by David Brock
Corsi’s promotional efforts began in earnest on Hannity & Colmes. “I do a great deal of analysis of [Obama’s] autobiography,” Corsi told viewers. Echoing John Gibson’s comments from the previous year, Corsi gave his spin on the candidate’s family history. “Obama first presents his father as a great hero, and the truth was, his father was a polygamist and an alcoholic. He had abandoned the family in Africa when he met Obama’s mother in Hawaii [and] he married Obama’s mother without disclosing that he had not divorced this African woman.”38
Then, two weeks later on Fox & Friends, Corsi claimed Obama’s campaign “has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website.” He continued, “The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.” As the interview continued, Corsi was allowed to expand on his conspiracy theory, claiming, “There’s been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the website right now.”39
The allegation that Obama was not a natural-born citizen had already been widely discredited, but Fox News executives were not only happy to let Corsi spread his lies on air; they vouched for the author’s credibility. On Hannity & Colmes, Fox News’s Washington deputy managing editor, Bill Sammon, claimed, “Well, the nature of those inaccuracies [in Corsi’s book], I think, is relatively innocuous,” he said. “The first thing in that forty-page document that the Obama camp points out is that the author got their wedding date wrong—the year of their wedding wrong. Okay. Well, that’s not a good thing, but it doesn’t go to the ideology of Obama.”40
Sammon was understating the extent of Corsi’s smear campaign. In his book, Corsi spread numerous lies about the future president, ranging from the claim that Obama had “pledged to reduce the size of the military” to the claim that Obama “has yet to answer questions” concerning whether “he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug use extended into his law school days or beyond.”41
Unlike what had occurred in 2004, other networks simply did not allow Corsi to spread his falsehoods on their airwaves, or they were prepared to challenge him, limiting his ability to repeat his performance. Fox gave Corsi free reign to spread his lies in the name of book promotion.
As the summer came to an end, Fox’s coverage of the election was as unbalanced as ever. Consider the network’s reporting during the five-day period that followed the Republican convention—from September 5 to September 9, 2008. Of the total time Fox News devoted to candidates or campaign surrogates
speaking directly to the camera, 78 percent went to Republicans and 22 percent went to Democrats.42
With McCain trailing Obama as the election drew closer, the attacks became more and more desperate. One frequent perpetrator was Dick Morris, who served the dual role of Fox News contributor and consultant to political action committees airing attack ads against the Democratic nominee.
Morris was a political mercenary. He had begun his career managing future congressman Jerry Nadler’s campaign for student government secretary at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.43 As a political consultant, he had worked for right-wing senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms before signing on to work with Bill Clinton in late 1994. After resigning from the campaign during the Democratic convention because of a prostitution scandal, Morris turned vehemently anti-Clinton and became a favorite Fox News guest and eventual paid contributor.
On October 6, Morris claimed that Bill Ayers, a former member of the 1970s radical left-wing group Weather Underground, had “hired” Barack Obama as chairman of the board for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a public school reform project, “to distribute the $50 million that Ayers raised”44 for the organization. The New York Times reported that, in reality, “according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment.”45
Morris’s wild attacks on the future president did not let up. On October 13, he claimed that “Obama served as ‘general counsel’ to ACORN.” “Obama was never ‘general counsel’ to ACORN; he was part of a team of attorneys from the law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland who represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the State of Illinois.”46 The ACORN tie was significant only because Fox had spent weeks attacking ACORN. They were so successful at branding the organization that in interviews at campaign rallies, McCain supporters would talk directly about ACORN’s nonexistent voter fraud operation that would supposedly steal the election for Obama.
“Between October 27 and October 31, Morris touted an ad by the National Republican Trust Political Action Committee attacking [Obama’s] association with his” by-then “former pastor Jeremiah Wright—three times on Fox & Friends and once on Hannity & Colmes. Each time, Morris solicited viewers to go to GOPTrust.com—National Republican Trust PAC’s website—and make contributions.”47 Morris, of course, was being paid by the PAC, a fact Fox viewers were never informed of.
On October 27, Morris told Fox’s audience that GOPTrust.com “is an independent expenditure accepting contributions, if you know what I mean, folks, who are running the world’s best anti–Reverend Wright ad.” Morris continued, “It’s a thirty-second spot. It includes all the stuff that needs to be done in battleground states. They only have a million bucks for this right now. If they had two million, they could do a huge amount to swing this election. Let’s win this election despite John McCain.”48
Morris made similar comments on October 30, claiming that GOPTrust.com was “raising money right now for the next twelve hours, and they’re hoping to come up with another two million. They are going to saturate all of the swing states and the networks with the ad you just saw.” Morris added, “I hope your viewers go online to GOPTrust.com and make it possible to run this ad all over the United States.”49
On October 31, Morris was at it again. “One of the things that I think McCain should—or the McCain supporters should do, is there are still about two hours to contribute to GOPTrust.com, which is the independent expenditure group that is running the Reverend Wright advertisement,” he said. “I hope people give funds to GOPTrust.com to get that issue out.”50
No other network had a paid contributor on air promoting his political work without noting any financial ties. Fox was paying Morris to promote his outside political work attacking the president and raising funds for attack ads.
