  David Shuster was no longer having the time of his life. His unhappiness was on one level surprising, because he was being lauded by management. Shortly before Clinton admitted to the affair, Moody called Shuster and told him that Ailes wanted to meet him in person in New York “to pat you on the back.” But Shuster was becoming increasingly frustrated with O’Reilly, Hannity, and other talking heads, who took his reporting out of context to damage Clinton. In August, Shuster told producers that he learned Starr was investigating the possibility of a “second intern.” He did not report it on-air and cautioned that Starr had found no direct evidence for it. But Mort Kondracke, co-host of The Beltway Boys, promoted the allegation on camera. After Shuster complained about Kondracke to Brit Hume, Moody had Shuster indicate which part of his reports could be used on-air. “There was initially this Maginot line between the news and the commentary,” said Steve Hirsh, a member of the Washington bureau. “As they became more successful and more identified with the niche they sought out to get, that line was blurred more. You had some of the old-line news folks, whether they agreed with the politics, who didn’t want to do that.”

  During the impeachment saga, Shuster and other Fox journalists learned that Ailes was telling Brit Hume to commission Clinton-bashing assignments. “We would hear that Roger would call Brit with a laundry list of five or six stories that he would want us to do,” Shuster said. “It was something like either the Clintons pushing a particular nomination, or that they were buying off someone for a vote. It was stuff that Roger was picking up.” He went on, “But Brit would say, ‘I’m not going to have my White House correspondent ask this at a briefing.’ ” In a private conversation in the bureau, Shuster told Kim Hume he was uncomfortable with the direction of the channel. “Kim said to me, ‘Look, Brit’s on your side. You don’t realize it, but he’s fighting tooth and nail protecting you and the other reporters from what Roger wants you to do,’ ” he recalled.

  Catherine Crier was also increasingly unhappy. As the host of the 10:00 p.m. Crier Report and the newsmagazine Fox Files, her sensibility was vastly different from Ailes’s. “I’m very interested in conflict resolution,” she had told a reporter when the channel launched. “The world really doesn’t exist in black and white, wrong and right, liberal and conservative.” Ailes disagreed, at least for the purposes of television. “Be more opinionated,” he told Crier in one meeting. “The guests are there as a foil for you.” He also disagreed with her dress. “He had admiration for her legs,” a senior executive said. In one meeting, Ailes barked, “Tell Catherine I did not spend x-number of dollars on a glass desk for her to wear pant suits.”

  Crier found the editorial direction worrisome. “Over time, in the three years I was there, I began to feel more of a heavy hand,” she said. Ailes, she said, was “paying more attention to what stories were being covered or not covered.” After months of Lewinsky mania, she was bored. “Of course everyone covered it ad nauseam. But it was to the point I was stopping strangers on the street saying, is there anything about this you don’t know? I can’t do this anymore. There certainly was a take that was emerging, it wasn’t there when I was starting,” she said.

  She was also disturbed by Murdoch’s influence on Fox’s coverage. In the summer of 1997, at a time when Murdoch was seeking to expand his media empire into China, Crier was told to soften her coverage of the British handover of Hong Kong to Beijing. “I would get comments through my production staff and my executive producer,” she said. Months later, Crier decided to leave Fox News for a position at Court TV. “They offered me a lovely contract to stay. I felt uncomfortable. There were no hard feelings when I left,” she said. “I was troubled when I left. I can’t even imagine the situation today.”

  Hannity & Colmes was another management challenge. Despite its bipartisan billing, the show was a vehicle for Sean Hannity’s right-wing politics. An Irish Catholic from Long Island, Hannity came of age as two revolutions, Reagan conservatism and right-wing talk radio, sent the country on a new course. He harbored dreams of becoming the next Bob Grant, the caustic New York City radio commentator who provided an outlet for incendiary views on blacks, Hispanics, and gays. Radio personalities like Grant, Hannity said, “taught me early on that a passionate argument could make a difference.”

  In his twenties, Hannity drifted. He tried college three times but dropped out. By the late 1980s, he was living in southern California working as a house painter. In his spare time, he called in to KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station, to inveigh against liberals and to defend the actions of his hero Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. His combative commentaries impressed the station management. Though he was not a student, Hannity was soon given an hour-long morning call-in show, which he titled The Pursuit of Happiness, a reference to Reagan’s 1986 Independence Day speech.

  In April 1989, Hannity invited the virulent anti-gay activist Gene Antonio on the air to promote his already widely discredited book, The AIDS Cover-up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS. A Lutheran minister without scientific training, Antonio peddled paranoid fictions about the epidemic. He wrote that the virus could be transmitted by sneezes and mosquito bites and that the Centers for Disease Control and the American Medical Association conspired to cover up the “truth.”

  At the opening of his hour-long interview, Hannity said: “I’m sick and tired of the media and the homosexual community preventing us from getting the true, accurate information about AIDS in this day.” He went on to describe The AIDS Cover-up? as an “excellent book” that was “so full of facts” and added, “if you want the real truth about this deadly, deadly disease, he’s not afraid to say what the homosexuals don’t want you to hear.” He gave his audience Antonio’s mailing address, where they could order “autographed copies” and write to find out about “places where homosexuals can go for help if they want to change.”

  Hannity’s description of gay life on the show was just as venomous as Antonio’s extreme rhetoric. He described San Francisco gay men as “disgusting people,” gay sex as “against nature” and “tantamount to playing in a sewer,�
�� and gay adoptive parents as “really sick.” Hannity said he would not allow a gay man to teach his son at school. “I don’t care if you call me homophobic. I’ll take it,” he said. Strangely, given his avowed disapproval, Hannity expressed a prurient interest in Antonio’s explicit descriptions of enemas, golden showers, and bestiality.

  As the men talked, irate calls flooded the studio. Jody May, a lesbian station employee, told Hannity about her baby boy.

  “Artificial insemination?” Hannity asked. “Aren’t you married to a woman, by the way?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Yeah, turkey baster babies,” Antonio interjected.

  “Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?” Hannity added.

  “That’s also a really disgusting remark,” May said.

  “I feel sorry for your child,” Hannity snapped. “You wanna make any more comments?”

  Gay rights groups, calling for a boycott of the station, pressured management to yank Hannity off the air. In June the station canceled his show, citing his “multiple discriminatory statements based on sexual orientation,” which were in “violation of the University of California Nondiscriminatory Policy.” Hannity played the victim of overzealous PC enforcers. After Hannity launched a free speech campaign, enlisting the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, the university agreed in the summer of 1990 to reinstate his program. Hannity insisted that the university double the standard one-hour show and one-semester appointment to two hours and two semesters. When the university balked, Hannity walked away. In his telling, he was a target of liberal persecution.