After applying for radio gigs around the country, Hannity found work in the South, eventually landing a job at the Atlanta talk station WGST. His bio on the station’s website declared that he made “a proud name for himself by insulting lesbians.” In an interview with New York’s Newsday several years after joining Fox, Hannity glossed over his time in Santa Barbara, speaking the powerful language of conservative resentment. “You work for free at a college station, where they spit on you and then they fire you,” he said. “Then you pack up and move to a small station across the country. And if you work hard and you are talented, eventually you get a shot. Everybody has that story in America. That’s why I love the capitalist system in America.”
Though cast as a supporting character for Hannity, Alan Colmes did not want to be Hannity’s punching bag. To indulge Colmes, producers tried to help him feel like more than a prop. Each morning, a producer would first call Hannity to get a rundown on what he wanted to cover that night. Then the producer would call Colmes to get his input. Unbeknownst to Colmes, this second call was largely a ruse. “There was a real tightrope walk we had to do to make Alan feel like he was an equal voice,” one producer recalled. “Sean basically served as executive producer of the show.”
While conservatives like Hannity thrived at Fox, rank-and-file staffers began to express apprehensions with Ailes’s programming directives. Some struggled with the channel’s self-conscious anti-intellectualism. Others felt uncomfortable with the overt politics. “I had higher-ups wanting to see my scripts,” said producer Rachel Katzman. “They needed to make sure I wasn’t too liberal. I was told to change stories.” Jordan Kurzweil, who was hired to launch Fox News’s website, also got pressure to conform. “John Moody would call my editor and ask me to change a headline or the positioning of articles because it was damaging to Republicans. The phone calls got made, it was frank,” Kurzweil said.
In hushed conversations around the halls, these young staffers wondered why the channel masked Ailes’s conservative aims with the “fair and balanced” slogan. One former producer remembered exchanges like this: “What is the crime in coming out and saying what we’re doing? Everyone knows this is what we’re doing.… Why do we have to keep it a secret? What’s this ‘fair and balanced’ thing the producers keep talking about behind the scenes? I don’t know why they don’t just say what it is. It’s so blatantly obvious.”
The answer involved a combination of politics, history, and psychology. The conservative dream of establishing a counter-media hinged, in large part, on convincing the viewers that what they were getting was news, not propaganda. “Fair and balanced” was a commercial necessity. “If you come out and you try to do right-wing news, you’re gonna die. You can’t get away with it,” Ailes said to the Hartford Courant. “There’d been four failures at that,” he told The New York Times, without citing examples. “This was a different mission entirely.”
TVN’s failure had many causes. But certainly its stigma as a Coors propaganda tool contributed to its demise. Two decades later, Paul Weyrich’s National Empowerment Television was ghettoed to the far right because the channel uniformly displayed Weyrich’s dogmatic conservatism—a turnoff to most viewers.
Keeping Fox News’s staff in line was not a major concern for Ailes. Brian Lewis and the PR operation took care of that. Lewis’s absolute no-leaks policy scared employees into silence, from highly paid anchors to low-level grunts, at least when reporters came calling. Blasting rap music in his office—“Gangsta Nation” was a favorite track—Lewis planted negative stories about disloyal employees. When successful he liked to say, “I shoved a Scud up his ass!” The harder challenge involved the one thing Ailes could not ultimately control—the news itself.
By the winter of 1999, Fox News’s prime-time lineup was passing MSNBC for second place, even though MSNBC was distributed in nine million more homes. But in February, the Lewinsky saga finished its final act. The Senate voted to acquit Clinton. Ailes would need a new story line.
The options were unappealing. The news cycle was favoring his less partisan rivals and Ailes was turned off by the coverage of the NATO air campaign in Kosovo, which he saw as both boring and expensive. His audience did, too. During the conflict’s opening days in late March, MSNBC doubled its daytime audience and zoomed past Fox to reclaim second place in the ratings wars. One afternoon, Ailes barged into John Moody’s office to complain about Fox’s war coverage. “You gotta stop this bullshit, how much are we spending?” he said. “Who the hell gives a shit? Is there even a story? What the hell are we doing there?” Moody, the former Time foreign correspondent, stared back. “Are we done?” he said.
