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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Peter Johnson Jr., who was taking over for his father as Ailes’s lawyer, sent the reporters a flurry of threatening emails and certified letters. They contained a nondisparagement agreement and a list of potential charges Roger and Beth were considering filing. Lindsley barraged Haley with panicked text messages. “The world’s fucking ending!” he wrote in one.

  In April 2011, a few weeks after the walkout, Gawker reported a detailed account of the spying episode. Brian Lewis refused to comment for the story. “I hate everything that goes on up there,” he told people. None of the former PCN&R staffers were quoted by name in the article. But Beth blamed Lindsley. As soon as Gawker posted its story, Beth released a nasty statement attacking Lindsley as if he were the source: “These rambling allegations are untrue and in fact not even reality based.”

  When Ailes walked into a meeting at Fox that week, he told his executives, “Lots of stuff is out there. None of it is true.” In future meetings, Ailes did not utter Joe Lindsley’s name.

  The saga provided another example of how Ailes wielded power. The fear that swept through the PCN&R office was every bit as visceral as the panic experienced by CNBC executives during Ailes’s tenure.

  In the spring of 2011, after moving out of his apartment in Cold Spring, Lindsley traveled around the East Coast staying with friends. He began running again and got back down to his high school weight, eventually taking a job as a writer for Foster Friess, the conservative billionaire. He helped Haley get a job with Friess as well. Panny went on to work as an editor at The Daily Voice, which serves Connecticut, New York, and western Massachusetts. Lindsley’s uncle, a lawyer in Ohio, handled Peter Johnson, and the threatened legal action never materialized.

  Roger and Beth did their best to disappear the three journalists. Shortly after Lindsley left, he discovered that their bylines had been erased from the PCN&R archives. On the online version of dozens of articles they had written, the author field stated simply: “Staff Reports.”

  On January 31, 2011, a week after Boyer’s Cold Spring article was published in The New Yorker, Tina Brown announced that she was hiring Boyer as a senior correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. It was an inauspicious move for Boyer. On October 18, 2012, the same day Newsweek announced it would fold its print edition by year-end, Boyer found a new job. “I have followed Peter’s work throughout his storied career,” Roger Ailes said in a statement to the press. “He’s a talented and insightful journalist who will add weight and depth to our investigative reporting.” Boyer, Fox’s newest editor-at-large, was welcomed to the family.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE LAST CAMPAIGN

  MARCH 2011 WAS A TURBULENT MONTH for Roger Ailes. Joe Lindsley had just walked away. He was also losing his biggest star of the Obama era. On Monday afternoon, March 28, Ailes called Glenn Beck to his office to discuss his future at the network. He had spent the better part of the weekend in Garrison strategizing how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Beck, the situation was exhausting, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session. Beck had already indicated his willingness to leave.

  “You’ve got to be crazy. No one walks away from television,” Ailes said.

  “I may be,” Beck replied.

  Ailes asked Beck’s producer, Joel Cheatwood, to translate. “What the fuck is he doing? Does he want a raise? Tell me how much.” Beck’s people held firm.

  Moving him out the door without collateral damage was proving difficult.

  “Let’s make a deal,” Ailes told Beck flatly.

  During a forty-five-minute conversation, the two men agreed on the terms: Beck would give up his daily 5:00 p.m. program and appear in occasional network “specials”—but even that didn’t solve their problem. They haggled over how many specials he would appear in. Fox wanted six a year, Beck’s advisers wanted four. At another sit-down, Beck choked up as he talked about his bond with Ailes over right-wing politics and history. But Ailes threatened to blow up the talks, saying that Beck’s advisers were jerking him around. “I’m just going to fire him and issue a press release,” he snapped to a Fox executive.

