by David Brock
In May 1970, the Republican National Committee ended Ailes’s contract, citing “severe budgetary problems.”17 However, in 1971, Ailes was granted an office in the Executive Office Building right next to the White House for use during “consultation visits to the White House.”18 In a letter sent in June 1971, H. R. Haldeman congratulated him on his “new political trouble shooter role.”19
When Ailes was fired from the Nixon White House, Haldeman was given talking points that claimed, “We have not been able to build the relationship between you and the president which we had hoped to see. It is no one’s fault.”20 The memo also suggested Ailes could be involved in the creation of a “TV series with a pro-administration plot”21 or a talk show starring Attorney General John Mitchell’s wife.
Throughout his tenure in the Nixon administration, Ailes fought to convince his colleagues of the power of television. In November 1968, while Nixon was president-elect, Ailes wrote a “Confidential Report” that began by stating, “Television will play a major role in the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon.” He continued, “When it is necessary to run for re-election, it will be the public’s composite impression of the President (formed over four years) that will influence them.”22
A little more than a year later, in December 1969, Ailes sent another “confidential” memo to Haldeman, pitching his company, telling the chief of staff: “It is contingent upon you appointing a person to be responsible who can organize and supervise [the White House’s television operation]. Who knows the answers and where to find the answers and who is always ‘thinking’ and presenting ideas for you to use.”23
Just under a year later, Ailes sent yet another memo to Haldeman with an apocalyptic warning: “In my opinion, Richard Nixon is in danger of becoming a one-term President. Further, he is in danger of leaving office, even if he is re-elected, with a stigma of leadership failure much as President Johnson did: not because of what he has done—his accomplishments are many—but because of what the people ‘think’ he has done, and because of the way he sounds and looks to them.”24
Ailes further elaborated on his ideas in handwritten notes on an unsigned, undated memo titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.”25 The memo, later released by the Nixon Presidential Library, sought to create a news dissemination organization to “avoid the censorship, the priorities and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators.”
The concept was to create news packages featuring “pro-Administration, video tape, hard news actualities”26 that could then be transmitted to and subsequently broadcast by local stations, which, at that point, were wholly dependent on the major networks for Washington stories. Ailes scribbled copious notes on the fourteen-page memo, at one point writing: “basically a very good idea.” Later in the document, Ailes writes to “Bob”—presumably Haldeman: “If you decide to go ahead we would as a production company like to bid on packaging the entire project.”27
It was during this period that the mega-donor Joseph Coors recognized the same missing piece of conservative infrastructure and set out to build that very network. An idea before its time, Television News Incorporated, or TVN, was set up to sell packages of national news to local stations to air on their nightly newscasts. The packages would be transmitted across phone lines, a slow and expensive process in 1972.
While much of TVN’s story has faded into history, the Columbia Journalism Review documented the problems at the fledgling network in a March/April 1975 article titled “Coors Brews the News.” From the start, Coors’s ideological bent created difficulties for the network.
In the twenty-two months that TVN has been in business, the company has had four news directors (two were fired and an acting news director quit) and one mass firing of news staffers … Much of the fighting arose from management’s feeling that journalists slanted the news in the direction of knee-jerk liberal beliefs and a feeling on the part of many TVN newsmen that management (the Coors family) wanted a right-wing news network.28
TVN became an organ for Joseph Coors’s political views. He told the Rocky Mountain News, “[We] got into it because of our strong belief that network news is slanted to the liberal left side of the spectrum and does not give an objective view to the American public.”29
To head the operation, Coors appointed Jack Wilson, who previously was news director of a station in Illinois. Wilson injected TVN with a very clear ideology, writing a series of memos with pronouncements such as:
“Martin Luther King was an avowed communist revolutionary. It is not necessary for us to cover him or any of his subordinates (Abernathy) just because other networks do so.”30
“David Rockefeller. Nothing like this should ever be allowed on our air. Rockefeller took a communist public relations tour.”31
“The American Civil Liberties Union is generally recognized as the legal arm of the extreme left if not the Communist Party in the United States.”32
“The Environmental Protection Agency again raises the specter of deadly pollution. Our typical journalist is putting the government on a pedestal.”33
Wilson also apparently had it in for Dan Rather. “I hate Dan Rather,” former TVN news director Tom Turley quoted Wilson as saying. “I hate all those network people. They’re destroying the country. We have to unify the county. TVN is the moral cement.”34
These dictates were not just coming from Wilson. Joe Coors once approached a member of the TVN staff and asked, “Why are you covering Daniel Ellsberg? He’s a traitor to his country.”35 Ellsberg, the informant who leaked the Pentagon Papers to lawmakers and The New York Times in 1971, certainly warranted
coverage.
