“He might be a nice guy, but he’s not doing a good job,” Borkowski countered. Ailes was unswayed.
Ailes spent an hour pumping Borkowski for information about local political players, in particular New York state senator Vincent Leibell III. “What do you know about charitable organizations? Does Vinnie Leibell make money off of them?” “It kept coming back to Leibell,” Borkowski recalled. At the end of the conversation, Lindsley and Beth escorted Borkowski to the front door. Borkowski lost to Smith several months later.
Richard Shea was also one of the politicians Roger asked about. A moderate Democrat who served on the town board, Shea was running in the 2009 election for Philipstown supervisor, the title given to the town’s senior elected official. He was a fifth-generation Cold Springer. He owned a successful local contracting business and fashioned himself as a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. There was one issue, however, on which he was progressive: the environment. Shea was campaigning on reforming the town’s decades-old zoning codes to preserve open space. This brought him into conflict with Ailes.
The notion of zoning was abhorrent to Ailes. The more he studied the issue, the more he disliked what he found. “Jesus, wait a minute,” he told a reporter, describing his thought process. “They’re starting to try and tell you how much glass you can have in your window, what color you can paint your house, and they’re saying, well, you can’t cut down any trees.” He added, “God made trees so you can build houses and have baseball bats.” He felt that he had a right to chop down any tree, and that the legal implications were obvious: “They’re going around to old ladies and telling them if they have a mud puddle they’re in a wetland and stealing their farm and stuff.”
It was a risk for Shea to take Ailes on over zoning. For decades, ever since the Storm King saga, it had been the third rail of Philipstown politics, the one issue that brought all the various cultural and economic resentments into stark relief. The first time Shea met Ailes was at a town forum, sponsored by the PCN&R and moderated by Joe Lindsley, in October 2009. Afterward, Ailes went up to Shea and told him that he was dodging Lindsley’s questions about zoning. “What are you trying to hide from me?” Ailes said. “I own the newspaper.” (Ailes claimed that he simply asked for Shea’s phone number and complained about the local environmentalist “zealots.”)
The next month, Shea won the election. Immediately, he set about making good on his campaign promise to push through a rezoning plan. A few weeks later, Shea discovered just what life with Roger Ailes as a constituent would mean. On Sunday morning, January 10, he received a string of frantic phone calls from friends in town. Ailes had been calling around ranting about a front-page New York Times profile of him that appeared in that morning’s paper. “My takeaway was that this guy is pretty much threatening me,” Shea was quoted saying about the town forum. Friends told Shea he had made a big mistake. “You can’t mention Ailes’s name in the press,” they said. Later that day, his phone rang.
“You have no fucking idea what you’ve done!” Shea immediately recognized the voice. “You have no idea what you’re up against. If you want a war you’ll have a battle, but it won’t be a long battle.”
“It was an accurate portrayal of the exchange,” Shea said calmly. “If you’re offended I’m sorry about that, but it was accurate.”
“Listen,” Ailes seethed, “don’t be naive about these things. I will destroy your life.”
Throughout the winter, the PCN&R filled with stories and editorials questioning Shea’s zoning plan as avidly as Fox attacked Obama’s policies. According to the PCN&R, an out-of-control band of tree-huggers and Manhattan elites was overrunning the town, dictating to the little guy how he could use his land. The paper framed the debate as a skirmish on a much wider battlefield. It was another case of government trampling the rights of the individual. Readers chose sides and hardened their positions. Jeannette Yannitelli, a Fox News fan whose son ran a liquor store near Main Street, saw linkages to forces threatening her way of life. Half the town did not pay property taxes just as she heard on Fox that half of all Americans didn’t pay any federal income tax. “Thomas Edison wasn’t told to invent the lightbulb. It was his idea. You can’t take things and give it to others,” she told her grandkids. “Look at what is happening to Greece. They give everything away. It’s just not right!”
The emotions stirred up in part by the PCN&R’s crusade drew extreme elements into the debate. Anti-zoning factions had begun making posters displaying photos of guns and the slogan “They’re Taking Away Your Property Rights.” To lower the temperature, Shea decided to call a town-wide meeting at Haldane High School. It would be a chance for all the citizens to get in a room together and clear the air.