  The relationship had been strained since Beck joined Fox. In early 2009, Fox News executives denied a request from Beck’s production team to allow Beck’s head writer and close friend, Pat Gray, to accompany Beck to the Fox News studio for his daily program. At CNN, it had never been an issue for Gray to join Beck at the studio; in fact, Beck leased space for his entire staff at the Time Warner Center. Beck wrote an email to Ailes stressing that Gray was a key writer for the show and that his presence in the studio was important. Ailes responded that he did some checking and it was against the “policy” to give out a building pass. In private, Ailes expressed wariness about Beck’s staff. “I don’t want too many of his people here,” he told an executive.

  Things took a turn for the worse as Beck gathered 300,000 of his devoted followers in front of the Lincoln Memorial for a “Restoring Honor” rally—scheduled for the August 2010 anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Fox executives showed little enthusiasm. “I’m going to D.C. in case something happens, and we have to react,” Bill Shine told a colleague the day before. “We’ll probably do a cut-in during the news.” In the end, Fox gave the event scant coverage; CNN actually seemed to cover it more. Ailes praised Beck in a meeting with his executives afterward—“I don’t know anyone else in the country who could have done that”—but Beck could not understand why Ailes did not actively promote an event that drew so many potential Fox viewers. Brian Lewis was selling Ailes on the idea that Beck, who had graced the covers of Forbes, Time, and The New York Times Magazine, was amassing a power base independent of Fox. “Beck had his own PR apparatus and Brian resented that,” a colleague said, “so Brian one day explained to Roger during a meeting called on a completely other topic, that Glenn’s problem was that he felt he was bigger than Fox.” Ailes agreed: talent should never eclipse the brand. “From that day on, that was Roger’s theme with Glenn: he didn’t appreciate the platform Fox had given him and needed to be pushed out,” the colleague said.

  Tensions continued to escalate when, a few days after the rally, Beck launched The Blaze, a conservative news website. Fox executives told Beck he couldn’t promote his new venture on air. At times, The Blaze undermined stories that Fox pushed, like its piece debunking conservative provocateur James O’Keefe’s NPR sting, which had received wall-to-wall coverage on the channel. After the New Year, the cold war turned hot. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, hired an executive from The Huffington Post to run The Blaze, and later poached Joel Cheatwood from Fox. The moves signaled Beck’s ambition to build a conservative media empire of his own—a clear encroachment on Ailes’s turf. Brian Lewis retaliated by having his department tell the entertainment news website Deadline Hollywood that Cheatwood had earned $700,000 a year at Fox, a low-ball figure that was designed to damage his earning potential at future jobs. “Joel lost Roger’s respect and trust a long time ago,” an unnamed Fox “insider” told the website. Reporters began highlighting that Beck’s ratings had been slipping and that progressive groups had orchestrated an advertising boycott of his show. But ratings for his time slot were still nearly double those from before he joined the network, and Fox simply shifted the advertising inventory to other programs.

  On April 6, Fox and Beck announced the breakup. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes did not want a public meltdown to alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers. Most of all, he didn’t want Beck’s departure to be seen as a victory for the liberal media; that would ruin the most important story line of all.

  By the time of Beck’s departure, Ailes had been spending considerable energy discussing the consequences of an Obama reelection. For the past two and a half years, he had committed himself to blocking the Obama agenda
. When the Affordable Care Act passed the previous March, “he went apeshit,” a senior producer said. Ailes instructed his producers to book former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey, a conservative health care advocate who popularized the notion of “death panels.” “He said she was the best person to talk about this,” the senior producer recalled. “He even gave her a prop: a giant stack of papers of the law itself.”

  And so Ailes set out to recruit a viable Republican candidate. In the summer of 2010, he invited Chris Christie to dinner at his home in Garrison with Rush Limbaugh. Like much of the GOP establishment, Ailes fell hard for the New Jersey governor. They talked about pension reform and getting tough with the unions. Ailes saw in Christie a great candidate: an ordinary guy, someone you’d be comfortable talking to over your back fence. But Ailes may have seen something else. Christie had Fox News television values with a ready-made reel. And, of course, Obama versus Christie was a producer’s dream: black versus white, thin versus fat, professor versus prosecutor. Maybe, just maybe, Ailes could laugh all the way to the White House and the bank. Nevertheless, Christie politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run. Christie joked at dinner that his weight was an issue. “I still like to go to Burger King,” he told the three rotund conservatives.