Memos from Wilson were just the tip of the iceberg. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the interview process for employment at TVN sometimes included a screening by a Heritage Foundation official:
Ex-staffers say at least three applicants for key TVN editorial jobs were jointly interviewed by Jack Wilson and by a member of the Heritage Foundation advisory board, John McCarty. McCarty is also on the board of the American Conservative Union. “It was a political litmus test,” said Tom Turley, a former CBS assignment editor who became TVN’s third news director in June 1974.36
Sometimes these conservative allies could control TVN’s broadcasts. Paul Weyrich, the Heritage Foundation’s first president, had returned to government, serving as an aide to the Republican senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska. At a news conference for the senator, Weyrich “produced a three-by-five index card listing questions he wanted asked and handed them to a TVN reporter, who then asked the questions.”37
The first three news directors of TVN were reporters with a background in television news. The fourth would have an ideology that aligned with the Coors family’s and no pesky journalistic integrity to get in the way. After doing some public relations consulting work for TVN, Roger Ailes transitioned to become the network’s news director. The reason for his appointment was clear, according to a TVN staffer: “The Coors people trust Ailes because of his affiliation with the Republicans, and because he’s not a newsman. They don’t trust newsmen.”38
The parallels with Fox News could not be more striking.39 At TVN, Ailes helped run a network built on defaming liberals as communists, attacking environmentalists, and demonizing mainstream journalists, all the while carrying on the pretense of impartial reporting. The Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “News Director Ailes says he wants a non-partisan news service. Perhaps he, like his predecessors, will resist any pressure to the contrary. Or perhaps the pressure will cease. But will it? The record indicates that it has been management policy to strengthen, not weaken, the role of Wilson (and therefore, one assumes Coors) while diminishing the role of independent journalists.”40
TVN was an idea before its time. Covering the news was expensive, and stations carrying the network’s signal had to pay AT&T an additional $2,50041 a month in transmission costs. This further limited the pool of stations willing to pay for TVN’s services
. The network fell into debt, and operations were no longer financially feasible. In 1975, TVN was essentially shuttered.
Thirteen years later, during George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign for president, Ailes was a hardened political operative who knew how to use television perfectly to manipulate voters. He would script every moment of his candidate’s performance. In a June 1988 profile, Time magazine captured Ailes’s relationship with the future president: “George Bush eases into a hotel armchair for an interview with Tom Brokaw. Suddenly a burly, bearded figure bounds across the room and, without a word, yanks an errant hair from the vice-presidential eyebrow. ‘That hurt,’ winces Bush as a grinning Roger Ailes leaves the room, satisfied that he has put his finishing touch on the scene.”42
In Bush, Ailes had found a reverse Eliza Doolittle, as he attempted to turn the blue-blooded vice president into an everyman. “Roger smoked out the fact that Bush was surrounded by bland, upper-class, middlebrow, tennis-playing second raters,” one former Bush adviser said. “Roger would tell Bush, ‘You can’t wear a short-sleeve shirt—you’ll look like a fucking faggot.’ ”43 Ailes denies using the slur.
Time also provided an example of Ailes’s ability to manipulate the media. When tipped off44 that Dan Rather would ambush his candidate during an interview, Ailes advised Bush to tell the newsman: “ ‘It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?’ The tactic illustrates an Ailes axiom: when attacked, hit back so hard your opponent rues the day he got nasty.”45
It’s that aggression that veteran operative Lee Atwater, who brought Ailes onto the Bush campaign, was referring to when he remarked that Roger Ailes “has two speeds. Attack and destroy.”46 This occasionally included people and inanimate objects. Once, angry that a table at Bush campaign headquarters had not been repaired, Ailes walked into the conference room, grabbed the piece of furniture, and flipped it over, in full view of the staff.47
What history remembers of the 1988 campaign was its ugly turn into racial politics, exemplified by the infamous Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton was a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Massachusetts. He was permitted to leave prison as part of a weekend furlough program supported by Governor Michael Dukakis. After failing to return to jail, Horton committed multiple crimes, including armed robbery and rape. George Bush repeatedly raised the case in campaign speeches, and an independent group called the National Security PAC spent $8.5 million running an ad featuring Horton that was widely condemned for its crude racial overtones. While the Bush campaign always maintained it was not responsible for the infamous ad, in the midst of the summer leading up to the election, Ailes’s interest in exploiting the issue was no secret. He even told a reporter, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”48
Following the campaign the Federal Election Commission launched an investigation to determine whether the Bush campaign had coordinated with the independent group, which would have been illegal. Ailes claimed during a deposition that he had only been joking when he made the remark, telling investigators, “I never say anything to the press I’m actually going to do.”49
While being questioned by FEC attorneys, Ailes once again made his views on race and politics clear:
Q: Did the Bush committee have any policy about not using Mr. Horton’s photograph?
A: I have no knowledge of that. I personally rejected the use of Mr. Horton in the advertisement.
Q: How is that?
A: A young researcher brought me a picture of him sometime and I tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket and said we’re not going to do that.
Q: And why is that?
A: I knew the issue would backlash because of the liberal media.50
The real problem with the Willie Horton ad was, of course, its use of race to frighten voters and divide the country along racial lines. The FEC’s attorneys continued their line of questioning:
Q: And what was that about?
