As the scene on the ground unfolded, Jerry Burke quickly absorbed the symbolic potential of the image, a way of punctuating the narrative with a replay of the images of rapturous East Germans knocking down the Berlin Wall. He immediately alerted his producers to make the most of the cinematic scene in Firdos Square. CNN and the broadcast networks were also carrying the shot live. Fox needed to move fast.
“Rolling Thunder!” he shouted to producers in the newsroom. “No one take a break! Do not leave that fucking shot!” Although firefights were raging in other parts of the city, Fox would not break away from Firdos Square for much of the day.
Burke quickly got David Rhodes on the phone to gather more information from the assignment desk.
“What else is there?” he said.
“We’re working on it,” Rhodes calmly replied.
Luckily, David Chater, a correspondent for Murdoch’s British network, Sky News, was in Firdos Square and also recognized the moment’s television value. He saw that the Marine convoy included an M88 Hercules, a tracked vehicle that was essentially a giant tow truck for tanks. A large crane mounted on the M88’s roof was tall enough to reach the top of the statue. “Get that flag going!” Chater said to one of the Marines.
The event was a collaboration between the military and the media, with both realizing the power of the image. The M88 had moved into position at the statue’s rounded pedestal. The square was largely empty. But the images shown by Fox and the other networks zoomed in tight on the crowd around the statue.
By now, Burke was receiving a string of excited phone calls from senior executives. The Washington bureau called to say that Bret Baier and Brit Hume wanted to get on camera. As the operation in Firdos Square progressed, Fox personalities worked to build anticipation and imbue the images with revolutionary significance. “My goose bumps have never been higher than they are right now,” anchor David Asman said. Brit Hume chimed in: “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen.… This speaks volumes, and with power that no words can really match.”
Cameras focused on a Marine as he climbed the M88’s crane to wrap a chain around Saddam’s head. Someone tossed him an American flag.
The Fox newsroom was transfixed. “What better picture than having our fucking flag in Firdos Square,” one producer later said. “It was the capper on 9/11. The towers went down but the flag went up on that statue. It was like, fuck you, Saddam.” The reaction on air was equally euphoric. “Here we go! The American flag!” a Fox News reporter exclaimed. “There we go! Saddam Hussein is now under the Star Spangled Banner. That’s all you’re gonna see from now on!”
The Pentagon was far less enthusiastic. The image of the American flag covering the statue’s head like an eerie hood threatened to turn the victorious visual into a symbol of American imperialism. The unit’s superior, Major General James Mattis, received a frantic order from the Pentagon to have the flag taken down. Before word could make it up to the crane operator, someone by chance handed him an Iraqi flag.
It was time for the Marines to put the crane into service. As the chain pulled tight, the statue wobbled, and then buckled. It broke off at the waist and jerked forward off its base. A scrum of Iraqi men thronged around it. “ ‘Jubilance’ seems too mild of a word for what you’re seeing here,” a Fox anchor gushed. At a press briefing in Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embraced the media’s artificial narrative. “The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking,” he told reporters. “Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.”
For both Fox News and the White House, the toppling was supposed to be the fulcrum that signaled the story’s final act. Throughout the day, Fox aired clips of the toppling every four and a half minutes, nearly twice as much as CNN. America had exposed the invasion’s doubters to be cowards. “Now that the war in Iraq is basically over, the antiwar crowd is demanding a role in reshaping Iraq’s future. You would almost think the axis of weasels were responsible for winning the war,” a Fox anchor said a few days later. Although thirteen American soldiers were killed in Iraq the week after the scene in Firdos Square, Fox’s coverage of the war plunged by 70 percent. “They had their ending,” a producer said. “For America and the cable news audience, the story began on 9/11 and finished in Firdos Square.”
Except the war was only beginning. And after Firdos Square, Fox’s programming options became much more complicated. The narrative of struggle and triumph had concluded—but what the new narrative should be was far from clear. While Fox personalities and George Bush were declaring mission accomplished, troubling portents of the bungled occupation and brutal sectarian insurgency were impossible to miss.
