Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires

by David Folkenflik

  Splitting the difference turned out to be a mistake. On the morning of February 29, Flamm’s story was posted online. He cited CNN’s good fortunes and said that a chastened Fox wanted to “spice up its coverage” and that Hume would be “relegated to a senior news analyst role.” Fox pounced. The industry website TVNewser was a widely read bulletin board for the industry. It had been started by New York Times television reporter Brian Stelter as Cable Newser when he was just a college student at Towson University outside Baltimore, and remained a clearinghouse for industry information after he sold the site. Within a few hours of Flamm’s online article, TVNewser posted a punishing item. Brit Hume would anchor for Fox News, as always. O’Reilly never figured into the plan as an anchor.

  “The notion that O’Reilly would ANCHOR election coverage of any kind is beyond absurd and wildly inaccurate,” Briganti told TVNewser in an email. “If Flamm is so off base with this ‘fact,’ you’d have to question all of his other ‘reporting’ when it comes to Fox News.”

  A second-tier site, Big Head DC, channeled Fox without quoting anyone at the network by name, reciting its financial and ratings successes. “In light of all this, we hear Flamm is being referred to as Matthew Flailing in some media circles today,” the site claimed. “The bigger question remains: how did such a woefully inaccurate story make it to print? Some insiders are even wondering whether Flamm will even have a job come Monday.”

  What the hell had happened? Flamm called the producer at Fox who had given him the errant tip. She was incredulous when he finally reached her. Who are you? she asked him coldly. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Panicked, the reporter sent an email to the Hotmail account from which he had received the original scoop. It bounced back. The account had been shut down. As Flamm and his editors conceded to associates, they should have treated the email as a tip rather than a confirmation. A former Fox News staffer knowledgeable about the incident confirmed to me they had been set up.

  To salt the wound, the posting at Big Head DC was accompanied by a photo-shopped picture of Flamm, with a bulbous nose, inflated ears, yellowed teeth, and enhanced rings under his eyes. The alterations were obvious when compared with the original photograph on TVNewser.

  Timothy Arango, then a media reporter on the business desk of the New York Times, told me he called Fox, more as a courtesy than to conduct a probing interview, as he prepared a story on CNN’s good fortunes. He received in reply an email containing the network’s internal ratings analyses designed to knock the story down. That’s a common response from many networks in such circumstances.

  As Arango pressed on, Briganti emailed an entire statement and said he could only use it if he printed it verbatim. “It was very vitriolic against CNN,” Arango told me. “I said, ‘I’m not running a full statement.’ Nobody has the right to make that demand.” He called her back to read the part of the statement that the Times would print. Arango had written from 2002 to 2006 for another News Corp property, the New York Post. He had developed warm relations with the parent company’s public affairs department and he believed he had a professional rapport with Fox.

  This time, he said, Briganti warned him: They’re going to go after you personally. On March 5, 2008, Arango’s story, headlined “Back in the Game,” ran on the front page of the Times business section, and it was featured prominently on the paper’s website. That morning, he received a call from a blogger with Jossip, a now-defunct gossip site. Arango knew what lay in store but did not return the call.

  The unbylined story on Jossip said Arango had just returned from a two-month medical leave that “many allege may have been a stint in rehab.” The Jossip posting utilized every element of Arango’s past coverage at the Post and Fortune magazine to draw a portrait of a craven reporter in unsuccessful pursuit of on-air reporting jobs at cable channels. It referred to “blowjob pieces about CNBC execs” written, the blog claimed, when Arango was hustling for a job at the network.

  Arango braced for the slam about rehab because he had indeed returned a few days earlier from an extended medical leave to address his substance abuse. Arango kept silent, expecting a wave of disgust from his own newsroom. It never materialized. Bill Keller, then the executive editor at the Times, emailed Arango a note of encouragement: We don’t take that kind of bullshit seriously. Keep your head up.