A: When Republicans see Willie Horton they see a criminal, and when Democrats see Willie Horton they see a black.51
On his next major campaign, Roger Ailes picked up right where he left off. He served as media consultant for Rudy Giuliani’s first New York City mayoral campaign, which placed an ad in a prominent Jewish newspaper, the Algemeiner Journal, featuring an image of Giuliani’s opponent, David Dinkins—who would become New York City’s first African-American mayor—alongside Jesse Jackson. The ad also showed Giuliani with President George H. W. Bush, and the headline read: “Let the People of New York Choose Their Own Destiny.”52
At the time, Howard Kurtz wrote, “Ira Silverman, vice president of the American Jewish Committee, said the Giuliani ad seemed a ‘legitimate campaign tactic,’ but said that he found it ‘troubling’ because it ‘preys upon the fears of the Jewish community.’ ”53
National Public Radio explained, “Giuliani also tagged Dinkins as a ‘Jesse Jackson Democrat.’ That was an appeal to the city’s large contingent of Jewish voters, who had despised Jackson ever since he used an anti-Semitic epithet to describe New York. In this context, Giuliani’s signature issue of crime took on racial overtones, says political consultant Norman Adler.”54
The campaign also had its own Willie Horton, a kidnapper named Robert “Sonny” Carson. Carson “and several others were convicted in 1974 of kidnapping a man they suspected of stealing money. The kidnapped man was shot in the head, but Carson was acquitted of murder and attempted murder.”55 Out of prison, he “became a community organizer” and worked for a group that had received funds from the Dinkins campaign “to help get out the vote.”56
Giuliani used Carson to rebuke Dinkins, telling audiences, “Imagine if this fellow Dinkins is sitting in City Hall, and he starts hiring Sonny Carsons on us, and he starts paying out $8,000 to $10,000 without receipts.”57
The New York Times also reported, “A new Giuliani television advertisement, aimed largely at wavering Democrats, features six apparently ordinary New Yorkers, who describe Mr. Dinkins as ‘a follower.’ They complain, among other things, about ‘the crowd’ around Mr. Dinkins, including Robert (Sonny) Carson, a former campaign functionary who later proclaimed himself to be anti-white. Another person in the commercial says, ‘I’m tired of living in New York and being scared.’ ”58
When asked about the “parallels” to the Willie Horton ads, Ailes replied, “They’re both felons and they’re both black, but that’s not my fault.”59 Democratic consultant Bill Cunningham was quoted in the same news account, painting a picture of Ailes as a political consultant: “ ‘ This is where he makes his money. If you go into the alleyway with him, he comes after you with a bottle or a brick.’ ”60
After Giuliani’s campaign, Ailes returned to TV, producing a syndicated show starring Rush Limbaugh. The show remained on the air for four years but never matched the audience or influence of his radio platform.
In August 1993, while still executive producer of the program, Ailes moved over to CNBC, which he helped turn into the dominant force in business news.
At NBC, Ailes unsuccessfully tried to create another channel. Launched on Independence Day in 1994, America’s Talking built its lineup around low-budget talk shows. The softer network featured shows like Pork, “a political talk show focusing on government waste,”61 and Bugged!, a “comedic look at what bugs people.”62 Ailes even hosted a celebrity talk show called Straight Forward. However, America’s Talking failed to catch on. The network’s most enduring legacy was a show called Politics with Chris Matthews, which became Hardball on MSNBC. When NBC began the process of creating MSNBC, it failed to include Ailes, freeing him to launch a competing network.
After his stint at CNBC, Ailes decided he would attempt to resurrect the Limbaugh model. This time, though, he wouldn’t create a single conservative show. Instead, with the support of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, he
would mold an entire network based on his Limbaugh television experiment.
Ailes’s recipe for success with the Fox News Channel, for the first decade of its existence, was to take conservative talk radio and move it onto cable television. While this programming annoyed the left and galvanized the right, it didn’t operate with a set of organizing goals in mind. Furthermore, the right was in power. Although Fox News was founded while Bill Clinton was still in the White House, it rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration. During this period, Bush was the singular leader of both the Republican Party and the conservative movement—the president’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, made sure of that. In post-9/11 America, Fox News was to be a cheerleader, not a campaigner, and definitely not a critic.
Ailes’s broadcast philosophy followed his political philosophy, which he outlined to Judy Woodruff during the Campaign Managers Forum at Harvard following the 1988 election:
ROGER AILES: Let’s face it, there are three things that the media are interested in: pictures, mistakes, and attacks. That’s the one sure way of getting coverage. You try to avoid as many mistakes as you can. You try to give them as many pictures as you can. And if you need coverage, you attack, and you will get coverage.
It’s my orchestra pit theory of politics. If you have two guys on stage and one guy says, “I have a solution to the Middle East problem,” and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news? (Laughter)
One thing you don’t want to do is get your head up too far on some new vision for America because the next thing that happens is the media runs over to the Republican side and says, “Tell me why you think this is an idiotic idea.”