The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine
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Following the 2010 election, the University of Maryland released a study finding that Fox News viewers were the most misinformed audience of any major news network. Compared with those who never watch Fox, frequent viewers of the network were:
Thirty-one percentage points more likely to agree that “most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit.” In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said just the opposite: that health care reform would actually decrease the deficit.
Thirty-one points more likely to agree that “it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States.” In fact, the birther claims had been repeatedly debunked during the 2008 election by numerous nonpartisan and even Republican sources, including former Hawaii governor Linda Lingle.
Thirty points more likely to agree that “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring.” In fact, there is broad scientific consensus that not only is climate change occurring but human activity is the cause.
Fourteen points more likely to agree that “the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts.” The nonpartisan PolitiFact.com noted that the stimulus bill provided tax cuts to 95 percent of workers.
Fourteen points more likely to agree that “their own income taxes have gone up.” Most Fox viewers could have confirmed this to be false by looking at their own tax return.
Thirteen points more likely to agree that “the auto bailout only occurred under Obama.” In fact, it had begun under George W. Bush.
Twelve points more likely to agree that “most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses.”13 USA Today reported with a banner headline in August 2010, “Economists Agree: Stimulus Created Nearly 3 Million Jobs.”14
When confronted with this study, Michael Clemente, Fox’s senior vice president for news, reacted in a telling way. Instead of expressing concern about Fox’s apparent failure to inform their viewers, or arguing with the substance or methodology of the study, Clemente attacked the messenger, sarcastically impugning the reputation of the University of Maryland. Acting more like a political attack dog than a major media executive, Clemente told The New York Times, “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study the Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School, ” adding, “Given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.”15
But this was hardly the first time Fox’s viewers had been revealed to be conspicuously misinformed. In 2003, the Program on International Policy Attitudes conducted “a series of national polls between January and September.” The results, as reported by The San Diego Union Tribune, found:
“A majority of Americans (52 percent) believed evidence was found linking Iraq to September 11.”
“A large minority (35 percent) believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.”
“A majority (56 percent) believed most world opinion supported the war.”
“Fox led the list for those with at least one misperception (80 percent). It also led for those holding all three—45 percent, compared with 12 percent to 15 percent for the other networks.”16
Misinformation has consequences, especially in a democracy. “In general, you end up with citizens who are acting on bad information when they carry out their civic duties,” says Kelly McBride, an expert on media ethics at the Poynter Institute, speaking about the media in general. “It affects the governing of a nation. It inspires people to make their voting decisions on fear or lies.”17
And the network’s partisan misinformation has not been limited to the dry facts of reporting on political or legislative issues—some of the consequences of its poorly vetted and politically motivated investigations have unjustly and seriously damaged lives and careers. In the past few years Fox News has been involved in several high-profile attacks on progressive leaders, such as White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Van Jones; Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education Kevin Jennings; and Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod; as well as progressive organizations such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood. While it is completely appropriate for a news organization to investigate malfeasance by political appointees and major groups, instead of seeking to get to the bottom of these stories, Fox based its work on distortions, smears, and heavily edited video, often used out of context. These “news” stories had little to no journalistic value and were aired simply to harm progressives. Too often, these efforts were successful.
When discussing the problems of Fox, media watchers often get into conversations about bias. However, bias is not Fox News’s core defect; nor is it what separates the network from CNN, MSNBC, or any other major news source. Nor is its main problem that it promotes tabloid journalism. Fox, rather, is something unprecedented in the United States: a news business that is willing to put politics above all else. While Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox’s parent company, News Corp, is driven mostly by his bottom line, the management of Fox News, led by Roger Ailes, takes an active role in shaping the politics of the country and is willing to use Fox News’s enormous platform to do so. Murdoch’s discomfort with Fox News, while denied in on-the-record settings, has been widely reported. In his biography of the mogul, Michael Wolff describes a Murdoch who despises some of his most popular on-air talent, such as Bill O’Reilly, and whose politics, tough to pin down, can occasionally flirt with liberalism. “In steady, constantly discomfiting ways,” Wolff writes, “Murdoch shares the feelings about Fox News regularly reflected in the general liberal apoplexy.”18
Fox News began with a simple concept: build a network based on the triumph of conservative talk radio. This model was successful at the tail end of the Clinton administration and was even better suited to cheerlead for George W. Bush. In less than a decade, Fox News president Roger Ailes created for Rupert Murdoch a network with a built-in audience driven by its conservative ideology.
