The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

by David Brock

  Now Murdoch’s news network was weeks away from launch, and what was to be another jewel in his empire already looked as if it had been struck with a deathblow. Time Warner Cable in New York, with its millions of subscribers, announced it would not carry Fox News. MSNBC, another new arrival, would appear on the cable system’s lineup instead.

  Murdoch was not used to losing. Over forty years, he had built an empire, beginning with a single newspaper in Adelaide, a city on the southern coast of Australia. After acquiring numerous papers around the county, including Sydney’s Daily Mirror, he founded Australia’s first national daily in 1964. From there, he expanded to the United Kingdom and around the world. The year after he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985, which legally permitted him to own broadcast stations, Murdoch founded the Fox Broadcasting Company. Along the way he had battled government regulators, politicians, unions, and, of course, rival newspapers, usually winding up on top, though sometimes after great expense. Few doubted Murdoch would fight to ensure that Fox News was broadcast in New York City.

  Fox News was always a political operation at heart, and it had an ally in New York City’s Republican mayor and former Ailes client Rudy Giuliani. At a party celebrating the network’s launch, executives spoke with representatives from the mayor’s office.3 Shortly thereafter it was announced that New York City would grant Fox News one of the channels it owned on the cable system. The programming on these channels was supposed to carry public interest broadcasts. According to an article in The New York Times announcing the deal, “The News Corporation would pay the city for access to the channel and give unspecific support to other Crosswalks channels. In return, it would be allowed to carry commercials.”4

  This was an unprecedented and clearly illegal decision expressly prohibited by the Cable Communications Act of 1984, in which Congress forbade municipally owned channels to carry commercial programming. In order to attempt to make the decision more politically palatable, the Giuliani administration also granted a channel to another upstart network, Bloomberg Television.

  It was clear why the Giuliani administration would take such an action. While some claimed the move “would bring jobs to the city,” The New York Times reported that “aides told”5 the paper, “Officials resented what they saw as a liberal bias in the news media, so by helping Mr. Murdoch, they were protecting what they believed was the only media conglomerate with a conservative voice.”6

  A little more than a week later, Federal District Judge Denise Cote issued an injunction prohibiting the city from broadcasting Fox News, writing in her decision, “The City’s action violates long-standing First Amendment principles that are the foundation of our democracy.… The city has engaged in a pattern of conduct with the purpose of compelling Time Warner to alter its constitutionally protected editorial decision not to carry Fox News.”7

  Time Warner, of course, was no saint. Refusing to carry Fox News was a business decision made to protect its own interests. The media conglomerate owned CNN, and Ted Turner served as vice chairman of its board. News Corp. and Time Warner eventually settled their differences, and the cable company agreed to carry Fox News as part of an unrelated business transaction.

  Fox’s behavior throughout this episode was telling. Even prior to its launch, Republican politicians had recognized the network’s potential—or at the least the political leanings of its owner. While purporting to be “fair and balanced,” Fox had the ability to summon the assistance of leading political figures even before a single minute of programming aired. How would these efforts be repaid?

  The ability of Fox News to beat the odds and become the highest-rated cable news channel is a testament to Roger Ailes’s talent. At the time of Fox’s launch, CNN was nearly twenty years old. It had grown from a scrappy cable network to the station of record. MSNBC launched around the same time as Fox News and was a partnership between NBC, with a newsgathering army of thousands at its disposal, and Microsoft, the untouchable technology king.

  On the other hand, the Fox network had only a limited news department, and its programming centered on comedies such as The Simpsons and Married … with Children.8 CNN and NBC already had correspondents around the world; they had studios, producers, and talent whose names were nationally known. Fox had none of these advantages.

  Whenever big news broke—O.J.’s car chase or the bombing of the USS Cole—cable audiences turned to CNN. The network provided the best, most up-to-the-minute coverage of these events. But even with its early advantage, CNN quickly recognized the potent competition it would soon face. The network’s ratings were already on the downswing, and now it had to contend with two new rivals. The channel needed a change.

  Rick Kaplan, who left ABC to become the president of CNN in the fall of 1997, had a solution. Instead of following Fox’s lead and creating its own opinion programming, CNN tried to reinvent the television news magazine. Shows like 60 Minutes and 20/20 had the ability to draw huge audiences and revenue. Kaplan thought he could emulate this format on cable. This error in judgment proved to be nearly fatal.

  CNN’s first attempt at a magazine show, Newsstand, launched with a sensational story claiming that during the Vietnam War, American troops hunted down deserters in Laos and killed them with nerve gas. The story was immediately attacked, and the network’s internal investigation concluded, “CNN should retract the story and apologize.”9

  Following the scandal’s blowback, CNN was still the goliath of cable news. Fox was a fraction of the size, and its biggest names were unknown quantities—but Ailes had a knack for identifying and cultivating talent.