Despite all the attacks, smears, and attempted “swiftboating,” the unthinkable happened: Obama won. At Fox News, Election Day was a stoic affair. Barring another cataclysmic polling error, the entire political establishment knew Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States—all that was left was the actual voting.
For the most part, Fox played election night straight. There were no delays in calling states for Obama, no early calls for McCain. The only oddity was the network “endlessly repeating some footage of a surly-looking fellow outside a polling place in Philadelphia who apparently represented the leading edge of a massive ‘Black Panther’ conspiracy to intimidate white voters.”51
One interesting aspect of Fox’s election coverage was who was not mentioned—George W. Bush. Although he was still president and leader of the Republican Party, Bush had already disappeared from the scene. The only time his name came up was in a slip of the tongue, when Chris Wallace mistakenly called Texas for Bush and quickly corrected himself.52
At approximately 11 p.m., Brit Hume informed the Fox audience that Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States. Karl Rove was surprisingly apolitical, telling viewers that the election of our first African-American president, who “was aspirational and inspirational, who appealed to the better angels of our nature, is very powerful. It’s a night for our country to celebrate, and for the world to celebrate.”53
Chapter 4
A Stalin-esque Mouthpiece
Some are wondering if the honeymoon is already over.
—Fox News’s Bret Baier, on President Obama’s
Just as George W. Bush disappeared from Fox News’s election-night coverage, the legacy of his presidency seemed to vanish from the network the next day. It was as if the eight-year period that had seen two major wars, a massive financial crisis, and budget numbers that had swung from an inherited $236 billion surplus to a $1.3 trillion deficit had never happened. Before Barack Obama had been president-elect for a single week, Fox hosts were already blaming him for the state of the economy.
On November 6, Dick Morris and Sean Hannity pinned the stock market declines that followed Election Day on Obama. “Now, the other thing that I predicted in Fleeced is that the stock market would go crazy after he [Obama] was elected,” said Morris. “Not just because he’s a radical, not just because he’s a Democrat, but because he’s going to raise the capital gains tax.”
Hannity replied, “If he doesn’t come out and say ‘I’m not
going to, you know, raise the capital gains tax, I’m not going to raise taxes,’ but heading into an economic slowdown, you’re predicting the stock market is going to—it’s the Obama tanking?”1
A week after the election, Hannity was not only trying to stick stock market declines on the newly elected president: in a conversation with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Hannity attempted to claim the recession was Obama’s fault. “This is really the Obama recession in this sense: that people that have money are looking at this, ‘Look, if—if he is true to his word, you know what? I’m getting out now.’ ”2
Fox News acted as if “history did not go back before the inauguration, as if this was Obama’s crisis,” says Tom Fiedler, dean of the College of Communication at Boston University and former executive editor of The Miami Herald. “It was the prism through which Fox reported on the 2010 election that had that skewed point of view, that the economic crisis was all a result of Obama’s failed economic policies, with no recognition that not only did the problem emulate from regulatory positions under George W. Bush, but the bailout that led to the deficit was also started under Henry Paulson and Bush.”3
Fox also could not resist linking Obama to the scandal brewing in Illinois following the arrest on federal corruption charges of Governor Rod Blagojevich and the fraud and bribery conviction of Democratic donor and fund-raiser Tony Rezko. On December 9, while discussing the criminal complaint against Blagojevich, Sean Hannity said, “I think the Tony Rezko issue is going to be a big problem for [Obama], especially because he’s all over this document. The pres—the word ‘president-elect’ is mentioned forty-four times in the document. Pretty troubling.”4 The truth was, “president-elect” was used in the documents primarily to suggest that Obama and his advisers were unwilling to conspire with Blagojevich, while other mentions simply were descriptions of the Senate seat vacated by Obama or references to his forthcoming presidential administration.
Since its founding, Fox News has been in a constant state of transition. A former employee described the fluid nature of the network this way:
For the first few years, it was, “Let’s take the conservative take on things.” And then after a few years, it evolved into, “Well, it’s not just the conservative take on things, we’re going to take the Republican take on things,” which is not necessarily in lock step with the conservative point of view. And then two, three, five years into that, it was, “We’re taking the Bush line on things,” which was different than the GOP. So we were parroting the White House. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece.5
Now, with the country in transition, Fox News would undergo major personnel changes that put Roger Ailes at the top of the GOP food chain. Fox had always been a conservative news operation, but Ailes would remake it into a political one as well.