Increasingly, the administration had to defend what they’d announced they’d won. And Fox was the preferred platform. In September 2003, after no WMDs had turned up, Bush’s communications chief Dan Bartlett worked out a deal for Bush to appear on Fox with Brit Hume to do damage control. It was Bush’s first extended interview since the WMD issue was threatening to become a liability. “I think he hid them,” Bush told Hume. “I think he is so adapted at deceiving the civilized world for a long period of time that it’s going to take a while for the troops to unravel. But I firmly believe he had weapons of mass destruction.”
In the fall of 2003, Fox correspondents looked for upbeat stories that showed “signs of a return to normal life.” One October 1 segment highlighted a renovated school with “excited kids checking out the new teacher.” When a Spanish diplomat was murdered on October 9, Fox aired a piece about a theater production as evidence “that some of the artistic pleasures of life are re-emerging with new freedoms in Iraq.”
Hume and others told the audience that the war was going fine, and it was the media that was portraying it negatively. “For a huge part of the Iraqi population, life is returning to normal and has picked up enormously … why would one go over there only to cover the bad news?” Hume complained in one segment.
John Moody told producers not to give too much attention to the rising number of U.S. deaths. “Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of US lives and asking out loud why are we there?” Moody wrote in one newsroom memo. “The US is in Iraq to help a country brutalized for 30 years protect the gains made by Operation Iraqi Freedom and set it on the path to democracy. Some people in Iraq don’t want that to happen. That is why American GIs are dying. And what we should remind our viewers.” Moody’s contention was that in war, people die. “It was the same reason why he hated hurricanes and snowstorms,” a colleague explained. “He would say, ‘Why are you surprised it’s snowing in the wintertime?’ ”
Not long after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Moody called the newsroom and told producers to refrain from putting the photographs of abused Iraqi prisoners on a continuous loop. “You know what? I’ve seen enough of these,” he said. In a memo, he said Fox producers should also focus on grisly pictures of an American prisoner. “[T]he pictures from Abu Graeb [sic] prison are disturbing,” he said. “They have rightly provoked outrage. Today we have a picture—aired on Al Arabiya—of an American hostage being held with a scarf over his eyes, clearly against his will. Who’s outraged on his behalf? It is important that we keep the Abu Graeb [sic] situation in perspective. The story is beginning to live on its own momentum.”
In 2004, Fox even considered hiring Dan Senor, the Pentagon’s thirty-three-year-old spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, to oversee Fox’s war coverage. His rose-tinted briefings from the Green Zone became an exemplar of wishful thinking. Senor turned down the offer, but signed on as a paid contributor.
As it became increasingly evident that the war in Iraq was not the victory that Fox had helped to proclaim, Ailes began to turn his audience’s attention in other directions. There was also turmoil in the executive suite. In the fall of 2003, Ailes and Brian Le
wis entered into a contentious contract negotiation over Lewis’s future at the network. On the surface, it was a dispute over money. Ailes told people that Lewis was asking for too much. “I’ll just fire him and put Zimmerman in his place!” he fumed, referring to Lewis’s deputy, Robert Zimmerman. In reality, the friction represented a struggle between mentor and protégé. For a decade, Lewis had worked in Ailes’s shadow. At forty-six, he asserted himself more, but Ailes chafed at his independent streak, calling Lewis a “cowboy” and a “leaker.” Feeling frustrated, Lewis explored other job offers. One day in November, as Lewis was negotiating with Ailes in his office, the conflict reached a head.
“You demand loyalty from people, but you never show it,” Lewis told him.
Ailes grimaced. He grabbed a water bottle on his desk and hurled it in Lewis’s direction. It thudded against the wall. “I missed you on purpose,” he said.
After the meeting, Lewis told colleagues that his time at Fox might be over. When Judy Laterza walked into his office, he teared up. Six weeks later, in February 2004, Ailes relented and signed Lewis to a new deal. Ailes would need Lewis by his side.
