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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  And just to ensure that there was no confusion about Ailes’s ultimate wishes, Ailes conducted “fair and balanced” seminars himself. “He would call a group of senior producers and make you watch the channel and he’d point out stuff, like a banner that’s slightly liberal,” a senior producer recalled. “He would say, ‘The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.’ ”

  Ailes maintained to his newsroom that “fair and balanced” had nothing to do with a partisan agenda. “Am I a Republican? Sure,” he said in a staff meeting. “But does that mean that my news network is biased Republican? Of course not.”

  Beyond the politics, however, Fox’s lodestar was Ailes himself. At the Fox News Christmas party in 2002, held at a Midtown Manhattan bar, Ailes was conspicuously absent, but at one point in the evening employees were instructed to watch a Fox News presentation on a large video monitor set up in the basement. The MSNBC and CNN logos appeared on the screen and elicited boos from the crowd. On the third slide, Ailes’s picture popped up. The attendees went wild, chanting, “Roger … Roger … Roger … Roger!”

  As the administration rolled out its sales pitch for the war, Ailes installed a new head of daytime programming to package the production, promoting Jerry Burke, the producer of Shepard Smith’s nightly newscast. Burke expressed a tabloid editor’s thrill for the biggest story of a generation. Not long after 9/11, John Moody offered him the position overseeing the 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. news block.

  “Will you keep the car on the road or will you crash it?” Moody said.

  “I want to see how fast it can go,” Burke told him.

  Fox’s raucous cheerleading disguised the fact that, on a complex story like international terrorism, the channel was at a distinct disadvantage against its rivals. At the time, Fox News had just 1,200 employees and six foreign bureaus. CNN, in contrast, employed 4,000 people and had thirty-one international bureaus. When the war in Afghanistan started, Fox had no one on the ground, while CNN had a correspondent in the country. Although MSNBC was struggling to develop an identity, it still had the robust newsgathering assets of NBC News to fall back on.

  So Burke improvised. Shortly after receiving the promotion, he teamed up with two staffers on the assignment desk—David Rhodes and Eric Spinato—to develop a flanking maneuver designed to pick away viewers from their better-funded rivals. They called it “Operation Rolling Thunder.” CNN may have been the entrenched opposition, but Fox News would cover the story in a way that would be irresistible to viewers. Terrorism would become serial entertainment. “Fox approached news differently,” a staffer who had done time at other networks said. “It wasn’t actual journalism where you say, ‘Let’s go see what’s going on.’ At Fox, it’s ‘This is what we’re doing, so go do it.’ ”

  Every morning, Burke got off the commuter train at Penn Station determined to inflict damage on the competition. He told people that producing news was like scanning a searchlight across the horizon to hunt for the right story. His first read of the day was the Drudge Report, not The New York Times. Whatever items seemed to be generating heat on the right were fodder for the air. Conflict was good. Too much conflict was bad. After an interview with a Muslim guest devolved into a shouting match, Burke hollered across the newsroom, “I need a better Muslim!” He was adept at convincing angry subjects to keep coming back. He cajoled another prominent Muslim guest to back off on his threat to boycott Fox after one particularly harsh interview. “Why would I come on to have someone say I’m a child murderer?” he told Burke.

  “You’re doing a service, you’re getting your message across,” Burke replied. He also told him that, at the end of the day, it was just television. “You need to lighten up.”

  Fox News promoted the buildup to war like a pregame show. Anchors played the role of announcers, championing the home team: America. George Bush was the star quarterback, carrying the hopes of an expectant fan base on his shoulders. On-air, troops were “heroes” and “warriors.” Ailes developed a roster of opponents who sought to block America’s drive down the field. Saddam Hussein was the principal foe, backed up by supporting players: the United Nations, France, Germany, and Al Jazeera. “If they’re going to get us, it’s going to be in a gunfight,” Geraldo Rivera said in one segment from Afghanistan. In November 2001, Ailes lured Rivera away from CNBC to be Fox’s war correspondent. Rivera could be embarrassingly thin on his facts. On December 5, 2001, he reported that he visited the site of a friendly fire bombing raid that left three American servicemen and several Afghan fighters dead. “We walked over what I consider hallowed ground today.… It was just—the whole place, just fried, really—and bits of uniforms and tattered clothing everywhere. I said the Lord’s Prayer and really choked up.” A week later, Baltimore Sun reporter David Folkenflik revealed that Rivera was actually hundreds of miles from the incident he cited. Rivera was indignant. He attributed the error to the “fog of war” and impugned Folkenflik’s manhood. “Have you ever been shot at?” he asked him.

  Ailes was constantly on the lookout for developments to keep the story moving. When Dan Rather sat down with Hussein on CBS News in February 2003, Ailes smelled a rat. “Did [the Iraqis] have pre-look at his questions?” he complained to his executives. “Was anybody in the room with a weapon? … I have less of a problem in getting in a room with Saddam Hussein with ground rules as long as those ground rules are disclosed.” Similarly, Time magazine’s interview with French president Jacques Chirac—a former Ailes Communications client—was a “total setup” and “anti-American.” “Nowhere in the Time magazine interview,” Ailes huffed, “do they say, ‘Mr. Chirac, do you have any business dealings with Iraq? Mr. Chirac, is there a one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar oil contract with Iraq? Mr. Chirac, weren’t you the guy that went over and set up a nuclear reactor? … How about the seven million Muslims down the street that are going to blow up the Eiffel Tower? Does that bother you?’ There are a few other questions that a few other good journalists would work into the interview.”

  People who questioned Bush’s policies were put on notice. “Americans and, indeed, our allies who actively work against our military once the war is under way will be considered enemies of the state by me,” Bill O’Reilly told his viewers. “Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand, and others who see the world as you do.” You could even see it if you walked by Fox’s Manhattan headquarters. When antiwar protesters staged a rally on Fifth Avenue in March 2003, Ailes allowed Marvin Himelfarb, the comedy writer who had worked with him at America’s Talking, to use the ticker to taunt them. It read: “ATTENTION PROTESTERS: THE MICHAEL MOORE FAN CLUB MEETS THURSDAY AT A PHONE BOOTH AT SIXTH AVENUE AND 50TH STREET.”

  Five days before America began its Shock and Awe bombing campaign, Fox News’s creative director, Richard O’Brien, hired a composer to write the network’s theme music for the war. He titled it “Liberation Iraq Music.” “The other networks, they always go for that John Williams, big, grand music, but our music is always pointedly more aggressive,” O’Brien explained. After listening to the sample, O’Brien told the composer to ramp up the intensity and add “more tom-tom drums because they had more urgency. I wanted it to sound like, I don’t want to say war drums, but …”

  Fox also created high-octane advertisements to introduce war segments. In one, a fighter jet streaked across the screen and morphed into an American eagle as the words “War on Terror” flashed. The script for a thirty-second Fox promotion read like a campaign spot: “Fox News Channel. The country at war. Stay with us for breaking news and live updates, fair and balanced, exclusively from the team you trust: Fox News Channel. On the ground. In the air. Reports from the front. Inside the conflict. War coverage, second to none. Fox News Channel. The political fallout. With eyes around the world, a commitment here at home. The first place to turn for the latest in news—Fox News Channel. Real Journalism. Fair and balanced.”

  In other ways, Ailes muted the coverage to build suspe
nse. Anchor Bob Sellers recalled how the whooshing “Fox News Alerts” were used less frequently before the invasion so they would pack more punch when the fighting began. For the viewers, Fox provided a fully immersive experience that made them feel like they were going into battle alongside the heroic American liberators. On March 20, shortly after the invasion commenced, an on-screen banner made the point explicitly. “Fox troops with U.S. troops heading into Iraq,” it read.

