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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  On Friday, October 23, Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, called Clemente to work out a truce. Clemente didn’t take the call. Gibbs complained to Fox’s well-regarded White House correspondent, Major Garrett, that Clemente had blown him off. On Monday, Garrett told Ailes and Clemente on a conference call that the White House was looking to make peace.

  Clemente finally called Gibbs on October 27 and traveled to Washington the next day to try to ease the tensions. In November, on a trip to Asia, Obama granted an interview to Garrett, his first since the war with Fox began. Both sides walked away claiming victory. But Major Garrett had had enough. Months later, he quit Fox to become a correspondent for National Journal.

  Garrett’s departure reflected a larger truth. “Roger’s thinking about ‘fair and balanced’ changed,” a senior executive said. “He decided MSNBC and CNN had gone so far to the left in response to him that he needed to go further right. So you didn’t need to hear both sides of the story at Fox. You were getting the other side by coming to Fox.”

  But Ailes was the catalyst that politicized the media. By hiring every conservative media personality of significance, he prevented his rival networks from airing prominent voices on the right. “The way the business works is, they control conservative commentary the way ESPN controls the market for sports rights,” a person close to Ailes said. “If you have a league, you have a meeting with ESPN, you find out how much they’re willing to pay, and then everyone else agrees to pay the same amount if they want it.… It’s sort of the same at Fox. I was surprised at some of what was being paid until I processed it that way. If you’re ABC and you don’t have Newt Gingrich on a particular morning, you can put someone else on. But if you’re Fox, and Newt is moving and talking today, you got to have him. Otherwise, your people are like, ‘Where’s Newt? Why isn’t he on my channel?’ ”

  By 2009, Ailes had fundamentally altered the basic idea of news on television as it was historically understood. While millions continued to watch the Big Three nightly newscasts, partisan cable news drove politics. And CNN, lacking a partisan brand, was left out of the conversation. In the months since the 2008 election, CNN’s prime-time ratings dived nearly 25 percent. The down-spiral dashed any hope that the network’s 2008 surge might usher in a post-ideological media moment. Jonathan Klein, the swaggering president of CNN/U.S., grasped for a solution to reverse the trend line.

  Meanwhile, CNN’s rivals were happily trading blows, and eating away at CNN’s audience. The main event took place nightly at 8:00 p.m. Olbermann operatically savaged “Bill-O the Clown” O’Reilly. The attacks were successful enough that Murdoch took notice. “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly,” Murdoch complained to an interviewer. O’Reilly was regularly crowned “Worst Person in the World” and at one point Olbermann tastelessly invoked O’Reilly’s family in a segment about a transgendered man who became pregnant. “Kind of like life at home for Bill’s kids,” he said.

  O’Reilly fired back, although he never mentioned Olbermann by name (“a vicious smear merchant,” he called him). Raising the stakes, he went after Olbermann’s boss and his boss’s boss, airing a series of segments on General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and Bob Wright’s successor, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker. O’Reilly slagged Immelt for GE’s business deals with Iran, claiming the company had blood on its hands. “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt,” O’Reilly said. At other points, he called Immelt a “pinhead,” “a despicable human being,” and featured GE’s logo alongside a photograph of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the caption “Business Partners.” Zucker came in for similar treatment. O’Reilly railed that Zucker’s network “spews out far-left propaganda” and was “the most aggressive anti-Bush network.” Ailes had warned Zucker that Olbermann was playing with fire. In the summer of 2007, Ailes called Zucker’s cell phone and vowed that if Olbermann did not stand down, he would tell the New York Post to go after Zucker.

  Both sides realized the collateral damage threatened to outpace the feud’s ratings gains. Beth Comstock, Immelt’s marketing chief, reached out to Brian Lewis to arrange a private sit-down with Ailes. One afternoon in April 2009, Ailes was spirited into a private entrance at 30 Rock and ascended to Immelt’s fifty-third-floor dining room for lunch.

  Both men had talking points ready. Ailes said MSNBC was to blame, not Fox. I can control my nutcases, but you can’t control yours, he said.

  Immelt responded that his mother in Cincinnati was a loyal O’Reilly viewer. How did she feel when O’Reilly blamed her son for killing U.S. troops?

  What about O’Reilly’s wife? Ailes shot back. Olbermann constantly brought up the Andrea Mackris sex harassment suit. After clearing the air, both executives agreed to talk to their stars and try to calm the waters. The following month, Immelt and Murdoch were guests at a Microsoft corporate retreat in Redmond, Washington. During an off-the-record panel discussion moderated by Charlie Rose, Murdoch and Immelt shook hands and agreed to a truce against personal attacks.

  It took a few weeks, but by June, Olbermann and O’Reilly were staying quiet.

  The whole deal got blowtorched in July after New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter began calling around to confirm the Immelt-Murdoch summit. Stelter’s front-page article, published on Friday, July 31, shattered the uneasy peace. Olbermann defiantly told Stelter he was “party to no deal.” Three days later, he proved it. During his “Worst Persons” segment, Olbermann denounced Stelter, O’Reilly, and Murdoch. O’Reilly answered two nights later. He reported that GE was forced to pay $50 million to settle SEC charges of misleading investors. The feud appeared to be back on. But it died down just as quickly as it flared.

  Shut out of the partisan cage match, CNN flailed, and Ailes pressed his advantage. He set up an anonymous blog called The Cable Game that took shots at his rivals. Ailes assigned Fox News contributor Jim Pinkerton to write the entries. “The Cable Game was Roger’s creation,” one person close to Ailes said. “Is CNN on the Side of the Killers and Terrorists in Iraq?” one headline read. “David Brock Gets Caught! (Although Secretly, He Probably Loves Being Naughty and Nasty),” blared another. The item’s text was accompanied by a photo of Brock posing in a skintight tank top with Congressman Barney Frank. “Media Matters, of course, is the notoriously left-wing hit group, founded by that flamboyantly self-hating conservative apostate, David Brock,” it said. “Brock has that rare distinction of being accused of being dishonest by both liberals and conservatives alike. But don’t take my word for it: Here’s what you get if you type ‘David Brock liar’ on Google: 168,000 hits.” CNN chief Jon Klein saw Ailes’s hand behind the articles. He called Ailes and blamed Fox for posting anonymous online gossip that outed the sexual orientation of CNN’s star prime-time anchor, Anderson Cooper. Ailes denied any role. (Cooper wouldn’t announce he was gay until July 2012.)

  Klein did not last long enough to get his retribution. In September 2010, he was fired.

  For Sarah Palin, the months since Election Day had been a letdown even bigger than the loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Being governor, she found, was drudgery compared to her media stardom. “Her life was terrible,” one adviser said. “She was never home, her [Juneau] office was four hours from her house. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.” Her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska—which had topped 80 percent before McCain picked her—had withered to the low 50s. She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000? The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off allegations that she had dismissed Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire a state trooper who was her ex-brother-in-law. She needed money and worried about it constantly.

  Partly because of her embarrassing campaign interview with Katie Couric, and partly because of her outlandish famil
y life and moose-shooting habits, Palin was a massive American celebrity. In November 2008, John Coale tagged along with his wife, Greta Van Susteren, on a trip to Alaska to tape an interview with Palin for Fox News. Later, the Fox camera crew, Van Susteren, and Coale gathered around the Palins’ kitchen table for some moose chili. After dinner, Coale and Palin retreated to the pantry and sat on stacks of boxes and talked for the next hour about her Troopergate dilemma. Palin confessed she didn’t know what to do about her legal bills. Coale assured Palin he would figure something out.

  Whatever one thought of her intelligence, she was more than shrewd enough to see that there was money to be made on her newfound national profile, and she hadn’t been the one making it. Planning quickly got under way for a book. Conservative pundit Mary Matalin introduced Palin to Washington superlawyer Robert Barnett, who helped Palin land a reported $7 million book contract with HarperCollins. Two former Palin campaign aides were hired to plan a book tour with all the trappings of a national political campaign. But there was a hitch: with Alaska’s strict ethics rules, Palin worried that her day job would get in the way. In March, she petitioned the Alaska attorney general’s office, which responded with a lengthy list of conditions. “There was no way she could go on a book tour while being governor” is how one member of her Alaska staff put it.

  On the morning of July 3, 2009, in front of a throng of national reporters, Palin announced that she was stepping down as governor. To many, it seemed a mysterious move, defying the logic of a potential presidential candidate, and possibly reflecting some hidden scandal—but in fact the choice may have been as easy as balancing a checkbook.

  Once she resigned from the governorship in July, the race was on to sign her up on television. Producers had already put out feelers. Weeks after the 2008 election, reality show producer Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, called Palin and pitched her on starring in her own show. Then, in September 2009, Ailes arranged for Palin to fly on a private jet when she needed to travel from San Diego to New York to meet with her editors at HarperCollins. During the visit, Murdoch met Palin at a charity dinner hosted by his wife, Wendi, at Cipriani 42nd Street, and that only increased the network’s appetite. Ailes deputized Bill Shine to land her.

  Negotiations dragged out over the next six months. Palin made it clear to Fox that she wouldn’t be willing to move to New York or Washington. Fox offered to build a remote camera hookup in her Wasilla home. Palin also told Fox that she didn’t want producers hounding her for interviews. She wanted all her appearances to have to go through Shine personally. In January 2010, Palin finally had her $1 million–a–year deal. Shine was responsible for making sure the various Fox personalities got equal booking time, to maximize her ratings appeal across the network. “Obviously, there needs to be a sense of fairness,” Shine explained.

  Hiring Palin brought the number of prospective presidential candidates on Ailes’s payroll to five: Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and John Bolton. Presidential politics were what brought in viewers, and in the Obama age, Ailes was dominating both politics and business. Fox was on track to generate nearly a billion-dollar profit. A Wall Street analyst valued the network at more than $12.4 billion. In 2009, Ailes earned $23 million. The Obama era turnaround plan was firing on all cylinders. Ailes “predicted that the Democrats would lose the House,” one senior producer said. Ailes was right. In the midterms, Republicans would retake the House in the biggest electoral gain since 1948.