  Bill O’Reilly, the star who would headline Fox’s prime-time lineup, had worked his way up through the television news business, first at a string of local stations and eventually making the jump to become a correspondent at CBS and then ABC News. In his highest-profile role, O’Reilly was the anchor of the syndicated tabloid news program Inside Edition.

  According to Scott Collins’s book Crazy Like a Fox, “O’Reilly pitched the executives at King World (which distributed Inside Edition) a show that resembled an edgy, opinionated version of Nightline.”10 They declined, and O’Reilly left television to earn a master’s degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Ailes, however, brought the concept to Fox News, and when the show did not perform in its original 6 p.m. time slot, it was Ailes who took the risk of moving the show to 8 p.m.

  The O’Reilly Factor’s success now seems like a forgone conclusion. However, the show was revolutionary when it launched in 1996. Opinion programming was still dominated by the Crossfire format—the left and the right debating each other. Larry King, who hosted a nonideological political and celebrity schmooze-fest, owned prime-time cable news.

  O’Reilly’s acerbic style was an unknown quantity. Instead of conducting standard interviews, he was willing to throw red meat at his audience. And it worked. Fox’s ratings began to climb, though it still lagged far behind CNN and MSNBC.

  As the 2000 presidential race began to heat up, Fox found its niche. The network’s average daily audience was still barely half of CNN’s, but there were times—during the Republican National Convention, for example—when Fox News actually surpassed CNN in the ratings.11

  To aid that year’s election-night coverage, Fox hired journalist and media consultant John Ellis to help analyze the results. It was Ellis who determined that Fox News should call the state of Florida—and the election—for George W. Bush, leaving the rest of the networks playing catch-up. They would retract this prediction hours later, but the projection, while not carrying any official weight, set in motion the dynamic that Bush had already won and created the perception that Gore’s attempts to get a recount made him a sore loser. Ellis was not an impartial observer; he was a Bush cousin who had been communicating with the campaign’s headquarters all night.

  As the recount election unfolded, Fox News offered its conservative audience a steady stream of coverage designed to reinforce their worldv
iew. “I think what’s going on is Democratic lawyers have flooded Florida. They are afraid of George W. Bush becoming president and instituting tort reform and their gravy train will be over,” Fox News anchor John Gibson editorialized. “This is the trial association’s full court press to make sure Bush does not win.”12

  Conservatives flocked to Fox as the place to get news during the hotly contested Florida recount, and it passed MSNBC in the ratings, averaging more than one million viewers per night in November 2000.13

  That month also offered evidence that Fox was more than simply a news channel to Republicans. When the network came under fire for Ellis’s critical role on election night, the Bush team leapt to its defense. “The media is full of people who are very close to candidates,” campaign spokesperson and future White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. “The exception is to be close to a Republican. The norm is to be close to a Democrat.”14

  In the Congressional hearings that followed the election-night debacle, Roger Ailes began his testimony with a conciliatory note, admitting, “Fox News, along with all the other television networks, made errors on election night which cannot be repeated, the biggest of which occurred in Florida.” Ailes continued, “Fox News acknowledges here that it failed the American public on Election Night and takes full responsibility for this failure.”15

  Ailes then eagerly defended his employee to the committee: “Mr. Ellis is the first cousin of President George W. Bush and Governor Jeb Bush. We at Fox News do not discriminate against people because of their family connections.” Ailes, according to his testimony, saw an advantage in employing someone related to George W. Bush:

  I am aware that Mr. Ellis was speaking to then Governor George W. Bush and Jeb Bush on election night. Obviously, through his family connections, Mr. Ellis has very good sources. I do not see this as a fault or shortcoming of Mr. Ellis. Quite the contrary, I see this as a good journalist talking to his very high level sources on election night. Our investigation of election night 2000 found not one shred of evidence that Mr. Ellis revealed information to either or both of the Bush brothers which he should not have, or that he acted improperly or broke any rules or policies of either Fox News or VNS [Voter News Service, which provided polling data].16

  Ailes made these remarks even after it was confirmed by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that Ellis’s communications with his family were not entirely professional in nature. In her accounting of election night at Fox News headquarters, she wrote:

  As the afternoon wore on, things weren’t looking good for George W. Bush. At about 6 P.M., after two waves of exit polls, Fox News’s chairman, Roger Ailes, called Ellis into his office for a private briefing. “What’s your gut say?” Ailes asked him. Silently, Ellis slid his index finger across his throat.

  Soon afterward, Ellis received a telephone call from the Bush brothers. “They were, like, ‘How we doin’?’ ” Ellis recalled. “I had to tell them it didn’t look good.”17

  The Bush campaign was not a source for Ellis at Fox News; just the opposite was true. The network was supplying political data directly to George W. and Jeb Bush. These conversations took place throughout election night. “At 2 a.m., Ellis called his cousins and told them, ‘Our projection shows that it is statistically impossible for Gore to win Florida.’ They were elated. ‘Their mood was up, big time,’ Ellis recalled. ‘It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth—me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.’ ”18

  While Bill O’Reilly was regularly beating Larry King in the ratings by the spring of 2001, the network as a whole had yet to pass CNN. But that would soon change.

