The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine
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Following Ailes’s lead, Fox blows up these typically insignificant local incidents into nationwide controversies. For example, in December 2010, Fox claimed that an elementary school in Heathrow, Florida, had banned “traditional Christmas colors.”16 Fox & Friends breathlessly covered the story, and Fox Nation, the network’s Huffington Post–like website launched in March 2009, prominently featured the “ban” on its homepage.
Fox, however, never called the school district. When asked to comment, the district revealed that the entire story had been a lie, simply stating that there was “no ban on the colors red and green at Heathrow Elementary.”17 This was typical of Fox’s War on Christmas: lots of bluster and outrage, backed by dubious facts, repeated year after year.
The hidden-camera videos promoted by Fox did not prove the institutional corruption at ACORN that they purported to expose. According to Breitbart, the tapes showed conclusive evidence of ACORN employees helping O’Keefe and Giles with an underage prostitution scheme. To make this case, O’Keefe was forced to heavily edit the videos. For instance, while O’Keefe often appeared in a pimp costume outside of ACORN offices, it was later revealed that he did not wear it inside.
Some of the most damning evidence of Breitbart’s deception came in a video taken at the ACORN office in San Bernardino, California, where an employee, Tresa Kaelke, recognizing that O’Keefe was engaged in an absurd stunt of some kind, decided to play along with his act. During her conversation with O’Keefe and Giles, Kaelke claimed that she had murdered her husband before giving the duo fake instructions for setting up a brothel.
Fox News saw the tape and went wild. A few hours after James O’Keefe posted the video, Glenn Beck went on the air and announced, “Tonight—a special program with tape from BigGovernment.com that is so explosive it’s going to peel the skin right off of your face. ACORN yet again caught on hidden camera showing their true colors. This is much more than anything you’ve seen yet.”18
“This is twisted, bizarre, macabre,” Beck said after playing the video. “I mean, is this theater? I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a jury. But, gosh, even to me, it seems like this is a potential admission of murder. And the way she was describing doing some groundwork beforehand, you know, so everybody in town knew exactly what was going on, a case might be made for premeditated murder.” He added, “We haven’t been even able to confirm from the state of California whether Tresa’s husband from ten years ago was killed, or if he’s dead, or if she even had a husband. Did she make the story up? I don’t know. Nobody’s asking questions.”19
In the 6 p.m. hour, correspondent Molly Hennenberg showed portions of the San Bernardino tape. At 8 p.m., Bill O’Reilly devoted his opening monologue to the video, stating, “So there you have an ACORN employee having a conversation about setting up a house full of child prostitutes. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”20 The 9 p.m. hour was no different. Sean Hannity gave Hannah Giles star treatment in an interview. When he asked whether anyone had “checked to see if in fact she had a husband that was killed,” Giles answered, “We’ve—we’re working on that.” Hannity went on to claim, “So she’s on tape admitting that she plotted to kill and had her husband killed, but we don’t know if it’s true yet.”21
Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage continued at 10 p.m., when contributor Karl Rove told Greta Van Susteren that Kaelke “claimed to have killed her husband because she thought he was going to abuse her at some point. So, she’s claimed that she shot him in the head.” Rove added, “I mean, this is an organization that really must have a terrific human relations—human resources department to hire people like that.”22
Contrary to Beck’s earlier assertion, the San Bernardino Police Department was in fact asking questions. That same day they put out a release stating, “From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.”23
Kaelke had recognized that O’Keefe and Giles were putting on a show, she explained, and “decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me. Like Stephen Colbert does—saying the most outrageous things with a straight face.”24
The next morning, on Fox & Friends, Gretchen Carlson exclaimed, “She killed somebody?” But an hour later, the Fox hosts explained that Kaelke had not “killed somebody,”25 in the following exchange between Carlson, Brian Kilmeade, and Steve Doocy:
CARLSON: Well, yeah, basically that she was playing along in a game after the fact. We are not really sure about the details yet, including whether or not she actually did kill her husband. That is still unknown at this time.
KILMEADE: I believe she didn’t. The husband is still around.
CARLSON: OK.
DOOCY: Right, he’s alive and living in Barstow.26
In two other ACORN offices, employees contacted the police following O’Keefe and Giles’ visit—an obvious sign that they had no intention of helping set up a prostitution business.27 And in Los Angeles, an ACORN employee flatly refused to assist the duo with their scheme—a fact that Breitbart, O’Keefe, and Giles hid from the public until more than two months after the story broke.28 (Even that didn’t stop Breitbart from falsely suggesting that ACORN employees had helped “set up a prostitution ring in every single office.”)29
In the end, not a single investigation revealed widespread wrongdoing by the organization. An investigation led by former Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger found “no evidence that any action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by ACORN employees on behalf of the videographers.”30 According to the Office of the Attorney General in California, “The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.”31 Additionally, the New York Daily News quoted “a law enforcement source” saying that O’Keefe and Giles had “edited the tape to meet their agenda.”32
But the truth did not matter. Within a week of the first video’s release, the Democratic-led House of Representatives voted 345–75 to defund ACORN, and the Senate followed suit, voting 85–15 to bar the organization from receiving federal funds. By the spring of 2010, ACORN’s national operation had dissolved. Although state chapters continued with their work, Fox News had succeeded in shutting down one of the largest and most active progressive organizations in the country.
The ACORN saga also provided a perfect example of how Fox News helps conservatives stir up national controversies:
STEP 1: Conservative activists introduce the lie. It’s important to note that often the source doesn’t matter. O’Keefe and Giles were unknown quantities, and Breitbart was primarily a news aggregator. There was no reason for their work to be trusted without verification, but Fox still relied on it, turning a fringe story into a national scandal.
STEP 2: Fox News devotes massive coverage to the story. In the twenty-four hours after Breitbart and O’Keefe posted the first ACORN video on BigGovernment.com, Fox News ran more than a dozen segments about the controversy.
STEP 3: Fox attacks other outlets for ignoring the controversy. The day after the first round of tapes was released, Glenn Beck was already complaining about the lack of media coverage: “This story was so huge, so huge, I wondered last night, how many in the media are going to cover it? Well, we watched. Let’s take a look here. Let’s just take this story by the numbers. Since yesterday morning until about noon today, how many times did the mainstream media outlets cover the ACORN story? What a surprise! Coming in at number one, FOX, nineteen times, at least nineteen times. CNN, how many times? Whoa! Three, three, wow … How about MSNBC, how much did they cover the ACORN scandal? Zero. ABC, how many times did ABC cover it? Zero. What do you say, CBS? Oh, zero. NBC, how many times did they cover this story? New York Times, this is a good one, huh? You could get a Pulitzer Prize.”33
STEP 4: Mainstream outlets begin reporting on the story. The New York Times and C
BS News began reporting on the ACORN story on September 15, 2009. NBC’s Nightly News and ABC’s World News followed with reports the next day.
STEP 5: Media critics, pundits praise Fox News’s coverage. On September 20, Howard Kurtz asked, “Were the rest of the media late to this burgeoning scandal?” Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander clearly believed so, writing: “It’s tempting to dismiss such gimmicks. Fox News, joined by right-leaning talk radio and bloggers, often hypes stories to apocalyptic proportions while casting competitors as too liberal or too lazy to report the truth. But they’re also occasionally pumping legitimate stories. I thought that was the case with ACORN and, before it, the Fox-fueled controversy that led to the resignation of White House environmental adviser Van Jones.”34
STEP 6: The story falls apart once the damage has been done. None of the investigations that cleared ACORN of wrongdoing received the same breathless coverage as Breitbart and O’Keefe’s misleading videos.
This pattern holds true not just for attacks against ideological foes, but for attacks on issues as well. As the network was smearing a progressive group, it was simultaneously battling President Obama’s proposal to address climate change. To combat the plethora of data proving the need for legislation, Fox News hosts touted false studies and data emanating from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. These institutions were often funded by companies whose profits would suffer from the decreased use of fossil fuels resulting from the passage of climate legislation.
When the House of Representatives took up the American Clean Energy and Security Act, Sean Hannity declared: “Most Americans don’t know that we’re going to lose two and a half million new jobs and that your electricity bills, as a result of this vote tonight, will go up maybe as high as three thousand dollars per family.”35
But the three-thousand-dollar figure was based on a false extrapolation of a 2007 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had already been discredited by one of the study’s own authors.
In contrast to Hannity’s assertion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that climate legislation would have an average annual cost of $175 per family. Similarly, the EPA found that the average annual cost to households of legislation to solve the climate crisis would be between $80 and $111 from 2010 to 2050.
FactCheck.org explained that “the $3,100 figure is a misrepresentation of both Obama’s proposal and the study from which the number is derived.”36
In addition to spreading false statistics about the Democratic bill, Fox News helped conservatives promote the trumped‑up scandal that became known as “Climategate.” Thousands of stolen e‑mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK appeared online days before negotiations were set to begin at an international climate summit in Copenhagen. Fox News and other conservative outlets gleefully seized on the e‑mails in an attempt to undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activities are contributing to global warming.