  Ailes’s embrace of Bush’s hawkish, neoconservative agenda had a potent political consequence for the Republican Party. Fox’s support of the war successfully marginalized the antiwar voices that existed on the right. Republican war critics like former George H. W. Bush national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Pat Buchanan found themselves drowned out by Fox’s boisterous boosterism. “The conservatives were not going to go anywhere,” a Bush official later said. “You didn’t have an isolationist wing anymore. Once you had political will on the right for the war, you had a changing political environment.” As a public relations matter, this changing political environment freed the White House to promote the invasion to a broader constituency. “We needed to sell the war to the middle,” the official said. They succeeded. The New York Times’s Judith Miller was one of the most aggressive promoters of the claim made by the administration that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a chief justification of the war. Bush officials found welcome receptions on the Sunday talk show circuit.

  Ailes’s network was invaluable in this sales effort. And Fox’s ratings dominance also played a significant role in the media’s abdication of journalistic skepticism in the coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath. Fox’s cable news rivals approached the 9/11 story already spooked by Fox’s post-recount surge. Both CNN and MSNBC were under pressure from their corporate parents to catch up to Fox. An obvious strategy was to become more conservative. In the summer of 2001, CNN chief Walter Isaacson courted Republicans. He traveled to Washington for private meetings with Senate majority leader Trent Lott and House speaker Dennis Hastert. He also wooed Rush Limbaugh and offered him a show. In October 2001, Isaacson sent a memo to CNN producers chastising them for not being patriotic enough. “We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people,” he wrote. “We must redouble our efforts to make sure we do not seem to be simply reporting from their vantage or perspective.”

  At MSNBC, Ailes’s influence was even more pronounced. Microsoft and GE’s cable news partnership was in deep trouble. As Ailes predicted, MSNBC’s strategy to promote the channel with NBC News celebrities backfired. NBC’s broadcast stars, accustomed to reaching millions, sniffed at cable news’s comparatively tiny audiences. MSNBC assigned senior producer Phil Griffin to convince royalty like Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw to increase their appearances. “It was torture,” Griffin recalled. Griffin was a good choice to finesse difficult egos. Prior to joining MSNBC at its launch, he worked with many of them as a producer for NBC Nightly News and the Today show.

  But no amount of Griffin’s diplomacy could obscure the fact that MSNBC was faltering. As the ratings sagged, MSNBC was riven by finger-pointing. After Bush’s election, Jack Welch and senior GE executives began leaning on Griffin’s boss, MSNBC’s president Erik Sorenson, to catch up with Ailes. “Jack would say, I understand why Fox has more ratings, it’s more interesting!” recalled a former executive. At management reviews with Welch and senior GE executives, Sorenson was peppered with questions that he experienced as political interference. “Why is Fox beating us? Maybe we should also be a conservative channel? What if you try and cut their audience in half?”

  For years, the values of an older generation of news churchmen held considerable sway at MSNBC. Tim Russert watched Fox with unease. An Olympian figure inside NBC News, Russert acted as an information hub, a kingmaker, and the scorekeeper to official Washington. “Let’s just do news,” he told Sorenson in one meeting. “I see what Fox’s ratings are. However, you have to understand, if you do news really well, you’ll get ratings.”

  The ratings did not materialize. So Russert’s resistance proved futile when Jeffrey Immelt succeeded Welch as GE’s CEO four days before 9/11 and increased pressure on Sorenson and NBC News executives to tap into the nationalistic fervor. “MSNBC is a dot on the side of a pool ball,” Immelt told NBC News president Neal Shapiro, “but it’s embarrassing. I don’t like being No. 3.” Following 9/11, NBC CEO Bob Wright gave Shapiro a direct order: MSNBC should go right-wing, like Fox. “We have to be more conservative than they are,” Wright said. Shapiro complied. MSNBC rebranded itself “America’s News Channel” and splashed American flag graphics on the screen.

  But MSNBC’s message was mixed. In April 2002, Phil Griffin brought Phil Donahue, a passionate liberal who had been Griffin’s childhood idol, out of retirement to anchor an 8:00 p.m. prime-time talk show that would challenge Bill O’Reilly. Donahue was a former major leaguer, with great name recognition, and the show debuted with the highest ratings ever for an MSNBC program, attracting more than a million viewers in its first night. But within a month, the audience was slashed in half. Donahue’s tumultuous run at MSNBC revealed Ailes’s power to shape the media culture. As Donahue’s ratings stalled in the run-up to the war, MSNBC executives expressed increasing concern about his vocal antiwar views. At a time when red-meat patriotism prevailed, Donahue booked antiwar guests like Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins.

  Donahue’s problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews saw himself as MSNBC’s biggest star—he commanded a salary of $5 million—and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue’s show. Shortly before the war started, Sorenson and Griffin took Donahue off the air to make way for 24/7 coverage. For Griffin, the firing of his childhood idol was a career low point. “The guy that got me into TV probably hates my guts, and I wish he didn’t because I love the guy,” he recalled.

  As his rivals flailed, Ailes gleefully poked at them in the press, though he usually kept his hand hidden. On the day MSNBC announced it was canceling Donahue, Brian Lewis told him Fox had a press release ready that would mock their decision. “We’re putting it out that Donahue’s numbers were higher than Matthews’,” he said.

  Lewis’s staff regularly fed reporters with embarrassing news and gossip about Fox’s competitors. After Andy Lack was quoted in the Times declaring he was “America’s news leader,” a Fox PR person sent an email to reporters that featured the quote and a Photoshopped picture of Lack’s face superimposed onto Napoleon’s body. After MSNBC anchor Ashleigh Banfield generated positive headlines for her post-9/11 dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan—which featured her head wrapped in a shawl and her Clark Kent–style glasses peeking out—Lewis’s deputy, Robert Zimmerman, wanted to embarrass her in The Washington Post. “Take her out,” Brian Lewis told him. Zimmerman called Post reporter Paul Farhi and fed him a tip that foreign correspondents were laughing that Banfield, despite her intrepid image as a foreign correspondent, was scared to leave her hotel.

  Ailes’s search-and-destroy approach to journalism and public relations destabilized his cable news opponents. They complained he played by a different set of rules. The news business was supposed to operate by a different creed than politics. Ailes did not agree. He had people on his payroll, like former Tomorrow producer John Huddy, who helped him devise political strategy. “He was the oppo research guy,” one executive said. Ailes deployed Fox programs in service of his goals. He ran a relentless campaign against CNN. One morning in late fall 2001, Ailes called Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy and narrated a script for him to read. “Steve, just say that [CNN news anchor] Aaron [Brown]’s your dentist. Then have your co-anchor say, ‘He’s not a dentist. He’s on CNN!’ … No matter what happens, even if they torture you, say he’s your dentist!” Doocy obediently followed Ailes’s stage di
rection. “You know who’s really jealous about our merchandising?” Doocy said during a segment promoting Fox-branded mugs and T-shirts. “My dentist is so jealous. You’ve seen him on TV—Aaron Brown. You know, the guy on CNN—he does that show at night? He just works nights over there. But during the day he’s our dentist. Do we have a picture?” Doocy’s producers splashed Brown’s photo on the screen along with a series of captions. “AARON BROWN DDS … MOLAR MAN … ARROGANT BROWN.”

  Both MSNBC and CNN were too constrained to respond in kind, which was frustrating. “You wake up aware of Roger,” Walter Isaacson told a reporter. “He’s always on the attack,” he said. Bob Wright shared Isaacson’s lament. During a staff meeting with CNBC employees around this time, Wright threw up his hands after CNBC anchor Ron Insana complained about Ailes. “Are we going to continue to let Roger and Brian Lewis nip at us constantly?” Insana said.

  “Fighting with Roger Ailes is a full-time job, and I already have one,” Wright said.

  By early April, with American troops on the outskirts of Baghdad, it appeared the war’s end was in reach. On the morning of April 9, Moody was running his 8:30 editorial meeting when a camera positioned on the roof of the Palestine Hotel—the base for the international press in Baghdad—showed a convoy of American tanks and Humvees surrounding a thirty-nine-foot-tall statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. A small crowd of mostly Iraqi men was milling around the statue’s plaster pedestal. Some smacked it with shoes, trying to impress the nearby photographers.