by David Brock
JUDY WOODRUFF: So you’re saying the notion of the candidate saying, “I want to run for president because I want to do something for this country,” is crazy.
ROGER AILES: Suicide.63
Running Fox News has made Ailes an extremely rich man. And Rupert Murdoch has given him an unheard-of level of control at the network. According to Michael Wolff, Murdoch “gives Ailes what he has never given any of his editors—never given the Times of London, even though his pledge has the force of law, and likely never will give the Wall Street Journal, although he’ll swear he will: fundamental editorial independence.… Ailes himself can’t be overruled about what goes on air.”64
Fox News is primarily a reflection of Roger Ailes, and the conservative movement has noticed. In 2009, speaking at a Boy Scouts dinner honoring Ailes, Rush Limbaugh commented, “One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it. Roger Ailes cannot do everything. Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera, and yet everybody who does is a reflection of him.”65
Politics, from the start, was Ailes’s primary passion. “I didn’t have to go into politics. I was a successful $60,000-a-year executive with Westinghouse producing their largest show,” he told The Washington Post in 1972. “I had it made, in effect, where I was. I took a hell of a gamble with my own career.”66
Now he would return to his first love—the art of public persuasion. As Ailes himself said in a 1971 speech titled “Candidate + Money + Media = Votes,” “Being deeply interested in and involved in television and politics, I find it difficult to divorce the two from the rest of our life.”67 Thirty-five years later, Ailes had more money and a larger platform to launch a campaign than ever before, and there was no candidate to screw it all up.
On January 20, 2009, the Republican Party was left leaderless. George W. Bush was aboard Air Force One, heading back to Texas for good. His father, never a favorite of the conservative base, was happily ensconced in retirement and for the better part of two decades had shown no interest in the day-to-day tussle of electoral politics.
The party’s 2008 presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, was in no position to remain the standard-bearer following his resounding defeat. The conservative base of the Republican Party had merely settled for John McCain at the top of the ticket. While their support was firmed up by the selection of running mate Sarah Palin, they would never accept McCain as their leader.
Palin, for that matter, had won the love of the conservative base, but by January 2009, she was back in the governor’s mansion in Alaska. It was not until the following summer that she would step down in order to take on a higher national profile and cash in on her newfound celebrity. Additionally, Palin was too much of a political neophyte for even her most ardent supporters to argue persuasively that she was ready to be the party’s leader.
Michael Steele, who would be elected chairman of the Republican National Committee ten days after Obama’s inauguration, soon proved himself cursed with the inability to appear on camera without embarrassing himself. Many insiders doubted he would survive even a year, while others were working behind the scenes to make sure his term would never be successful.
Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the Republican leaders in Congress, were too busy with the parochial concerns of running a legislative caucus. Congress, in any case, has never been an ideal platform for leading a movement, given that its leaders’ primary constituencies are the members of their own caucuses, whose individual interests often diverge from those of the party’s base.
Had it been 1993, Rush Limbaugh might have stepped in to fill the void. His platform had grown, and he certainly tapped into the Republican id when he proclaimed, “I hope he fails,” just days before President Obama’s inauguration.68 But Limbaugh didn’t have the desire or energy to run the kind of sustained campaign required to lead the party. Broadcasting an enormously profitable radio show one hundred yards from the ocean in West Palm Beach, Florida, is one thing; traveling around the country ginning up the base is another.
The only conservative pundit with the energy and desire to take on such a mission might have been Glenn Beck. But Beck had begun his new show at Fox News the day before Obama was sworn in, and he had yet to build his army of followers.
At the very moment the conservative movement was leaderless, it desperately needed one. Its grassroots—from the libertarians who wanted the government small enough to drown in a bathtub; to the religious right who feared what America would become with a liberal and, in their minds, possibly a Muslim, in the White House; to the neocons who saw their foreign policy aims in Iraq and Afghanistan crumble before their eyes—were left adrift, confident only of two things.
First, the Republican establishment had failed them. Eight years in power, four of which were completely unchecked, had bred corruption. The promise of the 1994 Republican revolution was now a distant memory. The size of the federal government had ballooned under Republican control. Instead of eliminating entitlements such as Medicare, George W. Bush oversaw the largest expansion of the program since its inception. Instead of tearing down the Department of Education, Bush expanded its power under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Conservatives were certain that the American people had not rejected their principles, but rather the devastating elections of 2006 and 2008 were lost because of the endemic corruption and incompetence that had taken hold of the Republican Party. According to this logic, conservatives didn’t lose in 2008. Republicans, led by McCain, had.
Second, President Obama was their worst nightmare. This was a president with an exotic name, who was liberal, urban, and “pallin’ around with terrorists,”69 as Sarah Palin suggested. At the same time, Obama led a huge army, with an e‑mail list of more than thirteen million followers, with a public appeal and private cool that made some on the right wonder if they would even be able to compete in the 2012 election.