Sean Hannity cited the e‑mails as a reason to believe the decades of data proving global warming was fraudulent. “This climate change hoax,” he exclaimed, “now we find out that this institute, in fact, was hiding from the people of Great Britain and the world that, in fact, climate change is a hoax, something I’ve been saying for a long time.”37
Experts at NASA had a different opinion of the Climategate fiasco. As one climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies explained, “There’s nothing in the e‑mails that shows that global warming is a hoax.”38
But Fox’s misguided interpretation of the e‑mails was not an accident. Climate skepticism was network policy, enforced by Washington managing editor Bill Sammon. At the outset of the international climate talks in Copenhagen, Sammon sent an e‑mail to producers with instructions on how to cover climate change:
From: Sammon, Bill
To: 169-SPECIAL REPORT; 036-FOX.WHU; 054-FNSunday; 030-Root (FoxNews.Com); 050-Senior Producers;
051-Producers; 069-Politics; 005-Washington
Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean
Sent: Tue Dec 08 12:49:51 2009
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data…
… we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.39
Fifteen minutes before the e‑mail was sent, Fox correspondent Wendell Goler reported from Copenhagen that the 2000s were “expected to turn out to be the warmest decade on record,” following a “trend that has scientists concerned because 2000–2009 [was] warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s.” When anchor Jon Scott asked about the Climategate e‑mails, Goler replied that “the data also comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and from NASA. And scientists say the data of course across all three sources is pretty consistent.”40
Indeed, Sammon’s take on Climategate had been widely debunked by the scientific community. Four days before Sammon’s memo, twenty-nine scientists sent a letter to Congress stating: “The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.”41
Additionally, the American Meteorological Society explained, “For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true—which is not yet clearly the case—the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.”42
Climategate was a fabricated controversy that did nothing to undermine the veracity of climate research. That fact did not matter to Sammon, who was intent on crafting his own narrative about global warming—one that fit perfectly into the conservative movement’s alternate reality.
Climate change is one of the issues that exposed the divisions between Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, underscoring Roger Ailes’s power inside the network. In 2007, Murdoch delivered a speech to News Corp. employees, announcing that the company would become carbon neutral by 2010:
As many of you know, I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and the last few months and years have brought some changes there:
In Melbourne, 2006 was the tenth consecutive year with below-average rainfall. And 2005 was the hottest year on record throughout Australia.
Australia is suffering its worst drought in one hundred years.
Now, I realize we can’t take just one year in one city or even one continent as proof that something unusual is happening. And I am no scientist.
But there are signs around the world, and I do know how to assess a risk.
Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction.
We must transform the way we use energy.43
In an interview with Grist magazine, Murdoch added, “I think when people see that 99 percent of scientists agree about the serious extent of global warming, it’s going to become a fact of life.”44
News Corp. even commissioned pollster Frank Luntz to help determine the best way to communicate with voters about climate change issues. Luntz found that “Americans want their leaders to act on climate change” and that a “clear majority of Americans believe climate change is happening. This is true of McCain voters and Obama voters alike. And even those that don’t still believe it is essential for America to pursue policies that promote energy independence and a cleaner, healthier environment.”45
But Murdoch’s own views would be cons
idered liberal lies on Fox News. Sean Hannity, for example, has called carbon offsets a “sham”46 and a “fraud,”47 despite Murdoch’s intention to use carbon offsets to make the company more environmentally responsible.
Furthermore, Fox has attacked others for their work outside of the government to combat global warming. In the case of former vice president Al Gore, Fox distorted his comments to create the appearance that he was personally profiting from his climate activism. “It seems that being green does pay big time—just ask Al Gore,” Laura Ingraham said while guest hosting The O’Reilly Factor. “Mr. Global Warming was worth about two million dollars or so when he left office in 2001, but after eight years of tirelessly working to save the world, the planet, he’s now reportedly—get this—worth a whopping hundred million dollars. His financial windfall came up at last week’s Capitol Hill hearing.”48 She then broadcast a portion of the congressional hearing:
REP. MARSHA BLACKBURN (R-TN): Is the legislation that we are discussing here today, is that something that you are going to personally benefit from?
[Ingraham’s cut]
GORE: If you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for thirty years is because of greed, you don’t know me.
[Ingraham’s cut]
GORE: I’ve been willing to put my money where my mouth is. Do you think there’s something wrong with being active in business in this country?
BLACKBURN: I am simply asking for clarification—
GORE: I’m proud of it.
BLACKBURN:—of the relationship.
GORE: I’m proud of it.49
In the edited clip Ingraham aired, Gore appeared to acknowledge that he would financially benefit from climate legislation. However, the full exchange told a much different story. Here it is with the portions of the segment Ingraham broadcasted in italics, with Gore’s responses, left off the air, in boldface: