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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Cold Spring’s downtown held on to everything Warren, Ohio, had let go. It was a vibrant civic space, dotted with well-maintained Victorian homes, quaint storefronts, and stately churches. The area appealed to Ailes’s sentimental ideas about America. From his mountaintop aerie, an impressive nine-thousand-square-foot mansion constructed of Adirondack river stone, he overlooked triumphal reminders of the country’s might. To the west was the spot where Continental Army troops strung a 185-ton iron chain across the Hudson to block British ships advancing upriver. To the north were shuttered ironworks that had produced vital armaments and steam engines in the nineteenth century. Across the river stood West Point military academy. The grand interior of his house also bore witness to American greatness. Photographs of Generals George Patton, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Dwight Eisenhower lined the walls.

  Roger and Beth were good neighbors. They attended the local Catholic church, Our Lady of Loretto, where on Sundays, Beth sometimes played the organ. They got to know the contractors who built their house, hosted a cookout for members of the volunteer fire department, and bought locally. Leonora Burton, the proprietor of the Country Goose, a gift shop on Cold Spring’s Main Street, considered Beth “a first-rate customer who spent freely.” “I liked her and, being a hugger, sometimes gave her one,” the chatty Brit recalled. Stories circulated of Roger’s generosity. One was that, upon hearing about a store owner who had fallen on hard times, he extended a personal loan.

  Buying The Putnam County News & Recorder, in the summer of 2008, was Roger and Beth’s first public endeavor in their adopted town. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century as the Cold Spring Recorder, the weekly newspaper was like the community itself: an artifact from a bygone age. The previous owner and publisher, Brian O’Donnell, kept production methods antique. In a one-room office, housed in a former barbershop on Main Street, staffers laid out the paper with scissors and glue. Under O’Donnell’s steady ownership, the PCN&R, or simply “the paper,” as it was affectionately known by residents, was a quirky, if reserved, information source. “It covered the 4-H Club and the kids’ activities at the school,” said Elizabeth Anderson, the founder and managing director of the investment firm Beekman Wealth Advisory, and a part-time resident of Philipstown. Letters to the editor—the paper’s liveliest section by far—were welcomed, but there were no editorials. When citizens complained that the paper ignored divergent points of view, O’Donnell responded that it was their job to express them at public meetings, not for him to stir them up.

  Ailes described Philipstown as a bastion of traditional America. In a certain sense, he was right. Many of the town’s contractors and restaurant owners were the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish and Italian immigrants who had found work in the local foundries. Other residents had ancestors living in the area since before the nation’s birth. But that was only part of the town. In the second half of the twentieth century, a different kind of settler had arrived: the college-educated urbanite who idealized country life.

  In the 1960s, when Consolidated Edison, the electric utility, proposed building a power station on the face of Storm King, a 1,340-foot domed mountain that rose like a carapace above the banks of the Hudson River, a coalition of newcomers filed a lawsuit, forming a counterweight against local businesses that supported the development. The ensuing legal battle played out in the courts until Con Ed settled and abandoned the project in 1980. The landmark victory, coming at a time when the Reagan administration was seeking to dismantle environmental regulation, emboldened citizens across the country to speak up in local development matters and helped spawn the modern environmental movement. In Philipstown, a host of preservation groups took root. They fought to preserve the community’s bucolic character and acquired land in trust from Gilded Era estates that had fallen into disrepair.

  After 9/11, residents saw a new wave of city dwellers moving in. Along with their politics, they brought their own back-to-the-land ethic with all the predictable signifiers. The number of Priuses and Subarus parked in the lot at Foodtown increased, as did the variety of heirloom produce at the weekend farmers’ market. It was this growing population that sustained local groups like the Garrison Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to applying “the transformative power of contemplation to today’s pressing social and environmental concerns.”

  It all added up to a rich brew of clashing sensibilities that bred resentments. The contours of the conflict traced the same lines that had defined the old battles of the Nixon years. For a long time, these passions bubbled at a low simmer. With the pages of the PCN&R now at their disposal, the Aileses were about to turn the temperature up.