Shortly before 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 7, 2010, Ailes walked across the parking lot of the high school with a white-haired lawyer from Poughkeepsie named Scott Volkman. Hundreds of townspeople were streaming into the school’s gymnasium. Joe Lindsley arrived and readied himself to write up the proceedings for the next edition of the paper. That morning, the PCN&R ran a front-page article by Lindsley, headlined “Residential Re-Zoning: Will Property Owners Weigh In?” Mimicking Fox’s wall-to-wall promotion of the Tea Party rallies, the article noted that special interest groups on both sides of the debate had “strongly encouraged attendance” at the event.
And the locals turned out in force. Inside the gym, the mood had the electric energy of a political rally. Ailes and Volkman, seemingly the only two men in suits, sat in the middle of the main floor as Shea brought the meeting to order. “Let us observe civility above all,” he said, instructing citizens to keep their remarks to two minutes.
It was a futile request. Jeannette Yannitelli took to the mic. “Fifty-two percent of this town is now tax exempt!” she said, sounding like a Fox pundit.
“Stop right there, that’s not true,” Shea said.
Facts did not sway Yannitelli. “If you were stealing from me, I’d call 911!”
An hour into the contentious meeting, Ailes’s lawyer got up from his seat and took the microphone. After he tangled with Shea for a few minutes, demanding a one-on-one meeting, Shea jokingly asked if Volkman wanted him to burn the zoning proposal on the spot. At that, Ailes stood up and intervened. Without giving his name—he was a man who acted as if he needed no introduction—Ailes began to lecture the supervisor.
“Civility above everything, please, Mr. Shea,” Ailes said, pointing the fingers of his right hand at him. “Civility above everything, Mr. Shea. Sarcasm is not useful here, Mr. Shea.”
Ailes buttoned his suit jacket, lowered the microphone, and plunged his left hand into his pants pocket. He had the floor now.
“Apparently this process has been going on since before the Civil War,” he said. “This is, as you explained to me, the first night that private property owners were going to have a workshop.”
“Can I ask you why Mr. Volkman is here?” asked Democratic town board member Nancy Montgomery, who was sitting next to Shea. “He’s not a private property owner in this town.”
“In America you are allowed to have an attorney represent you who understands the law!” Ailes replied. Cheers, whoops, and whistles rang out from the balcony and the sides of the parquet. “But this is Philipstown,” Montgomery said. “This is a civil meeting where our community has come together to discuss—”
“Oh, this is not part of America?” Ailes said, waving his right hand through the air dismissively. “No. No. The private citizens of this thing have been overlooked. This isn’t even about me.”
Ailes turned to face the board. “Is it true that this document puts institutional interests above businesses and private citizens?”
Shea explained that the plan was designed to help nonprofits keep their open space out of the hands of real estate developers.
Ailes did not appear to be listening. “Why would everybody not be equal under the law: Businesses? Private—There’s probably no greater position to hold t
han to be a citizen of the United States. Why would their interests be subverted?”
Shea told him that no one was getting special treatment.
“So, they won’t be above the law and private interests?”
“No, they’re not going to be.”
“Fine. End of story,” Ailes said. He wanted to know if the law would regulate the size of his windows or the color of his house.
“No,” Shea said.
Ailes used the opening. After thanking the board and the citizens for their turnout, he had a lecture about American history to deliver. “George Washington said, ‘A violation of my land is a violation of my being,’ ” he intoned. “That is in our core for two hundred thirty years.” Ailes loved to quote Washington, but this saying does not appear in any archive of Washington’s writings or speeches.
Ailes sat down and unbuttoned his suit jacket, then noticed that a woman had been shooting a video of him with her iPhone. “Take it off,” Roger growled. He leaned forward and grabbed a chair, shaking it menacingly.
“What are you doing to the chair, sir?” she asked. Roger sat back and folded his hands in his lap.