  In April 2011, Ailes sent Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland to Kabul to make a pitch to then-General David Petraeus. “He adored Petraeus,” a senior producer said. “When Moveon.org put the ‘General Betray Us’ ad in the newspapers in 2007, Roger said it was treasonous and we reported it as such.” Ailes had already told Petraeus that if he ran for president, he would quit Fox News to run the campaign. War hero presidents were especially impressive to Ailes. It was why he spoke almost daily to George H. W. Bush. “The big boss is bankrolling it,” McFarland told Petraeus, referring to Murdoch. “Roger’s going to run it. And the rest of us are going to be your in-house.” But Petraeus also turned Ailes down. “It’s never going to happen,” he told McFarland. “My wife would divorce me.”

  Around this time, Ailes set up a meeting with David and Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialists who were financing a phalanx of right-wing groups to defeat Obama. Ailes had never met the brothers, and both sides expressed that it would be a good moment to sit down. Charles Koch flew to New York for the meeting. But Ailes, for unclear reasons, canceled. “Charles was miffed,” one conservative familiar with the meeting explained. Perhaps Ailes recognized that if details of the gathering leaked it would further cement his image as a conservative kingmaker, a fact he was working overtime to dispel. “Listen, the premise that I want to elect the next president is just bullshit,” Ailes told a reporter. “The idea that I’m grooming these Republicans is just wrong.” Though the meeting was called off, Ailes’s interests were aligned with those of the Kochs. In the winter of 2011, Ailes had called Chris Christie, the Kochs’ preferred candidate, and implored him for a second time to run. Christie turned him down again.

  The first Fox primary debate proceeded on May 5, 2011, in Greenville, South Carolina, without an A-list candidate. The aspirants on the stage were a bunch of also-rans: pizza mogul Herman Cain; former governors Gary Johnson and Tim Pawlenty; former senator Rick Santorum; and Congressman Ron Paul. Ailes’s Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, had assured Fox executives that bigger names would show up, but Sammon proved to be misinformed. The debate confirmed what a mess the field was—a mess partly created by the loudmouths Ailes had given airtime to and a Tea Party he had nurtured.

  Meanwhile, Ailes had his hands all over the campaign in his backyard. It was also a mess. Democratic town supervisor Richard Shea was up for reelection in November 2011. Ailes wanted him out. “I still owe you one for that article,” he told Shea, referring to his comments in The New York Times. Since the volatile town hall meeting on zoning, their relationship had settled into a stalemate. But a few months before the election, Ailes asked Shea to meet him at the PCN&R office on Main Street. “What you should do is hire an opponent to run against you and then you win,” Ailes said. Shea later told others he wondered if Ailes was secretly taping him to set him up.

  The campaign season was unlike any the community had seen. The Ailes-backed conservative candidate, Lee Erickson, who owned a welldrilling business in town, sent out nearly a dozen high-gloss mailers to voters and conducted telephone push polls against Shea. Then, in October, Erickson refused to attend a debate that Gordon Stewart and Philipstown.info were organizing at the Haldane School. Stewart even promised to publish the website’s questions in advance, but Erickson was unswayed.

  On the day of the PCN&R debate, Ailes engaged in a bit of psychological warfare. The latest issue of Newsmax magazine had a cover story about Ailes, calling him “The Most Powerful Man in News.” That day, several local politicians, including Shea, received hand-delivered copies of the issue, with candy-colored tabs affixed to the pages of the glowing profile. “Using his instincts about on-air talent and the assault on American values, Roger Ailes has set the new agenda for TV journalism. But he’s decidedly not the kind of media mogul described by his liberal critics,” the article read. The text seemed tailor-made to rebut a series of articles about Ailes that had recently appeared in national magazines. Ailes had included personal notes with the magazine, at least one of which read, “Be careful what you say about my wife.” That night at the Haldane cafeteria, Shea was overheard asking Ailes about the Newsmax story and his note: “What’s up with that?”