Conservatives felt alone and insecure for the first time in nearly a decade. Suddenly in the minority, they were looking for a way to channel their anger. They wanted to fight the change that was occurring all around them, but had no means to do so.
Roger Ailes, having cultivated the conservative movement as his network’s core audience for over a decade, must have been waiting for this moment. Seven years earlier, the president of Fox News had seen his network overtake CNN in the ratings, making it the most-watched cable news network. Now was his chance to lead a movement—not with his own voice, but, as he had done so effectively in the past, by channeling his political ambitions through others.
After more than a decade of Ailes’s leadership, Fox News had been transformed into the ideal platform from which he could take advantage of this very situation. He was in control of the largest political megaphone on the right, speaking directly with more conservatives every day than any arm of the Republican Party. He had loyal lieutenants in his prime-time hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and in executives such as Washington managing editor Bill Sammon and Michael Clemente. And, on the day before Barack Obama became commander in chief, Ailes added a new weapon to his arsenal: Glenn Beck.
Whenever confronted, even in a friendly environment, about the role Fox plays in American politics, Ailes does his best Gomer Pyle impression, giving his audience an aw-shucks response. “I’m not in politics anymore,” he claimed in an April 26, 2010, speech at Ave Maria School of Law. “I don’t do politics, I do the news.”70 One could presume this was as friendly an audience as Ailes could attract, considering conservative Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan was the primary source of funding for the school. In the same speech, showing his true colors, Ailes put his role as newsman aside, arguing that President Obama’s health care bill was unconstitutional.
Throughout his political hiatus, there were hints of Roger Ailes’s restlessness. Bob Woodward, in his book Bush at War, caused a stir by highlighting a message Ailes sent to Karl Rove following the September 11, 200
1, terrorist attacks, which offered strategic political advice to the White House. Woodward wrote:
Roger Ailes, former media guru for Bush’s father, had a message, Rove told the president. It had to be confidential because Ailes, a flamboyant and irreverent media executive, was currently the head of FOX News, the conservative-leaning television cable network that was enjoying high ratings. In that position, Ailes was not supposed to be giving political advice. His back-channel message: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible. Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly.71
Ailes did not deny he sent the message, but he protested the context. “Bob Woodward’s characterization of my memo is incorrect,” he shot back. “In the days following 9/11, our country came together in nonpartisan support of the president. During that time, I wrote a personal note to a White House staff member as a concerned American expressing my outrage about the attacks on our country. I did not give up my American citizenship to take this job.”72
Ailes was doing the job of a political consultant, not acting as the head of a news network. Following its familiar pattern, Fox News responded by attacking CNN head Rick Kaplan and the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert, for their supposedly close ties with Democrats. “Mr. Ailes said his letter was not comparable to Mr. Kaplan’s ‘sitting up all night in the White House’ giving advice to Mr. Clinton,” wrote Bill Carter and Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. “He also said the letter was far less worthy of scrutiny than a meeting between the NBC anchor Tim Russert and Democratic senators last year in which Mr. Russert, who long worked in Democratic politics, offered what Mr. Ailes described as ‘strategic tips and advice.’ ”73 Both Kaplan and Russert denied giving advice to Bill Clinton or Senate Democrats.
Roger Ailes’s political involvement did not stop at letters to political allies. An explosive charge was leveled in a 2007 lawsuit filed against News Corp. Court documents reveal that executives at the company attempted to coerce publisher Judith Regan to withhold information from federal investigators in order to protect the political ambitions of Ailes’s former client Rudy Giuliani.
After working at the mayor’s firm Giuliani Partners, former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik had been nominated by George W. Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security. Regan had been Kerik’s lover, often meeting him for trysts in an apartment originally reserved for 9/11 rescue workers. According to the lawsuit, a “senior executive in the News Corp. organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.… [D]efendants knew they would be protecting Giuliani if they could preemptively discredit her.”74
Documents released as part of a subsequent suit between Regan and her attorneys revealed that it was Roger Ailes whom Regan had accused of instructing her to lie about Kerik’s misdeeds to protect the former mayor. According to an affidavit sworn by Seth Redniss, one of the attorneys who drafted Regan’s suit, “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of
Fox News (a News Corp. company), and Regan” took place, during which “Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.”75
A real news executive would strive to report on the misdeeds of those appointed to serve in or run for high federal office. Ailes instead used his perch to insulate future presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani from attacks.
While Roger Ailes refuses to take credit for his place in the political ecosystem, other Republicans openly tout his influence. In June 2010, conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told his audience, “If you’d wanna win, seriously, Roger Ailes … is the most powerful voice in the Republican Party. He has set up something that—it is the only organizing institution for the GOP because everybody’s let Republicans down in Washington, D.C.”76
Because of Fox’s standing as a “news” channel, Roger Ailes knew the network’s reporting, unlike the rants of Rush Limbaugh or conservative radio host Michael Savage, would be taken seriously by others in the media. He might not have gone to the Columbia School of Journalism—in fact, Ailes mocked those who did—but he knew how professional journalists operated and would use that knowledge to manipulate them.