  One morning in July 2008, Brian O’Donnell called the employees of the PCN&R to the newsroom to meet Roger Ailes and his wife. The staff was on edge. “Has he even seen this place?” one employee asked O’Donnell. Although Beth was taking the title of publisher, Roger did most of the talking that day. They could keep their jobs, he said, but there would be “new” rules. “The first one was, ‘Don’t badmouth your employer,’ ” reporter Michael Turton, an affable Canadian, recalled. “In all the places I’ve worked, including on farms, I’ve never been told not to.” Roger’s second proviso was to “get both sides of the story.” “He was talking about the name the News & Recorder,” Turton remembered, “and he said the ‘Recording’ part was fine, but he didn’t think the ‘News’ part was up to snuff.”

  In public, Roger and Beth maintained that the PCN&R would not become Fox News. But Roger communicated other intentions privately. “He said the community needed more of a speaking to,” said local journalist Kevin Foley, who was once a campaign volunteer for Democratic governor Mario Cuomo and a deputy superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department. Shortly after buying the paper, Roger invited the fifty-seven-year-old Foley up to the mountain several times to interview for the top editing job. He spent much of the time monologuing about the ills afflicting his adopted home. He said he would never send Zachary to the public school because it was overrun with liberalism. At his window, he pointed at an outdoor sculpture exhibit at Boscobel House and Gardens, a half mile in the distance. “Do you think they have the right to block my view?” Roger asked. “Isn’t it their property?” Foley asked. “It’s not their property! It’s a nonprofit! They get tax breaks!” Roger replied. He spoke of his security more than once. “He worried about his kid and his wife and said he wouldn’t want anything to happen to them because of what he was,” Foley recalled. Roger told him his German shepherd, Champ, helped protect them. “He said, ‘I let the dog out of the car when we come here. The dog gets out first. He’s trained to patrol the whole grounds and report back before we get out.’ ”

  Foley quickly lost interest in the job, and Ailes lost interest in him. Later that summer, Ailes hired Maureen Hunt, a Fox News human resources employee and Philipstown resident, to edit the paper, but she didn’t last long.

  As summer turned to fall, political issues began to arise. Alison Rooney, the copy editor, at first found reasons to be optimistic about the ownership change. She liked using the new computers to put out the paper and looked forward to the newsroom moving into a renovated two-story building on Main Street. But that honeymoon ended when Rooney laid out a press release from the Garrison Art Center that described a work invoking the “mythological story” of the virgin birth. After the release was published, the priest of Our Lady of Loretto wrote a letter to the editor, and Beth Ailes lit into Rooney. A few weeks later, Rooney got another dressing-down as she formatted a promotion of the high school’s upcoming production of Urinetown, this time from an editor who found the language offensive and removed the title of the show from the headline.

  Michael Turton failed to impress. He was assigned to cover Haldane Middle School’s mock presidential election. After the event, Turton filed a report headlined “Mock Election Generated Excitement at Haldane; Obama Defeats McCain by 2–1 Margin.” He went on, “The 2008 U.S. presidential election is no
w history. And when the votes were tallied, Barack Obama had defeated John McCain by more than a two to one margin. The final vote count was 128 to 53.” Reading the published version a few days later, Turton was shocked. The headline had been changed: “Mock Presidential Election Held at Haldane; Middle School Students Vote to Learn Civic Responsibility.” So had the opening paragraph: “Haldane students in grades 6 through 8 were entitled to vote for president and they did so with great enthusiasm.” Obama’s margin of victory was struck from the article. His win was buried in the last paragraph.

  Turton was upset. “I’ve been mulling over the changes made to my article and need to voice my concern,” he wrote in an email to Hunt. “I’m also sure the article left students, parents, teachers, administration and trustees wondering how a reporter can omit the actual results when covering an election.… I know editing is part of the process, but the rationale for the omission escapes me.”