The evening lineup was also a problem. In January 1999, Ailes poached the respected CBS anchor Paula Zahn to helm a 7:00 p.m. newscast, which had rotated through anchors since Mike Schneider’s exit. But Zahn’s seriousness and elegance were out of sync with the prime time partisans. O’Reilly was firing on all cylinders at 8:00, which boosted Hannity & Colmes at 9:00. So Ailes tried a different tack. He moved Zahn to 10:00 p.m. and put Shepard Smith, a thirty-five-year-old fast-talking field correspondent, in her slot.
The goal was to go tabloid. After his forceful performance covering the Columbine massacre, Smith convinced Ailes he could own the screen. “Put Shep in front of a live picture, and it’s unbelievable,” one former Fox producer said. A gregarious Mississippian who had joined Fox at the launch, Smith was part of a clique of young staffers. He rented a beach house in the Hamptons with fellow Fox correspondent Rick Leventhal and began dating Julia Rolle, a beautiful field producer. But Smith had a dark side. He was known to explode unexpectedly on his colleagues. “He Shepped Out” became a phrase around the halls.
Whatever turbulence he caused, Smith had an ineffable quality that Ailes prized and that he had an instinct to spot. To produce his show, Ailes hired a former tabloid producer named Jerry Burke, who had done a stint in Los Angeles at Extra, the syndicated celebrity news show. But Burke’s sensibility was not welcome in all corners of the channel. On one of his early shows, Burke told Smith to lead with a live report on the drama between basketball star Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra. The phone in the control room rang. Burke answered. It was Brit Hume, who had just signed off Special Report from Washington.
“Why are you calling me?” Burke said.
“You are single-handedly going to destroy this network,” Hume seethed. He told Burke the Rodman story had no place at the channel. Burke slammed down the phone. The following morning, Ailes walked into Burke’s office in the newsroom and told him he was backing Hume. “Jerry, you gotta be true to the brand,” Ailes told him. “I’m willing to risk a tenth of a rating point if you protect the brand. Think about it, we’re not Extra.”
While Ailes refused to acknowledge it in public, the Fox News brand had been set: the channel programmed news to appeal to conservatives. Which is why it was not tabloid for Hume to talk about blow jobs and semen stains on the air. That was a serious matter of national consequence. One of Ailes’s gifts was knowing where the taste line was and pushing right up to the limit of it. Matt Drudge did not. In November 1999, Drudge stormed off his set when John Moody refused to let him show a photograph from the National Enquirer of a twenty-one-week-old fetus undergoing surgery for spina bifida. Drudge wanted to use the photo to illustrate an antiabortion segment. Moody overruled him, saying it would be out of context. The messy episode spilled into the press. “I guess I can go on and talk about Lewinsky’s dirty dress,” Drudge complained to The Washington Post, in a burst of truth telling. “I have to wonder whether their motto of ‘we report, you decide’ isn’t just some Madison Avenue slogan.” “Matt’s entitled to his opinion. It was an editorial decision,” Brian Lewis said.
After a few days of sniping, both sides stood down. Drudge agreed to cancel his contract, which had more than a year to go. “The network cannot live by the standards of the Internet, where each person is his own writer, editor and publisher,” Ai
les told a reporter. Drudge’s exit signaled that Ailes’s Lewinsky train had reached the end of its line.
FIFTEEN
THE CALL
AS AMERICANS MADE THEIR QUADRENNIAL PILGRIMAGE to the voting booth on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 7, 2000, John Prescott Ellis, first cousin of George W. Bush and the chief of Fox News’s “decision desk,” hustled into a second-floor conference room to brief Roger Ailes, anchors, and producers on the state of the race. A confidant of his cousin’s presidential campaign, Ellis was part of the story he was covering, managing the team of analysts responsible for how Fox News would call winners and losers. In an hour, Brit Hume would begin anchoring the channel’s live election night coverage.
For the conservatives around the conference table—Ailes, John Moody, Brit Hume, Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor Bill Kristol, and Fox News analyst Michael Barone—Ellis painted a depressing picture. Exit polls showed Hillary Clinton coasting to victory in the New York Senate race. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was surging, winning so-called late deciders by a two-to-one margin. Michigan and Pennsylvania, key battleground states, were breaking his way. More ominously for the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney ticket, Gore was pulling ahead in Florida. For weeks, the consensus had been that the Sunshine State would be ground zero on election night. The best news Ellis could offer was that Gore would likely be denied an early victory. The electoral math was such that Gore could not get over the top until the polls closed in California at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
After the briefing, Ellis slipped out of the building for a cigarette. At forty-seven, with wavy brown hair and a wry sense of humor, Ellis exuded privilege and confidence. It was not the first time he’d been a kind of double agent. In 1978, as his uncle Poppy Bush was mounting a run for the GOP presidential nomination, Ellis joined NBC News as a producer in the election unit. In 1993, Ellis landed a political column at The Boston Globe. Ellis’s role as a Bush family surrogate eventually complicated his role as a Globe pundit. “Looking back over the last 6½ years, the collected lies of William Clinton test the hard drive of memory,” he wrote in a column in May 1999. On July 3, Ellis recused himself from covering politics. “Loyalty supersedes candor,” he wrote. “I am loyal to my cousin, Governor George Bush of Texas. I put that loyalty ahead of my loyalty to anyone else outside my immediate family.… There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.… And there is no way for you to know whether I am telling you the truth about Al Gore’s presidential campaign.” Three weeks later, he gave up his column entirely.
Ailes expressed no reservations about bringing Ellis to Fox. In the early 1990s, Ellis worked for him at Ailes Communications. It was Ellis who helped secure his lucrative consulting contract with Paramount Television at a moment when Ailes was transitioning out of politics. In 1998, Ellis ran Fox’s election unit, his first experience in such a role. “We at Fox News do not discriminate against people because of their family connections,” Ailes later said.
As Ellis smoked his cigarette outside the Fox studios, he dialed Bush in Austin. Earlier that afternoon, he had told Bush, who sounded tense, “I wouldn’t worry about early numbers. Your dad had bad early numbers in ’88, and he wound up winning by seven.”
Now that Gore’s apparent advantage was widening, Bush wanted to know what his cousin thought.
“I have no idea,” Ellis said.
Bush told Ellis to stay in regular contact throughout the night.
Ellis ended the call and stamped out his cigarette. There was one more meeting he had to attend. Ailes was waiting upstairs for a private briefing in his office before venturing over to the Fox Sports Suite, a reception space on the second floor where Murdoch and senior News Corp executives would watch the returns come in. Ailes wanted fresh intelligence.
“What’s your gut say?” Ailes asked.
Ellis pantomimed a knife motion across his throat.
In the messy aftermath of the 2000 election night debacle, and Fox’s central role in the recount drama, liberals would single out the presence of John Ellis as evidence of a conspiracy to propel Bush into the White House. The truth was more complicated. But Ailes’s decision to place a candidate’s cousin in charge of calling an election, regardless of his conduct on election night, reflected a lack of concern about journalistic standards.
Ellis’s Bush family ties were not the only factor that made him a controversial choice to direct Fox News’s election night coverage. While Ellis certainly possessed a sophisticated understanding of national politics, he lacked the mathematical skill that was essential to understand the complex computer models that guided the on-air calls. “From what Ellis says, he does not know how to read the screens,” said Warren Mitofsky, the longtime head of CBS News’s election operation, who is credited with creating the modern exit poll. “I cannot, for the life of me, imagine what Ellis is doing when he makes calls.”
Ellis’s decision team was made up of three people. They included John Gorman, a longtime Democratic pollster who had worked for George McGovern and Jimmy Carter; Arnon Mishkin, a Boston Consulting Group partner and former NBC News analyst; and Cynthia Talkov, a Berkeley-educated statistician, who worked with Gorman at his polling firm, Opinion Dynamics. Fox News received its election night information from the Voter News Service, a consortium established in 1993 by the Associated Press and the five major television networks—ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox—to cut costs by sharing the burden of conducting exit polls and tallying vote counts for Senate, congressional, and presidential races. The consolidated system would become one of the factors that led to the disastrous 2000 results. Although the networks all used the same raw data, each outlet fielded their own decision teams (except CBS and CNN, who shared a joint unit). On election night, when millions of viewers were up for grabs, the pressure to be first—or at least not be last—created perverse incentives inside the competing newsrooms to make premature calls.
Cynthia Talkov, who was mentored by Warren Mitofsky and whom Ellis would later describe as his “statistical wizard,” knew immediately that something was off about Fox News when she joined the decision team for the primaries. To Talkov, Fox seemed like a seat-of-the-pants outfit. She observed Ellis and her colleagues struggle to grasp the Voter News Service computer models. “They didn’t understand half the numbers on the screen.… I couldn’t believe how unqualified they were,” she later recalled. “They weren’t listening to me. I thought maybe it was because I was a woman, I didn’t know.” As a last resort, she brought in the editorial director of the Voter News Service, Murray Edelman, to tutor them on the computer system. Edelman was equally unnerved. “My God, you were right!” he told her after the session. Ellis, Edelman later recalled, was “so arrogant, as though he knew it all. When I talked with him, I thought, ‘Whoa!’—he was so confident, but knew so little.”
And then there was the politics. Although she had worked for the Voter News Service and done opinion polling for Gorman, Talkov never paid much attention to the actual campaigns. She was a moderate Democrat, and had voted for Bill Clinton, but to her, candidates were names “all flagged either Democrat or Republican” on a screen. “I enjoy crunching numbers,” she said. “I’m not in the world of media or politics in any shape or form. People say to me, ‘what’s going on?’ I just tell them, ‘ask my mother, she’s home watching CNN. I don’t know who the candidates are.’ ” So it was a shock to arrive at Fox News and find Ellis, Gorman, and Mishkin gossiping on the phone with political operatives from both parties. “I was brought up in the ranks that we do not talk to any campaigns on election night,” Talkov said. But her initial surprise was nothing compared with the surreal experience she had during the New Hampshire primary. When Ellis stepped away from his desk, Talkov noticed his phone ringing and leaned over to pick it up.
“We’re surging now!” the voice said.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Ge
orge Bush,” the voice returned. “Is my cousin there?”
Talkov was incredulous. VNS numbers were supposed to be strictly confidential. If Ellis disclosed exit poll data to a campaign, he would be in violation of the consortium’s ironclad contract.
When Ellis got back to his desk after his post-cigarette meeting with Ailes, Talkov was hunched over her screen reading the latest exit poll numbers. The new data stream only bolstered the prediction Ellis had just given Ailes. North Carolina and West Virginia were listed as “too close to call,” and Bush was “flat in Ohio,” the state that had elected every president since 1964. The worst news came from the state that mattered most. Shortly after the Florida polls closed at 7:00 p.m., the trend lines shifted in Gore’s direction. At 7:50, the VNS computer showed Gore with a 99.5 percent chance of winning Florida. The “status” menu on the screen read: “Call.”
Ellis’s former colleagues at NBC News did not wait for the official VNS go-ahead. At 7:49, Tom Brokaw announced on air, “We’re going to now project an important win for Vice President Al Gore.” Thirty-one seconds later, Dan Rather declared Gore the Florida victor. CNN echoed Rather’s call. John Moody needed an answer from Ellis. It was up to Moody to sign off on all the calls. He would relay the word to Fox News Sunday producer Marty Ryan in the control room, who would in turn speak the result into Brit Hume’s earpiece. Ellis polled his team about calling Florida. “Any objections?” They all agreed it was Gore. At 7:52, Hume made the pronouncement.
In Bushworld, the Florida call rankled. The polls had yet to close in the Republican-dominated Panhandle. How could they call it for Gore when citizens were still voting? Bush’s senior strategist Karl Rove directed aides to call news executives and complain. Moments after Fox’s call, Ellis’s phone rang. “Jeb, I’m sorry,” Ellis said, speaking to W.’s younger brother, the governor of Florida. “I’m looking at a screenful of Gore.” Jeb asked Ellis about the polls in the conservative Panhandle counties that had not yet been tallied. “I’m sorry. It’s not going to help,” he said.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 32