by Tobin Smith
Roger did not blink. He said, “Toby, tell your friend the reason our female talent are so attractive is that I am the audience, and no guy like me wants to bang Andrea Mitchell. You know our audience—they want a show, not a college professor.”
Boom, shakalaka—Ailes’s answer is almost everything anyone needs to know about the Fox News aesthetic—high-end escort in a short above-the-knee skirt on a SportsCenter style set.
I learned everything else you’ll ever need to know about what matters most to the producers of Fox News opinion programming while on a remote hit from Fox’s DC studios from a mighty executive producer.
It was a slow news day. In the New York City studio was Sandra Smith, a Fox Business Network anchor (now noontime daily host at FNC) who was just a few years out of college, statuesque, drop-dead gorgeous, and of course, a bottle blonde.
Steve Forbes, the heir to Malcolm Forbes of the Forbes magazine empire, and I were in the DC studio. Steve is a notable Republican who ran a Don Quixote-like presidential campaign on a flat-tax platform.
Fox purposely had no written rules about what they wanted paid contributors to say or talk about (so there was no evidence that could be leaked to the New York Times or Media Matters, for example), but it had lots of unwritten rules. For instance, when it came to business/economic panel interviews, FNC producers did not want a paid contributor to talk about the value of the dollar vs. another currency.
I learned this the hard way when I was scolded by an executive producer early in my career: “Toby, never talk about the value of the dollar on Fox. Our viewers don’t give a shit about the price of the dollar vs. the Euro. Our viewers aren’t jetting off to Saint-Tropez, okay?” Not coincidentally, I had just returned from Saint-Tropez, and the same executive producer had asked me, “Why go there? It’s nothing but old buildings and smelly Europeans and women with armpit hair. Who cares?”
You have to love the worldly Fox News opinion-show producers!
Note: All of the opinion-programming executive producers I worked with at Fox were dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers. This is the complete opposite of the producers I worked with at CNN or CNBC (and of course MSNBC).
Anyway, this hit was the standard seven-minute interview segment with three “boxes” (live streaming video shots—in this case, of me, Forbes, and Sandra).
Steve Forbes opened the segment and launched into a four-minute tirade about the US dollar being weak against the Euro and twelve reasons why it was all President Obama’s fault. Next to respond was Sandra, and she went into a two-minute report telling our viewers that the price of oil was dropping because of the weak dollar. (FYI actually, because oil is priced in US dollars, if the dollar goes down in value, the price of a barrel of oil in dollars rises because it takes more dollars to buy the same amount of oil relative to the other currencies.)
Then the interview swung to me. There were just about sixty seconds left, so, sort of laughing, I said to the anchor, “Well, first, I know what Sandra meant to say is that when the value of the dollar drops versus the Euro, the price of a barrel of oil goes higher and—”
Boom! In my ear, the executive producer shouted, “Wrap!” which tells the anchor and the paid contributor to end the segment immediately—and for me to shut the heck up.
I immediately texted the executive producer after the hit: “WTF? Steve Forbes goes on a four-minute rant about the value of the US dollar which you told me many times to never talk about . . . Sandra talks about the value of the dollar and its correlation to oil prices and gets it completely backward . . . and I was trying to not embarrass Fox News with such inaccurate reporting and I’m the asshole?”
The executive producer texted me right back with the lesson no one should ever forget when it comes to Fox News: “Toby . . . if you looked like Sandra Smith you could say whatever the fuck you want to on my air.” (Excuse me for using the F-bomb, but in Fox News land, that word is used as often as people breathe air. Don’t tell the Evangelicals!)
Fox News Lesson Learned: Not shockingly, on Fox News, how attractive a female host or guest looks from the chest up or how bright your GOP star power is will always be ten times more important than what you say. Over my fourteen years there, I heard the dumbest and least-informed on-air statements and opinions from ridiculously attractive women and powerful elected GOP officials—without the executive producers ever saying a word.