  He never heard back from Hunt, but soon received a series of accusatory emails from the Aileses. Turton had disregarded “specific instructions” for the piece, Beth wrote. Accordingly, the piece had been edited. Headline changes occur all the time, she noted. “Do you anticipate this becoming an ongoing problem for you?” A short while later, Roger weighed in. Maureen Hunt’s instructions to focus on the school’s process for teaching about elections had been “very clear,” he wrote, and Turton’s “desire to change the story into a big Obama win” should have taken a backseat. Ailes described himself as “disappointed” by Turton’s failure “to follow the agreed upon direction.”

  Turton defended himself. “I would not disregard clear direction,” he replied in an email. “Had the results been exactly opposite I would have written the story in the same manner, including the results.” Beth responded cryptically, thanking Turton for his “thoughtful explanation,” which she said she would “pass on to Roger.” Soon afterward, Turton learned that Maureen Hunt had resigned.

  Ailes had seen similar newsroom turbulence at TVN and during the early days at Fox. To bring “fair and balanced” to the people of Philipstown, he continued his search for someone who understood in which direction the paper was meant to take the community.

  In February 2009, Ailes met Joe Lindsley, a twenty-five-year-old journalist, for lunch in his private third-floor dining room at Fox News. A fast-rising star in the conservative movement, Lindsley came on the recommendation of Martin Singerman, a former News Corp executive who had worked with Lindsley at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization that funds right-leaning student newspapers on college campuses. When he was a student at Notre Dame, Lindsley completed the rigorous Great Books program and launched The Irish Rover to combat the liberal bias of the Notre Dame News. A fervent Catholic with a low, booming voice and a certain likeness to Ailes, Lindsley inspired his classmates with his earnest sense of mission, once leading a pilgrimage to northern Michigan to visit the home of conservative historian Russell Kirk. After graduating, he worked for The Weekly Standard, assisting executive editor (and Fox News contributor) Fred Barnes, before moving over to the magazine’s culture section.

  After they spoke, Ailes offered Lindsley the position of editor in chief, asking him to start right away. Ailes was in the process of buying a second paper, The Putnam County Courier, out of bankruptcy and needed a committed journalist to run the newsrooms of his budding publishing enterprise. Lindsley jumped at the opportunity to work directly for an icon of the cause. Without time to line up an apartment, Lindsley moved into the pool house on the north end of Roger and Beth’s property. It was silent and near freezing the day he stepped out of his Jeep Wrangler on the circular driveway atop the mountain. It was an isolated environment for a recent college grad. He later told friends that he drifted off to sleep that night full of doubt. “What am I doing here?” he thought.

  When Lindsley moved to Philipstown in the winter of 2009, Ailes’s mountain was a topic of intense conversation on Cold Spring’s Main Street. “[Ailes] was said to have ordered the removal of all trees around his house so that he … had a 360-degree view of any leftist assault teams preparing to rush the house,” Leonora Burton recalled. Roger and Beth also bought up as many surrounding houses as they could. “I don’t think he has all of them yet,” Roger’s brother said. “He probably only has 80 percent of them. He is a strong believer in the security of real estate. He thinks they don’t make any more of it.” Security cameras were installed throughout the property. “A team of landscapers was, in the absence of the Ailes family, working on the grounds of the compound,” Burton later recounted. “They were planting a tree when the boss’s cell phone rang. It was the absent Beth. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not where I want the tree. I insist that you move it.’ She directed them to the correct site. The landscapers were puzzled until they realized that the many security cameras on the grounds had captured them at work. Beth had been watching them from wherever she was and called to correct the tree planting.” Other local contractors helped install a bunker that could weather a terrorist attack underneath their mansion. “He can live in there for more than six months,” a friend who has visited it said. “There are bedrooms, a couple of TVs, water and freeze-dried food.” “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Robert Ailes said. “I think the proper term is a ‘panic room.’ ”

  Most of all, it was the PCN&R that inspired a deepening sense of panic among the town’s liberals. The signs were impossible to miss. As Lindsley began to redesign the papers, his bosses suggested that he place the Cold Spring Recorder’s original motto—“By the grace of God, free and independent”—on the masthead. Articles were sharper-edged. Overt religiosity crept into the pages, evidence, they suspected, of the growing influence of Father McSweeney, the priest of Our Lady of Loretto. Patriotic paeans, including to Medal of Honor recipients, and excerpts from the Federalist Papers filled the weekly.

  In May 2009, readers opened the paper to find something they had never seen before: an editorial. The unsigned attack on Obama’s stimulus titled “Debt, Decisions, and Destiny” called the plan “reckless” and said “rich people should be shown some respect.” Lindsley was the editorial’s author, and he quoted from Atlas Shrugged: “We either see ourselves as a nation of people who want to achieve, produce, succeed, and contribute to society or else we see ourselves as a people who want to rely on the producers to create ‘free money’ and support us with grants and federal spending.”

  This was too much for some. Leonora Burton stopped selling the paper in the Country Goose. “After Beth learned of my decision, she boycotted the store,” she recalled. Individual subscribers also expressed their outrage. Elizabeth Anderson later decided not to renew her subscription. In an email to the paper, she questioned the relevance of publishing the names of Medal of Honor recipients who did not live in the area. A few minutes after sending the note, she received a phone call. It was Lindsley. Why was she canceling her paper?

  “I think I said so in my email,” she said.

  “Aren’t you an American?” Lindsley shot back.

  A few days later, she opened the paper to find her comments mocked in an editorial. In response, she wrote a letter detailing her family’s long involvement with the Navy. “I do not require lectures from the PCN&R on patriotism, nor on the valor and bravery of the military, nor on the sacrifices made by military families,” she wrote. Lindsley and Beth declined to publish the letter.

  Lindsley relished the partisan combat. With the intensity of a bulldozer, he devoted upward of eighty hours a week to the Aileses’ papers. He moved into a nearby apartment on the Hudson River so he could be close to the newsroom. He had no time to meet anyone his own age in town or to pursue outside interests. A state-ranked track star in high school, Lindsley gave up running. He put on weight, forty pounds at the peak, adding to his resemblance of Ailes. During the first part of the week, he worked out of the PCN&R’s newsroom editing articles and handling production. On Thursdays and Fridays, he often accompanied
Ailes to Fox News, where he wrote speeches for him and attended to other personal matters. On Sunday mornings, Lindsley sat with Roger and Beth at Mass. He was up on the mountain at all hours, watching the Fighting Irish games with Ailes or joining the family for dinner with the likes of John Bolton and Glenn Beck. He joined Ailes in the News Corp box at Yankee Stadium and he traveled with the family on News Corp’s private plane to visit prominent Republicans across the country. “You know you can’t tell anyone about this, right?” Beth said to him before their first trip on the jet.

  With his trusted editor in place, Ailes used the paper to muscle local pols. James Borkowski, a lawyer and town justice in Putnam County from 1998 to 2009, learned the danger of crossing the PCN&R when he decided to run for Putnam County sheriff in the 2009 election, challenging Ailes’s close ally, the incumbent Don Smith. A few months before the Republican primary election, Lindsley invited Borkowski to meet with him and Beth for breakfast at a restaurant across the street from the PCN&R offices. At one point in the conversation, Beth turned to Borkowski.

  “So,” Beth said, leaning in close, “you are pro-life, aren’t you?”

  Borkowski hesitated. “Personally I am pro-life. But I’m of the position that reasonable people with genuine belief can disagree.”

  Wrong answer. “It cast a pall over the whole meeting,” Borkowski said later. “I remembered thinking, what does that have to do with running for sheriff?”

  A few weeks later, Borkowski got another call from Lindsley. Roger wanted to see him this time. They met in the PCN&R’s conference room.

  “Why are you running against him?” Ailes asked, referring to his friend Smith. “This guy is a West Point grad, a religious guy, a family guy.”