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

by David Brock

  In March 2008, Dick Morris pointed out to Bill O’Reilly the significance of Fox News in spreading the story. O’Reilly began his show by informing his audience, “This man, Chicago preacher Jeremiah Wright, is Barack Obama’s pastor. He even married the senator and his wife. Well, Fox News has obtained portions of Reverend Wright’s sermons that are anti-American, to say the least. Viewer warning, some offensive material coming up.”

  He then played some of Reverend Wright’s controversial statements and concluded, “Now, there’s no question that Reverend Wright is a problem for Senator Obama.” O’Reilly continued, “How big a problem remains to be seen. Most Americans love their country and believe it is noble. That kind of extreme rhetoric, the kind that Wright traffics in, is only acceptable to the far left. So Senator Obama will have to deal with this.”17

  Later in the episode, discussing the political implications of Reverend Wright, O’Reilly asked Morris, “This is Willie Horton—who was used to destroy Michael Dukakis’s campaign, a criminal in Massachusetts—times a thousand. If you were McCain, do you use this against Obama?”

  Morris replied, “He doesn’t have to. You just did.”18

  Morris realized how much had changed since 1988 in politics and the way it was covered by the media. Then, with fewer major news sources, each of which held itself to a higher standard in terms of what constituted real news, the Willie Horton story had to be floated as a paid advertisement. Had Fox News existed in 1988, the Willie Horton commercial would never have needed to be aired—the network would have carried the story for the GOP.

  A little more than a month after his colloquy with O’Reilly, Morris again spelled out Roger Ailes’s strategy behind the Reverend Wright story and the other racially tinged coverage on Fox: “The determinant in the election will be whether we believe that Barack Obama is what he appears to be, or is he somebody who’s sort of a sleeper agent who really doesn’t believe in our system and is more in line with Wright’s views?”19

  In the summer of 2010, another story with racial overtones would dominate Fox’s airwaves. On the night of Obama’s election in 2008, Fox News anchors had mentioned in passing that members of the New Black Panther Party were intimidating voters at a polling station in Philadelphia. During the summer, a former Justice Department employee, J. Christian Adams, came forward to claim that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice had declined to pursue charges against the New Black Panthers.

  In the June 25, 2010, edition of The Washington Times, Adams wrote, “The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.”20

  Adams continued, “Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.”21 According to Adams, the New Black Panthers were never charged because of reverse racism at the Justice Department.

  The story fit perfectly into the Ailes-Sammon-Beck racial framework. It didn’t matter that not a single voter came forward to claim he or she had been intimidated, or that the facts didn’t line up with Adams’s story. It was not the Obama Justice Department that chose not to pursue a criminal complaint against the New Black Panthers. Appearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez testified that the Bush Justice Department had “determined that the facts did not constitute a prosecutable violation of the criminal statutes.” And, in fact, “the Department did, however, file a civil action on January 7, 2009.”22

  The Obama administration took additional action in the case in May 2009. “Based on the careful review of the evidence, the Department concluded that the evidence collected supported the allegations in the complaint against Minister King Samir Shabazz,” Perez said. “The Department, therefore, obtained an injunction against defendant King Samir Shabazz, prohibiting him from displaying a weapon within 100 feet of an open polling place on any Election Day in the City of Philadelphia.”23

  Furthermore, the New Black Panther Party case was not the only incident of alleged voter intimidation in which the Justice Department had recently declined to pursue criminal charges. After Election Day in 2006, the Austin American-Statesman reported, “In Arizona, Roy Warden, an anti-immigration activist with the Minutemen, and a handful of supporters staked out a Tucson precinct and questioned Hispanic voters at the polls to determine whether they spoke English … Armed with a 9mm Glock automatic strapped to his side, Warden said he planned to photograph Hispanic voters entering polls in an effort to identify illegal immigrants and felons.”24 In his testimony to the civil rights commission, Perez pointed out that the Bush Justice Department “declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation, notwithstanding the requests of the complaining parties.”25

  J. Christian Adams, whose charges were fueling the controversy, was a longtime Republican activist. In 2001, Adams filed an ethics complaint against Hillary Clinton’s brother, Hugh Rodham, which was dismissed. In 2004, he served as a Bush poll watcher in Florida. Additionally, the legal news website Main Justice reported that Adams had “volunteered with the National Republican Lawyers Association, an offshoot of the Republican National Committee that trains lawyers to fight on the front lines of often racially tinged battles over voting rights.”26

  Although he was supposedly a “career” employee in the Justice Department and not a political appointee, Adams’s position in the agency was based on his partisan affiliation. According to Joseph Rich, the former head of the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Voting Section, Adams was “Exhibit A of the type of people who had been hired” under a process the DOJ Inspector General determined was improperly influenced by politics.27

  Fox News wasn’t concerned with the facts or their source. In July alone, the network ran a whopping ninety-five segments on the fake controversy. Forty-five of them occurred on Megyn Kelly’s show, which purportedly was part of Fox’s “news” programming.

  Despite the coverage on Fox, the New Black Panther Party was a fringe organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled a hate group. There was really no reason to pay much attention to them—unless the objective was to scare a mostly white audience about the president’s ties to radical black activists.

  Only one network saw fit to give the New Black Panthers wide-ranging coverage. Dating back to 1998, the group’s leadership had appeared fifty-one times on Fox News, with the majority of those appearances coming on Sean Hannity’s program. There was no news value in hosting the New Black Panthers; the appearances were orchestrated to create the same tension as Ailes’s notorious furlough ad. Therefore, Fox was unconcerned with the fact that Adams couldn’t give detailed accounts of why the Justice Department made certain decisions in the New Black Panther Party case because, in his words, “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”28 His accusations were perfect for the story that Fox wanted to tell.

  Conservative blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson linked the New Black Panthers controversy directly to Roger Ailes, writing a blog post titled “King Samir Shabazz Should Be 2010’s Willie Horton” (Shabazz was the New Black Panther who had been sanctioned at the request of the Justice Department). In the post, Erickson wrote, “Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls … The Democrats will scream racism. Let them. Republicans are not going to pick up significant black support anyway.”29

  On his radio program, Glenn Beck declared that the New Black Panther Party was part of Obama’s “army of thugs.”30 A few days later, he adopted an even more hysterical tone. “The
y want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke and poke and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it,” he said. “We must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, ‘Kill all white babies.’ ”31

  Finally, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative scholar and Bush-appointed vice chair of the Commission on Civil Rights, told the truth about Adams’s charade. In an interview with Politico, Thernstrom said, “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers, this has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.” She added, “My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring Eric Holder down and really damage the president.”32

  Neither Shirley Sherrod nor the New Black Panthers were national figures, and neither had a platform or constituency that warranted major news coverage. Yet, in both cases, Fox News seized on unfounded allegations, without checking the facts, to create a national controversy. Roger Ailes had used race as a wedge throughout his entire political career. Fox’s coverage of Sherrod and the New Black Panthers were just additional evidence that he would use the same strategy to turn Americans against President Obama.

  Part III

  The Campaign

  Chapter 9

  A Vote for Liberty

  WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?

  —Fox News chyron

  With sixty Democratic votes, a filibuster-proof majority, in the Senate, it was likely the president’s health care reform legislation would become law. But in August 2009, Ted Kennedy passed away after a sixteen-month battle with brain cancer. Holding on to his seat in the Senate was critical to passing the legislation, which the Massachusetts senator had fought for his entire career. As the special election heated up, Obama’s top priority hung in the balance.

  Martha Coakley, the state’s popular attorney general, was the first candidate to officially enter the race, on September 1. Having already won a statewide election, Coakley was a formidable contender. She cruised to victory in the Democratic primary, beating Congressman Michael Capuano by more than twenty points and finishing even further ahead of City Year cofounder Alan Khazei and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca.

  Coakley’s general-election opponent was Republican state senator Scott Brown, and most observers expected the Democrats to retain their sixtieth vote in the Senate. However, as 2010 began, the race suddenly began to tighten. Following her primary victory, Coakley made only limited efforts to raise funds and left the campaign trail to take a vacation. Scott Brown took full advantage of her absence, and Fox News was ready to help his campaign cross the finish line.

  In the weeks leading up to the election, the network hosted Brown for numerous interviews, serving, in effect, as a glorified telethon for his campaign. On January 8, he appeared on Hannity, telling viewers, “If people are kind of fed up with the way things are going, they can go to BrownForUSSenate.com, and they can make a difference and they can stop the business as usual—not only in Massachusetts, but more importantly nationally.”1

  Three days later, Brown told the audience of On the Record, “And if people want to learn more, they can certainly go to BrownForUSSenate.com. But we have a money bomb right now that’s hitting, and you can go to RedInvadesBlue.com, and you can help me fight back against the machine, because the negative ads—the second I walked off the stage, the negative ads have started.”2

  And, appearing two days later on Fox & Friends, Brown said, “And if people want to help, they can go to BrownForUSSenate.com, and they can donate so I can fight against the machine. Because I can win this race if the people in Massachusetts look at the issues.”3

  While other networks discouraged candidates from explicitly promoting their websites or fund-raising on the air, no such rules existed at Fox News.