  One of the most painful days in our nation’s history, September 11, 2001, was the first national tragedy covered from start to finish on television. Nearly every network had cameras focused on the World Trade Center towers as the second plane hit. And Americans watched in horror for hours as those people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., reacted to the plane crashes, culminating in the collapse of the towers.

  Fox’s strategy revolved around the theory that there was an audience of news consumers being underserved in the marketplace—people who lived in between New York and Los Angeles, who waved their flags with pride and saw the world through a prism of right and wrong. Fox built a dedicated audience, directly responding to this emotional chord. In their minds, Fox was biased—toward America. While other networks cared about fairness, Fox cared about winning, both as a network and as a country. Just as the attacks of September 11 gave the Republican Party a wedge issue to pound Democrats with, Ailes would use the event to pound CNN. As we moved further away from the September 11 tragedy, this “pro-American” position simply morphed into a pro-Bush position and a pro-Republican position. This is exactly what the network’s conservative audience desired.

  This is not to disparage the underlying brilliance of Fox News’s marketing. The network’s ideological clarity enabled it to innovate in ways that would leave the competition in the dust. In the wake of September 11, Fox News jumped on two opportunities to distinguish itself. One of these innovations was quickly emulated by the competition; the other has become a mark of brand distinction.

  It is difficult to imagine cable news before the ticker existed, although there was nothing particularly novel about Fox News’s decision to adopt it. Tickers had been used on the financial news networks for years to display information about the stock market. The New York Times had installed a news ticker on the outside of its headquarters in Times Square decades earlier.

  On the morning of September 11, with terrorist attacks on two major U.S. cities and a hijacked plane in the air, news was coming in faster than ever before. The anchors struggled to keep up with the flow of information and provide their viewers with analysis at once. That morning, Fox News unveiled its ticker and CNN quickly followed suit. Acknowledging the competition, MSNBC launched its ticker a few hours later.

  Fox’s second innovation would come to define the network and build loyalty among its viewers. It was the simple addition of an American flag to the Fox News logo. In his book Crazy Like a Fox, Scott Collins tells the story of how the addition was made:

  With a wave of post-attack patriotism seizing the nation, Rich O’Brien, the network’s celebrated graphics chief, toyed around on his computer and came up with an image of a waving Stars and Stripes alternating with the Fox logo. O’Brien showed the graphic to [Fox News executive John] Moody and asked if some viewers might find the image offensive.

  “Is it offensive?” Moody repeated. “Rich, I think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

  “From there on,” Moody says, the flag “became our trademark.”19

  By linking the American flag to the network, Fox declared, “We are America, and we’re taking sides.” Like a local sports anchor cheering on his team, Fox had made it clear where the network stood.

  At the same time, other networks struggled with their place in the media landscape. A false report spread that “CNN had banned the use of the word ‘terrorist’ to describe”20 the September 11 attackers on its airwaves. The story was absurd, but it spread like wildfire. Fox News was on the side of the American people; CNN was with the terrorists. Need evidence? Just turn on your television and see for yourself which network is waving the American flag.

  The falsehood was spread so widely that on September 30, CNN released the following statement: “There have been false reports that CNN has not used the word ‘terrorist’ to refer to those who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In fact, CNN has consistently and repeatedly referred to the attackers and hijackers as terrorists, and it will continue to do so.”21

  In reality, it was Reuters—not CNN—that had instructed its reporters to avoid the word “terrorist.” But as so often is the case, the damage of the lie could not be undone. The network that conservatives had derided as the Clinton News Network during the 1990s had been
branded, in the minds of some, as a supporter of terrorism.

  Fox emerged triumphant. After the September 11 attacks, ratings for all three news networks spiked. But throughout the fall, viewership of CNN and MSNBC receded while Fox’s surged. According to the Associated Press, “During January [2002], Fox averaged 656,000 viewers while CNN had 596,000 viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. MSNBC had 296,000 viewers. In Nielsen’s cable measurements, a month ends on its last Sunday. In prime time, Fox averaged 1.1 million viewers, CNN was at 921,000 and MSNBC had 358,000. Fox beat CNN during two months last year in prime time, but by smaller margins. And it has never won in Nielsen’s 24-hour average.”22

  In the Associated Press story announcing Fox’s triumph, Ailes credited Murdoch: “He said that there’s room and we can win, and nobody believed him.” CNN responded defensively: “Fox and CNN do different things. If you watch CNN, we have a full day of smart, hard newscasts that cover the world and break news daily.”23

  Fox was not a news network; it was a place to which viewers could turn to cheer America on. In fact, the reporting of original stories was never a priority. “Fox does almost no original reporting, and they can do it on the cheap,” says Michael Shanahan of George Washington University. “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.”24

  At a time when the country was collectively anxious about the future, Fox News was the confident coach rallying the team into battle, as opposed to just telling them what plays were being called on the field.