  A few months later, on June 28, 2008, another Times media reporter, Jacques Steinberg, wrote an article on “an ominous trend” in ratings for Fox News: its cable news rivals appeared to be closing the ratings gap. On July 2, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends went after Steinberg and a Times editor, Stephen Reddicliffe, calling the article a “hit piece.” Doocy offered a backstory: “Mr. Reddicliffe actually used to work for this company—he got fired.”

  Reddicliffe had in fact left more than five years earlier as editor in chief of TV Guide, which Murdoch had sold in late 2007. Fox & Friends broadcast distorted photographs of both Reddicliffe and Steinberg that appeared on the screen as Doocy and Kilmeade spoke. Reddicliffe’s forehead was elongated, his teeth yellowed, his eyes blackened; Steinberg’s ears and chin were inflated, his nose greatly enlarged, his hairline lowered to collapse his brow, and his eyes blackened as well. The effect evoked what was done to Flamm’s picture. No disclaimer told viewers that the picture had been altered. A number of people, especially colleagues at the Times, regarded the images as anti-Semitic.

  In early July 2008, New York Times media columnist David Carr accused Fox News of targeting the reporters, citing the Steinberg episode and alluding vaguely to Arango’s run-in, though not by name. The episode involving Flamm largely escaped public attention. In the glare of attention, Fox pulled back on some of its most aggressive tactics.

  For Arango, there was a coda to the story. He later collaborated with Carr on an extensive profile of Roger Ailes. Fox regained a strong ratings lead. But its brass worried about what their piece might say. Brian Lewis called Bruce Headlam, the media editor of the Times, arguing that Arango should be taken off the story.

  There was no cause for anxiety. The resulting front-page story painted Ailes as one of the most dominant media executives in the country, operating from the intersection of television, politics, and commerce. He had done so in part by deploying all of the weapons available to him—including his programs and a muscular political operation that happens to work for a cable news channel.

  7

  THE VOICE OF OPPOSITION

  IN 2007, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES HAD refused, one by one, to take part in a planned early primary debate on Fox, complaining of unfair coverage of their party. As Barack Obama’s bid for the White House picked up momentum, the candidate endured a drubbing from Fox News. In one case, Fox & Friends had cited a report based on unnamed Clinton operatives to assert that Obama had studied at a Wahhabist madrassa while a child in Indonesia—just the kind of school at which a young Islamic jihadist would have been indoctrinated. Such segments continued after reporting from CNN and the Associated Press found the school Obama had attended was not Wahhabist nor did it preach violent struggle against the West. A drumbeat of speculation questioned whether Obama had been born in Kenya, the land of his father, and was ineligible for the White House.

  Others on the network suggested Obama had radical sympathies, citing ties to William Ayres, an antiwar revolutionary in the 1960s and 1970s, a founder of the Weather Underground, who set makeshift bombs to protest the Vietnam War. Over the years, improbably, Ayres had become a well-regarded educator; Obama had attended an event at Ayres’s Chicago home in 1995 when starting his bid to become a state senator. Amid criticism from Fox’s Sean Hannity, Republican candidate John McCain, and others, Obama denounced Ayres’s revolutionary record and said the two had no sustained relationship.

  Rupert Murdoch was fighting a rear-guard movement among his immediate family members, some of whom favored the young senator. His daughter Elisabeth and son-in-law, British PR executive Matthew Freud, had raised money for
the Obamas in the UK from American expatriates, while Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, participated in a fund-raising dinner held for Obama in Los Angeles. He also liked to build rapport with people who gave off a winning aura. So Murdoch brokered a meeting between Fox’s Roger Ailes and the candidate in June 2008 to smooth the waters.

  They met in a secluded area at the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. Murdoch offered the advice that a new president had six months to prove how he would lead the nation. And then Murdoch beckoned the Fox News chief to join. Ailes and Obama sat close, knees grazing, the older man jowly, unyielding, the other trim, intense.

  Obama’s demeanor shifted from solicitous to aggrieved. He asked Ailes whether he could expect to get fair treatment for the rest of the campaign. Obama had been livid at how he had been portrayed—as some kind of foreigner with suspect motives. Ailes challenged Obama to appear on Fox’s programs more often instead of rejecting or ignoring its requests for interviews. Don’t use Fox as a rallying cry at campaign rallies, Ailes retorted.

  As the Republican convention started in St. Paul in August, Obama sat down for an interview with Fox’s top-rated figure, Bill O’Reilly. It was a mix of contention and charm. O’Reilly visibly eased the intensity of his attacks. Obama had played ball.

  November 2008 would mark the end of the run for Brit Hume as the network’s Washington managing editor and chief political anchor. Hume told me he had lost his enthusiasm for the “poisonous atmosphere in Washington over the last fourteen or fifteen years.”

  “Sparks are what make news,” he said. “There’s dissent and disagreement, intense feelings and so on, which all contribute to an untidy, and at times ugly, but nonetheless newsworthy, atmosphere.” As I could not help pointing out, Fox News had been a home for all kinds of rancor. Did Fox bear any responsibility for that “poisonous,” “untidy and at times ugly” atmosphere? “We’ve certainly been a forum, as everybody else has, for the arguments of the day,” Hume replied. “We are more a reflection of it, I think, than a cause.”

  As Obama cruised to a win on Election Day, liberals, at least for a time, became ascendant, controlling both houses of Congress, a majority of governors’ mansions and, of course, the White House. Liberal commentators triumphantly wrote about the marginalizing of Fox in a progressive era. Andrew O’Hehir of Salon wrote that Fox “seemed a weak and piteous thing . . . staring mortality in the face.”

  Yet Fox News mapped out a strategy to ensure that times would be fatter than ever, as Bill Shine, Fox News senior vice president for programming, later told me. “With this particular group of people in power right now,” Shine observed, “and the honeymoon they’ve had from other members of the media, does it make it a little bit easier for us to be the voice of opposition on some issues?” It did. The Fox News audience grew so much after the election that ratings estimates placed it among the highest-rated of all basic cable channels, above the usual strata of cable news. Fox journalists attributed the ratings boost to the skeptical eye they focused on the new administration.

  Hume’s job was divided between two people. Bill Sammon, a conservative columnist and author who had previously written for the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner, took responsibility for directing political coverage as the network’s Washington managing editor. But tension emerged between Fox’s Washington and New York shops over the tenor of its coverage. Other news executives wanted to protect the reputation of the news shows from what they believed was a heavy hand.

  During the campaign, Sammon to varying degrees had tied Obama to socialist and Marxist thought—often by connecting him to the charged rhetoric of the president’s fiery former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s radical rhetoric, replete with anti-American and anti-white overtones, was first disclosed on a national level by ABC News. The Obama camp could not ignore it. In early 2008 in Philadelphia, Obama delivered what was perhaps the most memorable speech of his campaign. Sammon repeatedly raised the specter that Obama nursed anger over matters of race—one reflected in the younger Obama’s writings about his hurt over his reception as a racially mixed youth and his complicated feelings about his father.

  “Candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to, quote, ‘spread the wealth around,’” Sammon later told patrons of a 2009 fund-raising cruise in the Mediterranean for Hillsdale College, a conservative school. “At that time, I have to admit that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”

  Sammon went on, however, to justify that speculation, telling the Hillsdale crowd that it proved well founded after the government bailed out banks and car manufacturers: “The debate over whether America was headed for socialism seemed anything but far-fetched.”

  Amid those bailouts and stimulus spending, Bill O’Reilly could be found in full-fledged populist dudgeon against the liberal social engineering government bureaucrats he said were favored by the new president. Hannity had been newly unshackled from liberal cohost Alan Colmes and hammered the White House. And most outraged and outrageous was Glenn Beck, recently arrived from CNN Headline News, who quickly doubled the audience of Fox’s 5:00 PM time slot.

  In those early days of 2009, I marveled as I watched Beck on set at Fox News in Manhattan and interviewed him in a waiting room off his studios. In person, Beck was self-deprecating and often buoyant. On Fox, he depicted a bleak country run by shadowy forces. Beck brooded about whether FEMA was setting up concentration camps. He would later take credit for doing the heavy lifting to disprove the theory to which he had given so much airtime. Beck did not simply hammer away at the idea that Marxist thinkers had mentored Obama throughout his life. Only partially in jest, Beck also repeatedly invoked Stalinist imagery in characterizing the administration’s proposals.

  As for his own politics, Beck invoked an affinity for a group of politicians from an earlier era. “I have become more and more libertarian every day—more and more against both of these parties,” Beck said, adding, “I have just become much more like the Founding Fathers. I just wanted to be in a place that understood that.” Presenting himself as a modern-day Patrick Henry—give me liberty or give me death—Beck played the role of a scholar sorrowfully unearthing sad truths. Beck was a masterful broadcaster, keenly conscious of every element of his performance. And he was self-aware enough occasionally to wink at its ridiculousness. For the moment, Fox was just fine with the whole package: the divisive conspiracy theories, the flights of fancy, the grandiose self-aggrandizement, all of it. He was the network’s newest star.

  On the news side, Fox worked hard to win recognition for its anchors. The network’s primary news anchor was Shepard Smith, a maverick figure in the basement studios of Fox News in Manhattan. Deeply tanned, truly mischievous, proud of his red state roots in Mississippi, and fit to the point of being gaunt—he would puncture pomposity wherever he encountered it yet struck appropriately respectful tones without lapsing into sentimentality during sensitive moments on the air. Smith was equally capable of apparently spontaneous takes on torture, gay marriage, and even the news business itself.

  On several occasions, according to several colleagues, he refused to promote themes that recurred on other Fox shows. He liked to rattle O’Reilly in the hallway and openly mocked Beck on the air. His occasional shouting matches with high-ranking colleagues over stories made fewer headlines. Smith was cheered for saying what he thought, especially by non-Fox journalists, and Fox kept rewarding him with new contracts in the high seven figures. His ratings were strong, and publicly executives cited his unexpected sallies as part of Fox’s claim that it let employees say what they thought while reporting the news straight. Behind the scenes, executives would occasionally argue that Smith was cheered for saying opinionated things that fell on the left side of the political ledger. More proof, they claimed, of the m
ainstream media’s ingrained bias.

  Bret Baier, a competent reporter who had covered the White House and Pentagon, took over Hume’s responsibilities as the chief political anchor. A genial presence with a million-watt smile, Baier had a show that was often the second-highest rated in cable news, behind Fox’s O’Reilly Factor, with roughly 2 million viewers a night. While Baier’s Special Report relied heavily on reported segments, fully one-third of the show was consumed by a discussion he moderated among pundits dubbed the “Fox News All-Stars.”

  I reviewed six months’ worth of Baier’s panels and found a consistent formula: two clear-cut conservatives and another analyst. That other person was sometimes a Democrat or liberal—say, former Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers. But often that third slot was filled by a reporter from a news outlet that strives not to adopt ideological outlook in its reporting, such as Politico or the Washington Post. As I told Baier, his panels’ blend of personalities seemed to underrepresent the left and also to cast nonideological reporters as liberals. The pattern suggested Fox defined balance as a counterbalance to other media outlets rather than a program that in itself was fully balanced as the network’s executives pledged.

  In the months that followed the inauguration, the relationship between Obama’s camp and Fox News curdled. On September 9, 2009, Beck described Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor picked to lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as “a man that believes that you should not be able to remove rats from your home if it causes them any pain.” Sunstein had indeed written about animal rights for a law review article and explored the trade-offs in putting a primacy on human priorities and impulses, though he hadn’t really made the argument Beck ascribed to him.