  Enabling candidates to raise money on its airwaves was not a new practice at Fox. In the two weeks leading up to the 2009 off-year election, New York Conservative Party congressional candidate Doug Hoffman, New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie, and Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell appeared on the network and its personalities’ radio shows for a total of sixteen interviews, consuming more than 114 minutes of airtime. During these appearances, the candidates repeatedly beseeched Fox’s conservative audience to support their campaigns.4

  Fox hosts also used the network to raise funds for their own political committees. In October 2009, Mike Huckabee directed viewers on multiple occasions to “go to BalanceCutSave.com” and sign a petition urging Congress to “balance the budget,” “cut their spending,” and “save American families.”5 But the website was merely a front for Huckabee’s PAC, whose primary mission was to support Republican candidates. After signing the “Balance, Cut, Save” petition, visitors were redirected to a page asking for donations and received e‑mails asking them to “take a moment now to make phone calls to voters”6 on behalf of McDonnell, Hoffman, and California Republican David Harmer.

  Other Fox News contributors took advantage of the Massachusetts race to raise funds for their own organizations. For example, in a January 11 appearance on Hannity, Dick Morris urged viewers to “go to DickMorris.com … to help elect Brown” because “if we win this fight, then there will never be another victory for Obama.”7 At Morris’s website, visitors were asked “to help us raise $300,000 for a last minute media buy to push Brown and the Republicans to victory.”8

  Donor acquisition is an expensive process, but Fox News, by granting access to its audience, helped to ease the burden. The network provided selected candidates easy access to a large pool of potential contributors who were ready to fill their campaign coffers with small-dollar contributions. This practice distinguished Fox from any other cable news network. MSNBC, for example, suspended Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough, two of the network’s most prominent personalities, for their off-air political activities. In issuing Olbermann’s suspension, NBC News president Phil Griffin was clear: “I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”9

  Along with helping to fill Scott Brown’s bank account, Fox hosts made a concerted effort to build the narrative that Martha Coakley could not be trusted. Although some of Coakley’s mistakes—like describing Red Sox World Series hero Curt Schilling (who was supporting Brown) as a “Yankees fan”—were her own doing, Fox also cropped, edited, and misrepresented the Democratic candidate’s words at every turn.

  During the final debate of the campaign, moderator David Gergen asked, “How do you think we succeed in Afghanistan?” Coakley replied, “I’m not sure there is a way to succeed. If the goal was—and the mission in Afghanistan was to go in because we believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists. We supported that. I supported that goal. They’re gone. They’re not there anymore. They’re in, apparently, Yemen, they’re in Pakistan. Let’s focus our efforts on where Al-Qaeda is.” She added, “The focus should be getting the appropriate information on individuals who are trained, who represent a threat to us, and use the force necessary to go after those individuals.”10

  Coakley’s answer was noncontroversial. Many members of the foreign policy and military establishment had been making similar statements for months. For instance, National Security Adviser Jim Jones told CNN in October, “The good news is, that Americans should feel at least good about in Afghanistan, is that the Al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than one hundred operating in the country. No bases. No ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”11

  In May, when CNN’s John King asked whether it was “an exaggeration” to say there was “no Al-Qaeda at all in Afghanistan,” General David Petraeus responded, “No, I would agree with that assessment.”12

  Nonetheless, Fox News went on the attack. The hosts of Fox & Friends, in particular, wrongly accused Coa
kley of claiming there were no terrorists at all in Afghanistan and saying the Taliban was “no longer a threat.”13 In context, there was nothing extraordinary about Coakley’s remarks, but Fox repeated the charges over and over again to portray her as naïve.

  A few days before the election, Fox News attempted to drum up a new controversy. “She says Catholics shouldn’t be working in emergency rooms,” Sean Hannity declared. “This is Massachusetts. I lived in Rhode Island five years. A lot of Catholics in Massachusetts. So what’s happening?”14

  Likewise, Glenn Beck stated, “Now, the next one is religious bigotry. Do we have that with Coakley? Oh, sure. Catholics—pay attention to this one.” After playing a truncated audio clip of Coakley saying, “You can have religious freedom, but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room,” Beck said: “Oh, well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Hey, Catholics, as soon as we get all of the—you know, all of the universal health care, if you got to provide abortions or something, you’re a nurse and you don’t want to do that, well, go find another job. And practice that religious freedom elsewhere.”15 FoxNation.com linked to a blog post by right-wing blogger Jim Hoft under the headline: “Coakley: Catholics Shouldn’t Work in the ER.”16

  But Fox News distorted what Coakley, a Roman Catholic, actually said. In a local radio interview, host Ken Pittman asked if Coakley would support “a health care bill that had conscientious objector toward certain procedures, including abortion.” Coakley responded that she didn’t “believe that would be included in the health care bill,” and that she would oppose legislation that would allow health care workers who “don’t want to provide services that are required under the law” to “individually decide not to follow the law.”