You understand by now that an opinion segment at Fox is indeed a performance art; it’s another Roger Ailes rigged “debate” show without a fair debate. And of course, that means these politics-as-performance art segments start with a cast of characters who have to look and act their parts for the majority male audience. Roger Ailes also understood that to catch the compulsive male channel flippers sitting at home in their favorite chairs with the remote controls in their hands, Fox News needed as much visual glam as it could get.
If you could perform one of those roles with some energy and deliver fifteen-to-twenty-second sound bites, you got invited back, and if you played your conservative role very well, you became a paid contributor plebe at $500 per appearance. Once you’d made more than $200,000 in appearance fees in a calendar year, you went to a fixed $5,000 per week regardless of how many appearances you made.
Anyway, when it comes to the liberal pundits on Fox News, the casting rules were very different. First, they have to look and sound like stereotypical big-city liberals. Then they need to totally use the liberal talking points that the core right-wing audience hates. And the darker the liberal pundit’s skin color, the better.
IT’S ALL SHOWBIZ, BABY
In October 2000, early in my career as a Fox News contributor, I received my initial lesson about a Fox News panel debate being much more about showbiz than a substantive economic or political debate. One day, while I was taping a live segment on Your World with Neil Cavuto with my mutual-fund manager friend Bob Olstein and my old Bulls & Bears market analyst partner, Scott Bleier, Scott made an on-air prediction: “Cisco’s stock price is going to jump to $75 by the end of the year!”
When Olstein heard that prediction, I thought his eyeballs were going to pop out of his head. He looked at Scott and screamed, “For crying out loud, Scott! That would make Cisco worth $1 trillion. Even you aren’t that stupid, are you?”
We went to commercial break and with the microphones dead, Olstein looked at Neil and said, “When Bleier made that Cisco prediction, I wanted to reach over and choke that son of a bitch!”
Without missing a beat, Neil told Olstein, “Bob if you do choke him during our next segment, I’ll give you five grand cash!”
We all laughed, but Neil was dead serious. Even in the days before social media, Neil understood the real Fox News programming ethos, that these debate segments were performances first and foremost. Moreover, the mantra at FNC when I was there was, “Let CNN do the news. You see their ratings? We’re in the right-wing geriatric entertainment business; don’t forget it.”
FOX NEWS IS SOFT-CORE SEXUAL PORN FOR OLD PEOPLE TOO
One Friday, I was in the New York City studio as I always was on Fridays. As I have mentioned previously, I was the only contributor at Fox News who flew to NYC every week to do my show in studio with the host, my friend Brenda Buttner. At this point, I did not understand why my contract required me to be in New York City every week while the other contributors could tape remotely from home or a local studio. Once I discovered the fixed-outcome tribal hate-porn formula, it made sense, because I knew I was the guy they could count on to deliver our right-wing tribalists the triumphant happy ending they tuned in to see.
Brenda kicked off her prerecorded cold open (the “tease”), which in TV land is the technique of jumping directly into a story at the opening of the show with a high-energy, rage-inducing teleprompter script. Like any opening for any TV entertainment performance, our show had about between ten and twenty seconds to hook the channel flipper. (You may not realize it, but in non-prime-time hours, channel flippers are a
big key to cable channel ratings. Their effect on ratings is exceeded only by that of the core addicts of a particular channel.)
Brenda was about halfway through the cold open when the producer stopped the segment taping. Brenda asked the executive producer what was wrong. Then she listened to her earpiece and got up with a sour look before disappearing off stage.
The stage manager (who had heard everything said to Brenda in his own earpiece) told those of us on the panel desk, “Eh, she just got a call from the second floor. She is doing a little wardrobe fix.”
The term “second floor” was Fox News’s code for Roger Ailes. Roger watched every show—live or taped—while he was in the building. He had a literal wall of monitors in his office to see what was being recorded on every camera. In addition to making sure that his rundowns of what he believed were the most powerful emotional audience triggers for the day were being used by the executive producers, Roger also made sure that the hosts—especially the female hosts—looked Fox-worthy.