Even though he’s now more than seventy years old, Ailes’s current and former employees and colleagues still speak about him with a sense of fear. Nothing angers Ailes more than people leaking information about his network, and nobody wants to be the target of his wrath. A former Fox employee described Ailes’s philosophy, stating, “When [Ailes] gets really crazy is when stuff leaks out the door. He goes mental on that. He can’t stand that. He says in a dynamic enterprise like a network newsroom, there’s going to be infighting and ego, but he says keep it in the house.”77
Roger Ailes’s intense paranoia extends beyond leaks from inside the Fox network. In his biography of Rupert Murdoch, Michael Wolff writes, “[Ailes] is a man of overriding obsessions, including his belief that he has been earmarked by Arab terrorists, which costs News Corp. a considerable premium for his 24/7 security apparatus.” Wolff continues, “Delivering Ailes to work, his driver and bodyguard call from the SUV so that a second security team can fan out on the plaza in front of the News Corp. headquarters for Ailes’ arrival.”78
On one occasion, after seeing a man whom he “perceived” to be Muslim on the security monitor in his office, “Roger tore up the whole floor,” a source close to Ailes told Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim—which is consistent with the ideology of his network.” Ailes screamed, “This guy could be bombing me!”79 The terrorist Roger Ailes thought was out to get him was a janitor.
Beyond a high level of personal security, Ailes has a penchant for contacting law enforcement from his weekend home in Putnam County, New York. According to the gossip website Gawker, “All told, according to police records we obtained from the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department via New York’s Freedom of Information Law, cops have been called to the Ailes’ home 10 times since 2009.” The report continued, “In eight of those calls, units were actually sent to the house. None of the calls resulted in an investigation, arrest, or determination that any criminal activity had taken place.”80
Ailes has purchased two papers in upstate New York, the Putnam County News and Recorder and the Putnam County Courier, for his wife to run. True to form, he did not envision these as sleepy small-town papers. To run the venture, the Aileses hired former Weekly Standard staffer Joe Lindsley, who would move the political bent of the papers rightward. Lindsley resigned in April 2011. Afterward, according to Gawker, “he was driving to a deli in Cold Spring for lunch … when he noticed a black Lincoln Navigator that seemed to be following him, according to several sources familiar with the incident.” Even more shocking, “Then he got a look at the driver, who was a News Corporation security staffer that Lindsley happened to know socially. Lindsley continued on his way and later called the driver to ask if he was following him. The answer was yes, at Ailes’s direction.”81
The Putnam papers were not News Corp. properties, yet Ailes was seemingly using the company’s security to deal with a personal conflict. The surveillance was not limited to a single incident. According to Gawker, Ailes told three staff members, including Lindsley, that “he’d had them followed, and their private conversations surveilled, to catch them saying mean things about him.”82 These allegations were denied by Roger Ailes’s wife, Elizabeth, in an e‑mail to Gawker: “These rambling allegations are untrue and in fact not even reality based.”83
Ailes’s fights in Putnam County extend beyond his own employees. He also has feuded with a rival newspaper owner, Don Hall. At a local business expo, Ailes confronted his eighty-year-old competitor a
nd “pushed him in the chest and threatened to sue him”84 for printing an unflattering story that had already appeared in The New York Times. Ailes, of course, denies the incident occurred, stating, “There was no dispute with Don Hall—we had a joking conversation, but he may have missed the point—he’s not exactly a barrel of laughs. As for suing Don, that would be fruitless because he’s broke. I also never ‘poked him in the chest’—if I did, he would have toppled over since he’s only 60 pounds.”85
Ailes’s paranoid style and its resulting aggressive and over-the-top reactions create a climate of fear among current and former employees. Michael Wolff observed, “Everybody outside Fox News and inside News Corp. is afraid of Roger Ailes.”86
Chapter 2
The Path to the Top
You can produce a cable television network with people who talk nicely and are articulate and are blonde and look good on television and say provocative things. But it is not based on any discovery or intent to get to the bottom of something.
—Michael Shanahan, George Washington
University School of Media and Public Affairs
Rupert Murdoch was steaming. Months earlier, at a news conference in January 1996 announcing the creation of Fox News, Roger Ailes had told assembled reporters, “[Fox News would] like to be premier journalists. We’d like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking. And certainly there could be that interpretation because of my background. But I left politics a number of years ago and run a news organization for the last two years. So we just expect to do fine, balanced journalism.”1
This was contradicted by Ailes’s actions almost immediately after he began at the company. Joe Peyronnin, who was president of Fox News, recounted that the network boss asked some of the staff “if they were liberal or not.” He continued, “There was a litmus test. He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.”2