EIGHTEEN
“WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS POWER?”
AT FOX, ONE OF THE MEANINGS of “fair and balanced” was that an outspoken Democrat could play a key role in the prime-time dismantling of the Democratic nominee for president. On Wednesday, August 4, 2004, Bill Shine recruited Patrick Halpin, a Long Island politician and liberal television pundit, to fill in for Alan Colmes, who was on vacation. It was a side gig that the plainspoken fifty-one-year-old had been holding down for a few years. Halpin and Shine met at the Long Island PBS station WLIW in the early 1990s, where Shine was a producer and Halpin hosted a Crossfire knockoff. Despite their political differences, the two clicked. “He was very grounded. I wouldn’t call Bill Shine an ideologue,” Halpin said.
Halpin only met Ailes once. “You know I elected two presidents?” Ailes said when Shine brought Halpin around the offices. Although he was not a Fox regular, Halpin knew the drill. “It’s show business, make no mistake about it,” he said. It’s why, even though he knew Hannity & Colmes was rigged to make the liberal lose, he welcomed Shine’s invitations to joust on air. It was good sport. Still, Halpin was troubled by some of the subtle tricks Hannity’s producers pulled to manipulate the audience, like making the liberal co-host say the slogan “fair and balanced” on air. Halpin tried several times over the years to get out of reading it, but to no avail. “You could never change the script,” he said. “They know exactly who their audience is: white men,” he said. “They give them a message that resonates.” Shine had told him as much. “I remember asking him once, ‘Bill, what’s with all these hot blondes?’ He just smiled and said, ‘you know, I gotta tell you, the ratings go through the roof.’ ”
The August 4 edition of Hannity & Colmes would forever change the way Halpin saw Fox. About an hour before going on air, Halpin huddled with Hannity’s producers reviewing the lineup. The final segment caught his eye. “Later in the show, we’ll give you an exclusive look at a new campaign ad that could do some damage to Senator Kerry. We’ll have it before anyone else, and we’ll show it to you here,” his line on the script read. Halpin asked a producer about it but got a vague reply, something about a new conservative ad that had to do with a then-unfamiliar term: Swift Boats. The ad arrived at Fox through Hannity’s right-wing connections. “A new television ad released tomorrow is sure to drive the Kerry campaign crazy,” Hannity said on the air. “It was paid for by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and it features Vietnam vets who are opposing Senator Kerry’s candidacy. Now Hannity & Colmes has exclusively obtained a copy of this ad before anybody else. Let’s take a peek.”
The spot opened on a grainy black-and-white photograph of Kerry in his Vietnam uniform, standing in a group of young servicemen. Vice presidential candidate John Edwards’s voice, pulled from a stump speech, narrated the opening frames: “If you ask any question about what John Kerry is made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him thirty years ago.” Bold text replaced Kerry’s photo on the screen: “Here’s what those men think about John Kerry,” it read. Testimonials from middle-aged men played in quick succession. “I served with John Kerry.… I served with John Kerry.… John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam.… He’s lying about his record.… I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart, because I treated him for that injury.… John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know. I was there. I saw what happened.”
“That’s a hard-hitting ad,” Hannity remarked when it was over. He told his viewers that, in addition to airing the ad in its entirety the next night, he would talk live with the Swift Boat vets themselves before allowing the Kerry campaign to respond. “We’ll get both sides,” he promised.
Halpin first thought the effort was “preposterous.” Smearing Kerry’s military service smacked of desperation. Off-camera, Hannity assured Halpin he was wrong: “This is going to change the whole campaign.”
Hannity was right. The next day, a $500,000 ad campaign hit the airwaves in Ohio, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, key swing states. It was a modest buy. But Fox News gave the ad the oxygen it needed to explode. Throughout the week, hosts and pundits hotly debated the charges from all sides. On August 5, Brit Hume’s newscast ran two segments about the ad. That night, Bill O’Reilly, burnishing his no-spin bona fides, castigated Kerry’s accusers. “I think this is awful,” he complained to Dick Morris.
“I not only think it’s awful, I think it’s stupid and dangerous,” Morris replied.
Pro or con, it did not matter. Just talking about the controversy gave it juice. “Cable news,” Ailes said around this time, was “beginning to change the agenda of what is news.” The Swift Boat controversy, driven by Fox, showed a clear evolution from the Clinton era. The scandal around Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was at its core a real story. But Swift Boat began as a campaign commercial, spurring a cable-ready argument over what the underlying facts might be—the controversy was primary. And for Ailes, it was an apotheosis: take-no-prisoners campaign politics and engrossing television in one indivisible package.
The ad was the capstone of an extensive Fox campaign effort. Since Kerry locked up the nomination, Fox had painted a portrait of him as an out-of-touch Francophone with a superrich, foreign wife. “There were subtle commands from the second floor, like he’s French,” one senior producer recalled. Fox anchors helped transform Kerry into a cartoon. “He may be a Boston aristocrat with an Ivy League education and cousins in France, but that did not make it fair to laugh when John Kerry said last week that he pays close attention to rap music because it says something important,” Brit Hume quipped in one segment in April. It was a message reinforced in John Moody’s newsroom memos. “Kerry, starting to feel the heat for his flip-flop voting record, is in West Virginia,” the news chief wrote in March. The Swift Boat ad offered Fox’s audience a chance to relive the old grudge matches of the Vietnam generation. “Ribbons or medals? Which did John Kerry throw away after he returned from Vietnam?” Moody wrote in April. “This may become an issue for him today. His perceived disrespect for the military could be more damaging to the candidate than questions about his actions in uniform.”
Of all the Fox hosts, Hannity gave the story line momentum. The week after he debuted the ad with Halpin, Hannity aired the first television interview with John O’Neill, the Texas lawyer who founded the Swift Boat group, while he was promoting his anti-Kerry book, Unfit for Command. “I read the book,” Hannity told O’Neill. “It’s frankly devastating to Senator Kerry, what his fellow Vietnam guys are saying, what they experienced with him. They contradict just about every story he has told about his experience here.”
“It’s a pattern of total lying and exaggeration, much of it very demeaning to the other people that served with him,” O’Neill replied.
Unfit for Command hit the top of the Times bestseller list,
and CNN and MSNBC were compelled to cover the story, too. “Heck, I know our group did in the range of a thousand different television and radio interviews. They were on virtually every network,” O’Neill later said. Looking back, he was thrilled with the results. “Giving the kidney to my wife was the best thing I ever did. The Swift Boat [ads] was the second best.”
Many Democrats saw the controversy as so obviously contrived as to pose no danger to their candidate. But Kerry’s supporters didn’t understand the new dynamics of cable television. They ignored the warnings of liberals close to Ailes who knew his playbook. It proved a grave miscalculation.
Fox News contributor Susan Estrich was one. When she watched the Swift Boat story snowball, she recalled her experience running Dukakis’s 1988 campaign. All the dynamics were repeating themselves. In ’88, the Willie Horton ad was produced by an outside group with shadowy connections to the George H. W. Bush campaign. The Swift Boat attack was also funded by powerful Republicans with financial and personal ties to the George W. Bush campaign. In 2004, however, the authors of Kerry’s demise had one crucial advantage: Fox News. The group behind the Willie Horton spot had to buy airtime and hope the broadcast media and newspapers would pick it up. With Fox News, conservatives had a twenty-four-hour network that allowed them to inject attack lines directly into the political bloodstream. The interplay between political advertising and journalism was an old campaign gambit. When he was a political consultant in the 1980s, Ailes said networks only cared about pictures, conflict, and mistakes. If an ad generated conflict, reporters were bound to cover it as “news.” Fox News was a perpetual conflict machine.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 37