From a looks standpoint, as the media journalist Gabriel Sherman reported in a Vanity Fair article recently, “Every show was like an interview at Fox. If Roger liked your appearance, he told the executive producer at the next daily production meeting. If he didn’t . . . he let you know it before you taped.” (Very true, Mr. Sherman.)
To understand Fox News’s carefully choreographed emotional manipulation process, you can think of the beginning of an opinion segment as the host holding a psychic dental drill in his or her hands. The script always starts with the host boring into the rawest, most painful tribal apostasy or conservative heretical desecration of the day.
Then it was the right-wing tribal blood brother’s job to turn that despair and rage into the joy of ideological confirmation, affirmation, and a final glorious tribal victory over the viewer’s hated tribal enemy. The on-air host and talent are the actors in this performance—and looking the part is just as important as delivering the lines (especially for the women).
Brenda came back to the set wearing the same top, but with one more blouse button unbuttoned and a lot more cleavage than when she had first tried the cold open. I looked at her and said, “Geez, B . . . vavoom! You have a big date after the show?”
She smiled, we did the show, and no one else said a thing about her wardrobe change.
After the show, Brenda and I walked across the street to our favorite post-show drinking hole, Del Frisco’s. The fabulous and charming maître d’, Felix, cleared our normal spot at the bar, and I ordered our traditional post-show martinis and then toasted her on a job well done. Then I asked her, “So, B . . . what the heck was that stop-down and wardrobe change? The only thing that looked different to me was you came back looking a lot sluttier!”
She said matter-of-factly, “Oh that was a call from the second floor. Roger asked me to go back to the dressing room and put on a water bra and show more cleavage.”
A water bra? Really?
Later, I found out from my many on-air female Fox friends that receiving clothing, hair, makeup, and cleavage advice from Roger was standard operating procedure. Considering all that went on behind closed doors with Ailes and the platoon of female talent he sexually abused, this was not surprising.
BUT ARE YOU FOX-WORTHY?
On another Friday, I finished guest anchoring one of the episodes of America’s Nightly Scoreboard I hosted on Fox Business Network (FBN). The show taped an hour before we taped Bulls & Bears. I had a female economist guest on the FBN show who happened to be a young and beautiful blonde, and she was going to be on the Bulls & Bears taping with me as well.
Not ninety minutes after my guest had her hair and makeup done in the FBN studio just down the hallway, I walked with her into Fox’s hair-and-makeup room. When she sat down, the FNC hair-and-makeup person who was there asked, “Honey, how long do you have? This is Fox News, not FBN. We have to start from scratch to make you Fox-worthy!”
Fox-worthy is a term the makeup and hair artists use (among others) for the high-end escort aesthetic that Ailes required for all female conservatives. The left-wing women? Not so much—they were not there to be eye candy; they were there to beaten and if possible humiliated.
After the show, this same woman and I had a post-show drink at Del Frisco’s upstairs bar. (See a pattern?) While we were chatting away, I noticed a big dude in the dining room staring at her, and I thought, maybe this guy is an economist fanboy? I later excused myself to the restroom and took a little time to say a few hellos to the staff.
When I returned to my table, the general manager, Scott Gould, was consoling and apologizing to my guest, saying, “I’m so sorry. We just kicked that jackass out of our restaurant. That should have never happened here.”
What had happened? Well, it turned out the dude who was eyeballing my guest was an oil magnate visiting from Dallas and had judged, by looking at her makeup and hair and escort-like outfit, that she was a hooker. He had offered her “Five hundred dollars more than whatever that guy is paying you” to join him!
It was funny at the time, but I could see the guy’s logic—she did look like a hooker . . . and not a $500 hooker either!
A few weeks later, I was visiting another favorite Fox News watering hole, Broadway Langan’s, on Forty-Seventh near Seventh Avenue. (See a pattern?)
The hair and makeup artists from FNC who had made up the female economist guest weeks before were there, and I asked them, “So my economist pal just got off the air on FBN and you guys rebuilt her look from the chin up to the top of her head. Why?”