The meeting continued for more than an hour as residents debated the pros and the cons of the zoning law. Ailes stayed until the bitter end. After the meeting concluded, he approached Nancy Montgomery, who was cleaning up her papers at the white table.
“You’re the only one I haven’t met yet,” he said, by way of introduction. “You know, I’m just here for the little guy.”
“Do you even know what I do for a living?” Montgomery asked. Ailes had already turned around and was walking away.
“I’m a bartender, Mr. Ailes,” she said, calling after him.
Ailes stopped and looked back at her. “You’re just a liberal Democrat,” he said.
It was not Ailes’s politics that bothered Montgomery, although she was no fan of Fox. She didn’t like how he showed up in town one day and started throwing his weight around.
Later, Ailes had his own version of his exchange with Montgomery. “I made the mistake of saying, ‘I think Philipstown’s in America,’ and now she’s mad at me and goes against everything I’m for and hates me and wants to kill me,” he said.
The debate on the zoning reforms dragged on for another year while Shea met with citizens one-on-one to address their concerns. In the fall of 2010, Ailes succeeded in getting a private sit-down with Shea and Joel Russell, a land-use attorney who had been consulting Philipstown on the zoning issue for years. On the day of the meeting, Ailes arrived at Town Hall with his bodyguard and Scott Volkman in tow. Ailes slapped a set of color charts down on Shea’s desk.
“What do you think of that?”
Shea looked down at the printouts. They showed ratings figures for Fox News and its rivals.
“Fox is outperforming any other cable news network!” Ailes said.
“Well, there are a lot of stupid people out there,” Shea deadpanned.
Ailes guffawed. “Ha! A friend of mine said that, too.”
The bluff pleasantries were brief. Ailes let out a blast about zoning bureaucrats depriving him of his property rights. “It was ninety percent inaccurate,” Russell later said. “That rhetoric was over the top and basically was straight out of Fox News. He kept talking about how he had a young son and his son wouldn’t be able to live in the America he knew.”
Shea told Ailes that he was misinformed about the zoning restrictions, which triggered another eruption.
“I’ll see you out of office!” Ailes snapped. “I’ve never lost a campaign I’ve been involved with!”
Shea looked at Russell. “Are you hearing this stuff? There are laws against this sort of thing.”
Volkman shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m not hearing any of this,” he muttered. “I’m here to talk about zoning.”
For two hours, Shea and Russell attempted to calm Ailes down. It turned out that Ailes’s concerns were not totally unfounded: a zoning map had incorrectly marked his mountaintop property with a scenic designation, which could have limited some development. Shea and Russell immediately assured Ailes they would make the change. As the conversation wound down, Ailes told the men that he would spend millions if necessary to keep dangerous elements out of the town. To that end, he was thinking about buying Mystery Point, a 129-acre plot of land with a nineteenth-century brick mansion that overlooks the Hudson, to turn into a corporate retreat for Fox. “That’s up for sale,” Ailes said. “I could buy it in a heartbeat. You know why I’m interested?”
The men stared back at him.
“I hear a group of Chinese investors are looking. I’m not going to have some Chinese investors set up a missile silo right across from West Point.” Shea and Russell waited for the punch line that never came.
Getting to know Ailes changed Shea’s mind about Fox News. “I used to think it was showmanship, or theater,” he later said. “I was really naive. I was awakened to the reality it’s not made up. The profit is part of it, but it is ideology-driven.”
Putnam County resident Gordon Stewart did not attend the town hall at Haldane, but he heard postmortems the next morning. It provided one more data point that the “Ailes problem,” as a friend called it, would not be going away. Unlike many in Philipstown’s progressive set, Stewart did not immediately begin to fret about Ailes’s increasing power in the community. Although Stewart and Ailes had crossed paths only a handful of times, they had shared history. Born on the South Side of Chicago in 1939, Stewart was originally, like Ailes, a midwesterner of modest means. He moved to Ohio for college, studying history and music at Oberlin, and in a remarkable coincidence roomed there with Roger’s brother. (“He was an easy guy to get along with,” Robert Ailes recalled.) Stewart’s peripatetic career, like that of Ailes, intermingled the worlds of politics, entertainment, and business: Stewart had worked as a theater director, as a presidential speechwriter, and as a vice president of the American Stock Exchange. Though a Democrat—he had served as Jimmy Carter’s deputy chief speechwriter and helped craft what came to be known as the “malaise” speech—he respected his conservative neighbor’s formidable talent. In the late 1980s, while working as an executive at an insurance industry trade association, Stewart had invited Ailes to address a group of corporate chieftains. “He talked about how television is the Enrico Fermi nuclear reactor of contemporary society, and how it shapes everything,” Stewart recalled.