  “Oh, I sent that out to everyone,” Roger said, and smirked.

  After Beth gave opening remarks to the crowd of 150, Joe Lindsley’s replacement, Doug Cunningham, moderated. Over the course of the debate, Erickson hurled Ailesian putdowns. He called Shea “King Richard” and criticized his “disappointing level of arrogance.” Erickson, who had cofounded the property rights group Citizens of Philipstown, mainly went after Shea’s zoning legislation. Shea remained unflappable. “One of the things I’m most proud of is the zoning,” he said. Instead, Shea accused Erickson of distorting his positions. He said his opponent “went up and down [Route] 9 spreading a campaign of disinformation to business owners, riling people up.”

  The consensus in town was that Shea dominated Erickson that night. On Election Day, after an Erickson supporter went up and down Main Street in colonial garb stumping for his candidate, Shea won decisively by 518 votes, or 58.8 percent of the vote to 41.2 percent for Erickson. It should have been an augur of things to come. The PCN&R succeeded in monopolizing access to Philipstown Republicans, but failed to get Erickson into office. The same dynamic was about to play out on the national stage.

  Republicans referred to the 2012 campaign as the “Fox News Primary.” “It’s like a town hall every day on Fox News,” Kansas governor Sam Brownback told The New York Times not long before the Iowa caucuses. “I like Fox, and I’m glad we have an outlet, but it is having a major, major effect on what happens.” For both the candidates and Ailes, the Fox Primary was a ratings boon but a branding challenge. In the last eight months of 2011, GOP presidential candidates made more than six hundred appearances on Fox News and Fox Business while largely ignoring non-Fox media. (“I’m sorry, we’re only going to be doing Fox,” Gingrich’s spokesperson, R. C. Hammond, told a CNN producer on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in Des Moines.) Their face time on Fox during this period totaled seventy-seven hours and twenty-four minutes. But as Fox’s pundits and anchors pushed the candidates into the conspiracy swamps of Fast and Furious, the gun-running debacle, and Solyndra, the bankrupt solar panel company, Fox risked alienating independent viewers—and voters.

  It was a case of Ailes being unable to put his party’s goal of winning independents ahead of his personal views. “He doesn’t like green energy—period,” a senior producer said. “He says all the time that no one in America has died from nuclear power, but fifteen people have been chopped up by those damn windmills.” For Ailes, Fast and Furious was a passionate cause. “He wants indictments. He thinks [Attorney
General Eric] Holder should resign and go to jail for the death of a federal agent. He won’t be happy until he gets it,” the producer said.

  Branding issues aside, the Fox Primary was a cunning programming ploy. It gave Ailes’s audience a new reality TV show with a revolving cast of characters to follow. In May 2011, Mike Huckabee ginned up interest in his weekly Fox show by promising to reveal his presidential ambitions live. “Governor Huckabee will announce tomorrow night on his program whether or not he intends to explore a presidential bid,” his producer, Woody Fraser, teased in a press release. “He has not told anyone at Fox News Channel his decision.” On the night of May 14, when Huckabee announced he was not running, ratings soared to 2.2 million.

  But when the action took place off his set, Ailes, like any director, went wild. In October, Sarah Palin made the mistake of breaking the news that she would not be running for president on Mark Levin’s talk radio show. “I paid her for two years to make this announcement on my network,” Ailes told Bill Shine in a meeting. Fox was left with sloppy seconds: a follow-up interview with Palin on Greta Van Susteren’s 10:00 p.m. show, after news of Palin’s decision had been drowned out by Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs’s death. Ailes was so furious that he considered pulling Palin off Fox entirely until her $1 million annual contract expired in 2013. Shine told Palin’s agent, Bob Barnett, that Palin was at risk of being “benched.” After conferring with Palin, Barnett called Shine back and told him that Palin recognized the misstep. But tensions between Palin and Fox did not subside.