They both looked at me in wonder, and one of them said, “How long you been here, Toby? What is it about our job at Fox News that you don’t understand? Roger has a Fox-worthy look he wants, and Roger gets what he wants. FBN is a different network, although we are starting to ‘Foxify’ it up a little.”
Here is the kicker: “But at Fox News, our job for the on-air women is to get the tits up, get the tops down, and make the hair and makeup look like a porn shoot.”
Key Point: If you are female and want to get invited for guest hits on Fox News, you’d better not have a problem with them making you up and doing your hair like you’re a high-rent escort.
AT FOX NEWS, THERE IS NOTHING LIKE GINNING UP A GOOD CAT FIGHT
Another feature of Fox News tribal hate porn is the ginned-up cat fights between female liberal and conservative panel members. After all, what male doesn’t love a good girl-on-girl catfight in high-definition TV?
My longtime friend, USA Today conservative columnist Cheri Jacobus, shared with me one of her experiences in how Fox News producers are continually trying to gin up a “Battle Royale” between attractive left- and right-wing partisan female pundits (the WWE analogy is on purpose).
According to Cheri, “About twelve or fourteen years ago, I was blackballed (for several years) at Fox News because when I was asked to have a ‘catfight’ with ‘democratic strategist’ Kirsten Powers, I said I’m happy to have a spirited debate, but no catfight. Kirsten (then a paid contributor and thus expected, like me, to follow the orders of segment producers) had tried to start one with me a few days earlier on the air. When I refused to play ball, the Fox booker phone stopped ringing.”
Catfights have always been a part of soft-core porn. Why should it be any different at Fox News?
CHAPTER 9
More Fox News Production Lessons Learned
There is a lot more I learned about producing rigged-outcome debate programs in my years at Fox News. Here are more that are not well documented or discussed in the world of media reporting.
WHY “DEMOPUBLICANS” ARE SO CRITICAL TO FOX NEWS’S OPINION-PROGRAM MELODRAMAS
Here’s another way the opinion debates at Fox News are methodically rigged for the conservative tribal heroes to win. My old liberal friend Bob Beckel (now marooned from Fox News because of accusations that he made racist remarks) is an old-school Chicago blue-collar Democrat.
Most people don’t know that when Bob wasn�
��t on air and trying to be funny and glib on Fox News, he did research polling for FNC on the Q ratings of the various hosts and paid contributors.
A Q rating is a person’s on-air likeability rating relative to all the others in the survey. On Fox, the higher the person’s score, the more the core partisan right-wingers liked you. A high score helped a lot in getting contracts renewed. I was fortunate to get a top-10 percent Q score from our audience. When I saw my results, I learned that the audience liked me because (a) I tried to make the segments fun and (b) I was darn good at rhetorically disemboweling the token liberal our core tribal audience despised.
That was my persona at Fox News: The funny yet lethal hit man.
One afternoon before a show taping, I was smoking a cigar with Bob in the breezeway between the Fox News offices, and we start talking about the significance of Q ratings, especially for the liberal contributors.
As mentioned, part of the FNC fixed-outcome production playbook was for producers to select a liberal opponent—usually not nearly as experienced on the segment topic as I was but someone who fulfilled the character prop role for the melodrama we were performing that day. I asked, “So Bob, who are the most popular liberal contributors on FNC these days?”
In response, he gave me a lesson in producing right-wing tribal identity porn: “There is a fine line between being the ‘right’ kind of liberal pundit on Fox and being the wrong kind.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“I can tell you from the Q ratings that the liberals they like the best are the least confrontational. Fox News does not hire gunslinger Democrats. That is not what the audience wants to see. The audience wants a DemoPublican like Juan Williams or me or Mort Kondracke for you to beat up on.
“Look . . . Mort, Juan, and I don’t represent hard-core liberalism and progressives. We represent a soft-core adversary that any good right-wing conservative pundit can beat like a red-headed stepchild in the eyes of the right-wing nut jobs we call viewers.”