In 2005, after living many years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Stewart and his wife bought a place in Garrison. They looked forward to watching their young adopted daughter run in the backyard and swim in their pool. Stewart often dropped by Pete’s Hometown Grocery on Main Street to pick up a copy of the PCN&R. Reading the articles each week, he did not at first see glaring signs of right-wing agitprop. He especially liked the paper’s tough coverage of a contract dispute at the local school board. Shortly after Stewart gave a quote to the PCN&R criticizing the Garrison school, he bumped into Ailes in Manhattan at lunchtime at Michael’s, a restaurant frequented by media executives.
“We gotta get together on this, that school sucks!” Ailes said to him.
“What’s your problem with it?” Stewart said.
“There’s no Christ child on the lawn at Christmastime!” Ailes said. “They have all this fucking Kwanzaa stuff, they have this Hanukkah shit, and you can’t even get Jesus! They think it’s illegal. You can’t show any flags. So I’m not sending our kid there.” As Stewart turned to leave, Ailes told him to stay in touch. “Call me,” he said.
In the fall of 2009, Stephen Ives, a documentary filmmaker, invited Stewart over to his house in Garrison. A group of neighbors were gathering there to brainstorm ways to confront Ailes. They called themselves the Full Moon Project, but Stewart liked to call them “the Cold Spring Village Commune.” The folk singer Dar Williams was the gravitational center of this constellation of politically active residents. As the conversations unfolded over several weeks, an idea
took shape. The Full Moon Project would launch an online publication to rival the PCN&R. There was even a plan to start a Media Matters–like watchdog group to police right-wing bias in the PCN&R. They called it the Rapid Response Team.
When Ailes got wind of the meetings, he called Stewart and asked him whether he was a member of the “Full Moon conspiracy.” Stewart laughed.
But by the time of the zoning town hall at Haldane in April 2010, Stewart’s benign view of the PCN&R was changing. Under Joe Lindsley’s editorship, Stewart saw undeniable evidence that the paper was taking on a partisan tack. He also heard a string of troubling stories of Ailes threatening locals who stood in his way. “You want to see a Fox News truck parked outside your place? I can have one up here tomorrow,” he said to one.
It struck Stewart how disconnected Ailes’s simplified vision of the town was from the diverse reality Stewart had come to know. “Until Roger showed up, no one much cared what your party affiliation was,” Stewart said. “With nine thousand people it doesn’t work too well. It’s hard to demonize people for party affiliation when they all know each other. Scaling Rogerism and Foxism down is a disaster.” A canny businessman, Stewart sensed opportunity. The Full Moon meetings had produced a lot of talk, but Stewart was ready for action. He set out in secret to launch a local news website to take on Ailes directly.
On Tuesday morning, July 6, 2010, Lindsley was at his desk at the PCN&R working on the coverage of the Independence Day parade, which Roger and Beth had revived in 2009 after a thirty-year absence, when he let out a grunt. While searching the Internet, he came across the bylines of two PCN&R writers, Michael Turton and Liz Schevtchuk Armstrong, writing about Putnam County news on a site called Philipstown.info, which he had never heard of before, the proprietor of which was none other than Gordon Stewart. Alison Rooney, the copy editor, had also defected. Lindsley pushed his chair back from his computer and called Ailes. “What does this mean? Are we going to have trouble getting the paper out?” Ailes asked in light of the staff walkout. “Absolutely not,” Lindsley replied. The lineup was already settled with a July Fourth recap and Federalist Paper no. 78.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 46