  But Ailes’s biggest stars—Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin—were burning hot—too hot—which posed new problems. Beck’s numbers were moving toward three million a day, a stunning achievement. “I’ve never seen anyone build an audience this fast,” Ailes told executives. The concern was that Beck was almost engulfing Fox itself. He did not follow Ailes’s directives, and some of Fox’s other big names seemed diminished by comparison—and were speaking up about it. Sean Hannity complained to Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck, scheduled him as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further. In March, The Washington Post ran an article that reported on grievances Fox employees had about Beck’s inflammatory rhetoric and his self-promotion.

  Palin also ruffled Fox executives’ feathers. In the winter of 2010, tensions between Palin’s camp and Fox arose over a prime-time special that the network wanted her to star in. Nancy Duffy, a senior Fox producer, wanted Palin to host the show in front of a live studio audience. Duffy hoped to call the program Sarah Palin’s Real American Stories. Palin hated the idea. She complained to her advisers that she didn’t want to be a talk show host. She wanted to just do voice-overs. More important, she didn’t want Fox to promote her name in the title of the program. Not that it mattered: Palin’s ratings were starting to disappoint Ailes anyway. Fox did not schedule any additional specials.

  In the control room, the Palins entertained producers with their private reality show. Fox staffers chuckled watching Sarah and husband Todd on the video link Fox had installed in her Wasilla office. “On the internal feed you see everything. Someone should tell her that. Todd does the camerawork. She barks at him big time, ‘Todd, what are you doing!’ It’s embarrassing,” one person explained. Fox producers came up with names for their characters: “The Bitch” and “The Eskimo.”

  Ailes began to doubt Palin’s political instincts. He thought she was getting bad advice from her kitchen cabinet and saw her erratic behavior as a sign that she was a “loose cannon.” A turning point in their relationship came in the midst of the national debate over the Tucson shooting massacre, which left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords almost fatally wounded. As the media pounced on Palin’s violent rhetoric—her website had put the image of a target on Giffords’s congressional district months earlier to mobilize her voters to defeat Giffords at the polls—Palin wanted to fight back, angry that commentators were singling her out. Ailes agreed but told her to stay out of it. He thought if she stayed quiet, she would score a victory.

  “Lie low,” he told her. “If you want to respond later, fine, but do not interfere with the memorial service.”

  Palin ignored Ailes’s advice and went ahead and released her controversial “blood libel” video the morning Obama traveled to Tucson. For Ailes, her decision was further evidence that she was flailing around off-message. “Why did you call me for advice?” he wondered aloud to colleagues. “He thinks Palin is an idiot,” a Republican close to Ailes said. “He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”

  What had been an effort to boost ratings became a complication. Employing potential presidential candidates and Glenn Beck opened the network up to criticism that it was too politicized. Ailes also got an earful from leaders in the GOP establishment who were apoplectic that Beck, Palin, and Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, the Tea Party–backed candidate running for the Senate in Delaware, were becoming the face of Fox News and, by extension, the Republican party. “Why are you letting Palin have the profile?” Karl Rove said to Ailes in one meeting. “Why are you letting her go on your network and say the things she’s saying? And Glenn Beck? These are alternative people who will never be elected, and they’ll kill us.”

  Ailes was inclined to listen. After Fox News gave the inaugural Tea Party rallies wall-to-wall coverage in the spring of 2009, Ailes told executives to dial back the promotion. His message, according to one executive, was: “Let’s not abandon them, because their audience is driving the ratings, but we’re not going to have that umbilical cord connection to them. They’re on their own. So the next big iconic event that happened, there was no planned coverage. It was just planned news coverage.”

  Although Ailes valued the ratings, he had a grander goal. One afternoon not long before the midterms, Ailes told executives who sat in his office, “the network’s a success. We’re making a lot of money—that’s fine. But I want to elect the next pre
sident.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  TROUBLE ON MAIN STREET

  AS AILES TOLD Fox EXECUTIVES of his desire to install a Republican in the White House, he found himself caught up in a conflict of a much more personal sort: small-town politics. It was an imbroglio that Ailes would later say he did not want. At Fox News, the steel security doors, the public relations apparatus, and the discretion of generously paid confidants kept the full measure of Roger Ailes’s paranoia and rage from the world. In his hometown, Roger Ailes was exposed.

  From the outset, Ailes spoke of his residence in Garrison, forty-six miles north of Manhattan in Putnam County, New York, as an escape from the partisan front lines at Fox News. “All I ever wanted was a nice place to live, a great family, and to die peacefully in my sleep,” he said around the time of his move. Garrison, a few other hamlets, and the neighboring villages Nelsonville and Cold Spring formed the larger town of Philipstown, although it was not very large at all: fewer than ten thousand citizens. It seemed, on the surface at least, to be an ideal place to instill in Zachary the Eisenhower values Ailes had known as a boy. Putnam County even had a Republican bent: while voters tended to vote Democratic at the state level, the last Democratic presidential candidates to carry the county were Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson.