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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  With the daily headlines no longer driving ratings, Ailes looked for other ways to regain his edge. In the fall of 2006, he brought in an old hand: Woody Fraser. They reconnected at the Los Angeles memorial for Mike Douglas, who had died that year. The following spring, Ailes hired Joel Cheatwood, a veteran television executive from CNN, to gin up programming concepts for Fox. “Roger would call him Helmet Head, because Joel has a very unique coif,” a colleague said. More than for his hair, Cheatwood was known in the industry for being a tabloid-TV revolutionary. As head of a Fox affiliate in Miami in the early 1990s, he juiced ratings with gory, sensationalized crime stories and flashy graphics. And at CNN, Cheatwood and his deputy, Josanne Lopez, who had worked for Ailes at America’s Talking, had discovered a charismatic Philadelphia talk radio host and put him on Headline News. His name was Glenn Beck.

  Over the summer, Ailes tasked Cheatwood and a small group of executives—Bill Shine, Woody Fraser, and Suzanne Scott—to propose steps that would halt the ratings slide. “Roger likes things to be produced simply and overtly,” a producer said. “For example, he likes words in graphics to be big. There is a story he tells all the time about the live bug”—the graphic in the lower corner of the screen. “He made his bigger than CNN’s at the launch, then, when CNN made its bigger, Roger made his bigger still. He kept doing that until CNN gave up.”

  O’Reilly’s was the only show that seemed to be working and Ailes expressed uneasiness about it. “One person should not be the identity of this network,” he told executives. Ideas were thrown around about shuffling shows and hosts. One glaring weak spot was Hannity & Colmes. The show typically had higher ratings than its rival 9:00 p.m. offerings, but was far from meeting corporate expectations. While some observers said the format of left-and-right pundits was an anachronism, the consensus at Fox was that Colmes was the problem. After a decade, liberals were convinced he was a patsy; and conservatives simply did not want to listen to him. It was like a pro wrestling match where the result was scripted, the outcome the same every time. Hannity himself was one of Colmes’s most vocal detractors. “Sean was bitter he had to do the show with Alan for many years,” a senior producer said. Hannity also complained that Colmes did not hustle to book guests. As the Iraq War intensified, Hannity bombarded the White House with pushy personal appeals. “If you don’t give me Powell for the TV show, I’m going to fuck you on the radio,” he snapped to a press aide.

  “We don’t do debate shows,” the aide said. Hannity repeated his threat.

  “Listen,” the aide replied. “There is a policy of this government that we don’t negotiate with terrorists and those who harbor them.”

  In 2007, Hannity and Colmes’s relationship continued to unravel. “There were times he’d freeze Alan out and be curt with him,” said a former senior producer at Fox. “Sean became less close-mouthed about his feelings about Alan. They’d sit on set right before the show and Sean would say, ‘What’s it going to be like when you’re gone?’ ”

  One of the paradoxes of Ailes’s management style was that, while he bulldozed through barriers, he could be excruciatingly cautious when it came to making talent decisions, which frustrated his executives. He wavered when they suggested dumping Colmes. “Roger wanted the counterpoint,” the senior executive said. “They were a team. That’s what Fox was—these people. The only thing that changed in the prime-time lineup were the women, from Catherine to Paula to Greta.” As a stopgap, in January 2007, Ailes gave Hannity a Sunday night solo show. But Ailes still had doubts. While he shared Hannity’s hard-right politics, he privately complained that he was too stiff. “I want you guys to slap him in his head,” Ailes told Bill Shine. “There’s entertainment value here and he doesn’t get it. When he’s on camera, it’s like he expects Alan to have an epiphany on air and say, ‘You know, Sean, you’re right. I’ve been such a moron for fifty years. How did I not see it?’ ”

  Hannity’s pressure ate at Colmes. In the fall of 2008, Fox announced Colmes was leaving the show.

  As usual for Fox, salvation was on the horizon, in the form of a presidential election, which was certain to provide the armature of a new narrative. For the first time in eight years, Democrats and Republicans would be choosing candidates for the general election. The jump ball for the nomination on both sides of the aisle gave Ailes an opportunity to reignite the passions of his weary audience, who could rally behind a Republican nominee and enjoy a compelling gladiator death match on the Democratic side.