The transition began with a simple lineup change. Since Fox News’s founding, Hannity & Colmes had been the network’s left-versus-right show. While hardly a fair fight between the milquetoast Alan Colmes and the bullying style of Sean Hannity, at least Colmes always was a token liberal in Fox News’s prime-time lineup.
Sean Hannity’s career as a right-wing talker began in college, when he first appeared on KCSB-FM at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His show was canceled within months, after featuring The AIDS Cover-Up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS, a book widely condemned by the scientific and medical community, which made numerous false claims, such as “that AIDS could be spread by kissing and mosquito bites.”6
C. Everett Koop, surgeon general under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, criticized the book and its promotion by radio host and Focus on the Family head James Dobson, causing the evangelical leader to backpedal. Dobson claimed through a spokesperson, “We gave careful consideration to the feedback we subsequently received from members of the medical community and made the decision to discontinue it.”7
During one show, Hannity told a lesbian caller, “I feel sorry for your child.”8 The UCSB campus paper also reported that Hannity said, “Anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. It’s very dangerous if we start accepting lower and lower forms of behavior as the normal.”9 The ACLU fought the station, and Hannity was offered a return to his position in the lineup, but he declined. Hannity then marketed himself as “the most talked-about college radio host in America”10 and was hired by the Alabama station WVNN.
He was a host in Atlanta when Roger Ailes brought him to New York to host a show on Fox News with the working title Hannity & LTBD—“Liberal to Be Determined.” 11From there his popularity and stature as both a Fox host and now a national radio host grew.
Following the 2008 elections, Alan Colmes would be gone and Hannity would host the 9 p.m. hour alone. Instead of debating a liberal foil, Hannity would have the hour all to himself to promote the causes and candidates he believed in.
Left untouched was Greta Van Susteren’s 10 p.m. show. Van Susteren began her television career appearing on CNN during the O. J. Simpson trial as a legal expert. When the media circus concluded, CNN brought her aboard as a host. She moved to Fox in 2002 and joined its prime-time lineup. After the 2008 election, her husband, John Coale, became a close friend of Sarah Palin, advising the former vice presidential candidate on certain legal matters.
With Van Susteren’s close ties to the Alaska governor and O’Reilly’s traditional conservative views, Fox now did not have a single mainstream Democrat in its evening schedule.
While the small shift in the network’s lineup had this seismic effect, the network’s biggest on-air change was weeks away. Roger Ailes, with his keen eye for talent, recruited Glenn Beck from CNN Headline News to host a show in the 5 p.m. hour. According to Beck’s version of events, Ailes told him, “I see this as the Alamo … If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we’d be fine.”12
Beck was a former morning zoo DJ who had worked at a myriad of stations. His outrageous and offensive stunts often caused an uproar in the local markets where he was broadcast. While Beck was on the air in Phoenix, for instance, he called the wife of a rival station’s morning host to ridicule the couple over a recent miscarriage. In Hamden, Connecticut, his show was protested after he and cohost Pat Gray insulted an Asian caller on air.
According to Beck, as he bounced from city to city, much of his paycheck went “up [his] nose.”13 After meeting his second wife, Beck cleaned up, converted to Mormonism, and began to take his show in a more political direction. In 2000, The Glenn Beck Program launched on WFLA in Tampa, Florida, and Premiere Radio Networks began syndicating the show in 2002.
In 2006, Beck launched his CNN Headline News program. While the show was a success, Beck was clearly held back, producing a far milder program than what was to come at Fox. With Beck on board, Roger Ailes landed a key piece of conservative talent at the network—one who could not only draw viewers, but also generate controversy across the media.
An even more significant change at Fox too
k place when Brit Hume, who had been Fox News’s Washington, D.C., managing editor since the founding of the network, retired at the end of 2008. Though he would make controversial remarks from time to time, Hume was at heart a journalist who had made his way up the ladder in the mainstream news industry. He began as a print reporter working for The Hartford Times, UPI, and Baltimore’s Evening Sun. Hume then moved to ABC News in 1973 and rose to become White House correspondent during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton presidencies.
When Hume stepped down, Ailes replaced him with former Washington Times White House correspondent Bill Sammon, a conservative who, after beginning his career at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, had risen through the ranks at right-wing news sources such as The Washington Examiner.
In addition to his reporting duties at The Washington Times, Sammon was the author of four hagiographies of George Bush, who had nicknamed him “Big Stretch”: Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism—from Inside the Bush White House; Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, Media Bias, and the Bush Haters; Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media; and The Evangelical President: George Bush’s Struggle to Spread a Moral Democracy Throughout the World. The title of his first book, At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election, gives a hint as to why the Bush White House rewarded Sammon with excellent access and why Sammon’s publisher was able to state in promotional materials for his 2006 book, Strategery, “No other journalist has interviewed the president more times.”14