From the start, Fox had a profound effect on its viewers. In 2007, The Quarterly Journal of Economics published a study looking at differences between populations that received Fox News and those that did not. The authors found “a significant effect of exposure to Fox News on voting”:
Towns with Fox News have a 0.4 to 0.7 percentage point higher Republican vote share in the 2000 presidential elections, compared to the 1996 elections. A vote shift of this magnitude is likely to have been decisive in the 2000 elections. We also find an effect on vote share in Senate elections, which Fox News did not cover, suggesting that the Fox News impact extends to general political beliefs. Finally, we find evidence that Fox News increased turnout to the polls. Based on this evidence and on micro level audience data, we estimate that exposure to Fox News induced a substantial percentage of the non-Republican viewers to vote for the Republican party,
3 to 8 percent according to the more inclusive audience measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to the more restrictive measure.19
While the network already was having a significant impact, Fox began a transition in 2008. With conservatives out of power, no longer would it be merely a cheerleader for the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Now the network would wag the elephant, transforming itself from a news and opinion outlet into the leading communications, fund-raising, and mobilizing arm of the Republican Party. Or, as David Frum, then a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former George W. Bush speechwriter, told ABC News’s Terry Moran, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And that the balance here has been completely reversed.”20
The interview in which Frum made this comment followed a post on his blog, Frum Forum, in which he declared, after the passage of Barack Obama’s health care plan, “Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.”21 Frum placed the blame for this defeat squarely at the feet of one faction of his party: “There were leaders who
knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible.” Frum continued, “How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or—more exactly—with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?”22
Part I
Attack and Destroy
Chapter 1
Roger’s Rise
Let’s face it, there are three things that the media are interested in: pictures, mistakes, and attacks.
—Roger Ailes
In 1968, at the beginning of his second presidential campaign, Richard Nixon stopped by the nationally syndicated variety program The Mike Douglas Show to make a guest appearance. So that he wouldn’t have to share the green room with a burlesque performer named “Little Egypt,” Nixon waited before his spot in the office of the show’s twenty-seven-year-old executive producer. There Nixon, who had famously lost the first televised presidential debate to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier, bemoaned campaigning in the TV age. “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” he said.1
Nixon might have been a former vice president on his way to his second Republican nomination, but in that makeshift green room of The Mike Douglas Show, he was not top dog. That young producer, a man named Roger Ailes, turned to the future president and said, “Television is not a gimmick, and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”2
Impressed, Nixon hired Ailes as his campaign media adviser. In this role, he managed Nixon’s television strategy, which included the production of the candidate’s “Man in the Arena” appearances, during which Nixon took questions from “citizen” panels in front of vetted studio audiences. Today, Ailes downplays his role in the ’68 campaign, claiming, “People think I was involved in politics. I had no politics with Nixon. I was a television producer. Now The New York Times likes to make it like I was in charge of Southern strategy or something. I was in charge of back-lighting. Cameras. But I always saw a way to daylight.”3
However, speaking to The Washington Post in 1972, Ailes described a much more involved role within the campaign. “I did (Nixon’s) regional shows, television spots and that sort of thing. The whole ‘man in the arena’ concept was mine. Thirteen hours of live programming,” said Ailes. “I produced and directed a one-hour rally from Madison Square Garden on the ABC network and then I produced and directed the four hours live from NBC the night before the election. I did all his live and tape stuff, the commercials per se.”4
With his limited campaign experience, Roger Ailes had already gained an understanding of several fundamental truths that would drive not only future political campaigns, but also the future success of Fox News. Prior to the Nixon campaign, Ailes’s experience on The Mike Douglas Show had taught him that, in the age of mass media, production value matters as much as, if not more than, substance or even truth. “I don’t go out purposely and try and fool voters,” said Ailes. “Sure, I know certain techniques: such as a press release that looks like a newscast. So you use it because you want your man to win.”5
Working for Nixon in 1968, Ailes had his first opportunity to use these lessons and his ample media talent to subtly (and occasionally not-so-subtly) play on people’s prejudices and fears in order to win their support for his candidate. Reporter Joe McGinniss witnessed Roger Ailes’s manipulation of race firsthand during that Nixon campaign. In his book The Selling of the President, McGinniss recounts an exchange he had with Ailes during the process of casting a “Man in the Arena” appearance in Philadelphia. Ailes’s first job was to find a diverse set of constituents for Nixon to interact with, fostering a realistic exchange for viewers on TV, while at the same time creating an environment where Nixon would thrive. In Philadelphia, he managed to recruit “an Italian lawyer from Pittsburgh, a liberal housewife from the Main Line, and a Young Republican from the Wharton School of Business.”
But Ailes still had seats to fill. “Now we need a newsman,” he told McGinniss. McGinniss suggested “the name of an articulate political reporter from the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia.” Ailes was excited and asked McGinniss to call him. However, the recommended reporter was African-American, which gave Ailes pause. “Oh, shit,” he told McGinniss, “we can’t have two. Even in Philadelphia. Wait a minute—call him, and if he’ll do it we can drop the self-help guy.” The newsman turned out not to be available for the event.
Joe McGinniss had an additional suggestion for Ailes’s panel, a psychiatrist he knew who was “the head of a group that brought Vietnamese children wounded in the war to the United States for treatment and artificial limbs.”6 After booking the man, Ailes learned that Nixon hated psychiatrists and would not even appear in the same room as one. He also said the Nixon campaign wanted “to go easy on Jews for a while”—the psychiatrist in question being Jewish. “I guess Nixon’s tired of saying ‘balance of power’ about the goddamn Middle East.” Ailes called up and canceled, but now had an extra spot on the panel.
“You know what I’d like?” Ailes later told McGinniss. “As long as we’ve got this extra spot open. A good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Alwright mac, what about these niggers?’ ”7
In a perfectly choreographed moment, according to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, the candidate “could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a ‘moderate’ version of the opinion.”8 Out on the streets of Philadelphia, Ailes found his man, a cab driver named Frank Kornsey, who “was not really for Wallace, but he wasn’t against him either.”9
Kornsey ended up asking Nixon what he would do about North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo spy ship, to which Nixon gave a rehearsed answer. Earlier in the program Nixon had been forced to answer an unfriendly question about the Vietnam War. While Frank Kornsey did not fill the role Ailes originally prescribed, his softball question still served a purpose.
Roger Ailes grew up in a working-class household in Warren, Ohio, where his father was the foreman of the Packard Electric plant. He suffered from hemophilia, which played a large role in his childhood. According to Ailes, his parents “always would drive me to school and sometimes I[’d] have to sit on a pillow in class because I’d have hematomas in my leg. And I couldn’t go out for play period, sometimes, and that was bad.”10
His parents’ fears were justified—one seemingly minor incident almost turned fatal:
The worst thing I ever had, which almost killed me, is I cut my lip and hurt my tongue. I cut through my tongue by jumping off a garage. I didn’t hurt my legs, but I cut my tongue. I bit my tongue. They didn’t think I was going to make it. They couldn’t stop it—it was really bad. I was seven or eight, somewhere in there. And I was in the bed, I heard the doctor say— I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I heard him say, “We really can’t do anything.” I thought, Oh shit. My dad grabbed me out of the bed, in the sheets—he had a guy with him, a lodge buddy. And they grabbed me and put me in a car, took me downstairs, threw me in the back seat … And I remember the guys that used to come up, Frank La-something and Dirty Neck Watson, guys that worked for my dad who were giving me direct transfusions from their arms to my arm. This was 1946, ’47, ’48, something around there. And they were scrubbing these guys down. They were filthy, they were just filthy guys. They all worked for my dad—it was maintenance work—and anybody who had a type O positive, my dad would bring them up and they [would] hook me up to them. And I remember lying in the bed and they put it in me and they put it in Dirty Neck Watson and he dumped some blood down, and they’d go to the next guy. “Well, son, you have a lot of blue-collar blood in you, never forget that,” my father said after I got through it, and I never have. A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.11
Ailes attended Ohio University in Athens because, in his words, “they told me I could drink.”12 While he was away at school, his par
ents divorced. This came as a shock to Ailes, who recounted, “I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone. I never found my stamp collection.”13 Ailes stayed at a friend’s house; his mother moved to California, and his father fell into a deep depression.
Only twenty-one years old, Ailes took a job with The Mike Douglas Show at a Cleveland television station. Five years later, he was the executive producer and the show had grown from a local hit to being seen by “6,000,000 housewives in 171 cities.”14
After Nixon was elected with Ailes’s help, conservatives set out to build an ideological infrastructure that would help them dominate political debate for decades. Institutions such as the Heritage Foundation popped up in Washington, D.C., funded by millionaires such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors.
For the moment, Roger Ailes stuck around Nixon land, serving as an adviser to the White House and the Republican National Committee. Ailes also launched a consulting company, REA Productions, which worked for numerous Republican campaigns. In February 1971, bragging about his work, he sent a note to White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, telling him, “I worked my tail off but by and large I think we were pretty successful.”15 To his note he attached congratulatory letters from senators, congressmen, governors, and state party chairmen.
Ailes was not universally liked in the Nixon White House. After an appearance by Ailes on a CBS morning news show in March 1970, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler wrote a memo to Haldeman noting that “too close a public association between Ailes and the President could lead to problems,”16 due to the media consultant’s ties to candidates in Republican primaries.