  The obvious priority was the Republican primary. In early 2007, Ailes dispatched senior executives to lock down the highest-profile GOP debates. Katon Dawson, the former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, recalled how Fox outmaneuvered CNN in the negotiations to air the primary debate on May 15, 2007, in Columbia. Although Wolf Blitzer personally lobbied Dawson on behalf of CNN, Fox was swifter with its official pitch, and had carrots CNN did not. “Fox had a specific South Carolina audience. A very Republican audience,” Dawson said. Fox also had sticks. “I would never want to get on the wrong side of Roger Ailes,” he added.

  Those who crossed Ailes during his campaign to win the Republican primary telecasts faced his fury. On February 14, 2007, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation announced that it was partnering with MSNBC and Politico to host a debate, which would be moderated by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Ailes complained to Fox executives that NBC and Politico cut an inside deal with the library. Frederick Ryan Jr., the chairman of the Reagan foundation’s board, was also the president and CEO of Politico. Ryan had recused himself from the selection process, but Ailes was not appeased. “Roger likes to win, not most games, but every game, every single day,” Ryan said. Fox hosts began denouncing Politico as “far left wing.”

  The Republican debates took on more urgency after Democrats mobilized to freeze Fox out of their primaries. Ailes had triggered the backlash himself. On March 8, Ailes was in Washington to accept a First Amendment Leadership Award from a group of radio and television news directors. During his speech, he mixed up Barack Obama’s name with Osama bin Laden, for humorous effect. “And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said. “I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called [Pakistan president Pervez] Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’ ” Ailes’s impudence fed into a narrative about Fox’s hysteria over Obama’s candidacy. A couple of months earlier, Steve Doocy announced on Fox & Friends that Obama had attended a madrassa funded by “Saudis” in Indonesia. Obama advisers erupted, labeling the claim “completely ludicrous.” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications chief, called Moody to complain. Moody said he could not control Fox & Friends. “It’s an entertainment show,” Moody explained.

  On March 9, a day after Ailes jokingly confused Obama with Osama, the Nevada Democratic Party canceled its Fox News debate. It was a move progressive groups like MoveOn.org had been calling for. Fox quickly fired back. David Rhodes, Moody’s deputy for news, was put out front, to issue a statement. “News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic Caucus, which appears to be controlled by radical fringe, out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party,” Rhodes said.

  Ailes triangulated. Around this time, he ran into Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and suggested Fox could co-host a televised debate with the group in Detroit. It was a difficult sell, because many caucus members saw Fox as hostile to African Americans. Ailes met privately with former Michigan congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick. When she questioned him about his interest in civil rights, Ailes whipped out a photo of himself with Malcolm X on the set of The Mike Douglas Show. Kilpatrick was swayed. On March 29, Fox announced that the CBC would host a pair of debates on Fox News, the first taking place in Detroit in September. But the maneuver failed. One week later, the Democratic National Committee announced that Fox News would be shut out from hosting the six official DNC primary debates. The next day,
John Edwards pulled out of the Detroit debate, and the following Monday, Clinton and Obama announced that they were aligning with Edwards on the Fox boycott. “CNN seemed like a more appropriate venue,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton told the press.

  The problem with the 2008 Republican primaries from an entertainment standpoint was that the talent was weak. Around the second floor, Ailes evinced little enthusiasm for his party’s 2008 candidates, who included former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, John McCain, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and Kansas senator Sam Brownback. Ailes called them the “seven dwarves.” He made an exception for an old friend: Rudy Giuliani. In April, Giuliani was a guest at News Corp’s table at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. What’s more, Fox gave the New York mayor an invaluable national platform to propel his candidacy. A study found that in the first six months of 2007, Fox gave Giuliani more interview time than any other candidate.

  Which is why the news that broke on Tuesday afternoon, November 13, two weeks before the crucial GOP debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, threatened to derail Giuliani’s campaign. Judith Regan, the flamboyantly abrasive HarperCollins book publisher, filed a $100 million defamation suit against News Corp. It was the latest chapter in a tabloid circus that followed Regan’s abrupt firing the previous December, and would soon entangle Ailes and Giuliani in a web of competing agendas.

  At the heart of it was television. Books had fueled Judith Regan’s rise. A former National Enquirer reporter, she possessed a sixth tabloid sense, which she tapped to publish a string of salacious bestsellers—including Howard Stern’s Private Parts and Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love like a Porn Star. But her desire was to be bigger, more famous, than her celebrity authors. In 2006, Regan got Murdoch’s permission to pay O. J. Simpson $880,000 for the rights to publish If I Did It, Simpson’s hypothetical “confession.” The book was a centerpiece of Regan’s plan to reinvent herself as a prime-time personality. (In 2002, when Ailes canceled her weekly Fox News show, Regan told the press it had been her decision.) To roll out Simpson’s book, Regan would interview Simpson for a prime-time special to air on Fox TV. Regan had even relocated to Los Angeles in a quest to become a “multi-platform” media star—an Oprah for the Sex and the City Age.

  The whole thing blew back massively at Regan and News Corp on November 14, 2006, when details of the Simpson book and television special first appeared in the press. As pundits moralized about Regan’s morally suspect pursuit of profit, the flurry of headlines metastasized into a full-fledged corporate crisis. After days of withering criticism, News Corp pulled the plug. Although Murdoch and HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman had supported the project, Regan took the brunt of the blame for the scandal. By this point, Regan had few allies left inside News Corp. In a company full of massive egos, she stood apart. Stories of her office rage and the way she tormented underlings were legend. “Judith would call them ‘cunts’ who only had a job because of her hard work,” one former employee said. Things got so out of control that, in 2003, News Corp opened an HR investigation into her behavior. Jane Friedman, who had clashed with Regan for years, was running out of patience.

  In December 2006, Friedman fired Regan. She got the news in Los Angeles when her work computer suddenly was shut off. The two-sentence press release went out on December 15. Accounts soon leaked to reporters that Regan had been dismissed after she made an anti-Semitic slur to Mark Jackson, a HarperCollins lawyer. During a heated phone conversation, Regan allegedly told Jackson, who was Jewish, that a “Jewish cabal” was out to get her. “Of all people, the Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie,” Regan allegedly said. Her lawyer, Bert Fields, strenuously denied the account, attributing the termination to Regan’s long-running feud with Friedman. As crass as she sometimes was, Regan vehemently objected to being branded an anti-Semite. Striking back, she had leverage.

  Like Ailes, Regan was a brilliant storyteller and mythmaker. Her November 2007 lawsuit was no exception. The complaint, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, read like a pitch for a pulp corporate whodunit she might have published. “This action arises from a deliberate smear campaign orchestrated by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates for the sole purpose of destroying one woman’s credibility and reputation,” it began. “This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp’s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions.” Regan’s narrative sizzled with sex, power, and money. The media seized on an alluring nugget about Regan’s affair with Giuliani’s disgraced former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was indicted the previous week on multiple federal corruption charges. Her lawsuit alleged that a “senior executive at News Corp told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive told Regan to lie to, and withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.” Regan would later allege that the unnamed executive was Roger Ailes.

  The next week, the strength of Regan’s hand became immediately apparent. Susan Estrich, a Fox News contributor and Regan friend, was at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s home in Malibu when she got a tip that, like Andrea Mackris, Regan possessed a trump card. Regan claimed to have secretly captured Ailes on tape allegedly advising her to lie to the Feds. Estrich got a copy of Regan’s complaint and called her friend Joel Kaufman, who had been Regan’s producer at Fox. “We have to help Roger,” she said. “We’ve got to strategize how we deal with this.”

  Ailes passed Estrich off to his personal lawyer, Peter Johnson Sr., a former street cop turned hard-nosed Manhattan litigator who had taken part in the battle at Iwo Jima in World War II. A meeting with Murdoch and News Corp’s senior legal team was convened. In Murdoch’s cold calculus, Ailes was the asset that needed to be protected. Murdoch had come to blame Jane Friedman for impatiently firing Regan, which had set off the unfortunate chain of events. “He’s the talent. News Corp wants to make sure we helped him as much as we could in a way that was legal,” an executive involved in the talks said.

  The view inside News Corp was that Regan was capable of anything. Estrich, who was dispatched to act as a backchannel intermediary between Ailes and Regan, advised her against releasing the tape. “Susan acted as Judith’s shrink,” one executive said, “making sure she did not self-destruct.” Complicating matters, Regan’s camp refused to allow Murdoch and his lieutenants to listen to her alleged tape of Ailes. Without knowing what was precisely said, News Corp’s lawyers were flying blind. In meetings, Ailes denied he advised Regan to obstruct justice. “It’s embarrassing,” he told his lawyers, referring to his conversation with Regan. “I use salty language.” Lon Jacobs, who was then News Corp’s general counsel, pressed Johnson for hard facts. “I need to know what News Corp’s exposure is,” he said. Johnson backed his client up. He assured Jacobs that Ailes had said nothing illegal on the tape. Even if Regan relented, Jacobs did not want to hear the recording. News Corp’s outside counsel advised him not to listen to it, in case Ailes had made incriminating remarks.

  Regan’s deft play pushed News Corp to fold. On January 25, 2008, four days before the Florida primary, News Corp settled the lawsuit for $10.75 million, with no admission of guilt by either party. As part of the deal, Regan signed a nondisclosure agreement and a letter stating that Ailes had not pressured her to lie to assist Giuliani (News Corp kept a copy of her letter on file, in case they needed to release it at some point). After the Mackris case, it was the second time in less than four years that a News Corp employee earned millions of dollars for keeping the secrets of Fox News out of the press.

  The settlement did not reverse Giuliani’s fortunes. He dropped out of the presidential race five days later, after placing third in Florida. Years later, Regan blamed Ailes for smearing her. “Connect the dots,” she told a reporter.

  The marathon battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination was the bigg
est story of 2008—and for most of the campaign, Fox struggled to grab a piece of it. CNN’s prime-time audience was surging, up 42 percent in January from a year earlier, and up 68 percent in the third quarter of the year. Wolf Blitzer—a decidedly un-cable personality—was somehow anchoring the highest-rated election night show. MSNBC was also finding success as a destination for an energized liberal audience. In the fall of 2007, Tim Russert called Phil Griffin into his office in the Washington bureau and said, “Griff, you’re gonna have the greatest election of our lifetime. Own it.” Griffin debuted a new tagline: “The Place for Politics”—a phrase Russert had happened to say on the air. “It gave us the focus that we never had,” Griffin later said. “We once branded ourselves ‘America’s News Channel.’ It was a lie! We weren’t.”

  Watching CNN and MSNBC benefiting from the Obama phenomenon, Ailes found a way to counterprogram. “Roger felt that as Obama emerged as a candidate, the media was giving undue coverage to him,” a person close to Ailes recalled. “At one point he said, ‘We have to be the one to balance the Democratic side.’ ” Despite his partisan bluster, Ailes continued to triangulate. In early 2008, Fox News and Hillary Clinton, who was performing strongly with blue-collar white voters in the industrial heartland—Fox News country—forged one such surprising alliance.

  Hillary needed all the allies she could get. Relations between the Clinton campaign and MSNBC had all but broken down. The day after Clinton roared back into the race winning the New Hampshire primary in January, Chris Matthews declared that her political career was made possible because “her husband messed around.” MSNBC president Phil Griffin ordered Matthews to apologize, but it did little to mollify the Clinton camp. At Clinton campaign headquarters, an order went out that none of the twenty televisions in the press room were allowed to be tuned to MSNBC. On the evening of February 7—two days after Super Tuesday—David Shuster, MSNBC’s political correspondent, speculated that Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” in a bid to win over super-delegates. After Hillary threatened to boycott future MSNBC debates, the network suspended Shuster. In early March, Chris Matthews again displayed MSNBC’s Obama tilt when he gushed on air that Obama’s oratory talents gave him a “thrill going up my leg.”