Roger Ailes: Off Camera (20 page)

Not only that: An advertising boycott organized by Color OfChange.org hurt revenues, and Beck’s ratings declined after his march on Washington. Ailes spent months making him see that it would be in their mutual interest for him to leave Fox. “I could have done it in a harder way, but I didn’t want to give MoveOn and Media Matters the satisfaction,” he told me.

In April 2011, Beck announced he would be leaving Fox to start an Internet channel, Glenn Beck TV. As a face-saving move, it was announced that he would be cooperating with Fox to produce television and digital properties, although none have yet been undertaken. Ailes replaced the
Glenn Beck
show with
The Five
, whose ratings surprised everyone by approximating Beck’s, and left the five o’clock hour firmly in the hands of Fox News. At the same time, Ailes could plausibly say that he had moved Fox safely away from the fringe. As for Beck,
Forbes
magazine reported that in 2011, he earned $80 million—more than any other political celebrity and much more than he had earned at Fox. Ailes was right again: Everybody came out ahead.

GOING TO CAROLINA

On a cloudless Thursday morning in mid-April, I met Roger Ailes, accompanied by his spokesman, Brian Lewis, and his security guard, Jimmy Gildea—the retired NYPD detective—at the airport in Teterboro, New Jersey. We were bound for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Ailes was scheduled to address a crowd of journalism students. Ailes rarely makes public appearances. This one had been arranged long in advance, as a favor to a former colleague of one of Ailes’s aides, but it was taking place when Ailes was in the center of two controversies.

Two days earlier, the gossip website Gawker had broken the news that there was a mole at Fox, documenting the claim by posting some innocuous off-camera banter between Sean Hannity and Mitt Romney. The mole wrote that he had been working at Fox for years but despised the place and now intended to tell all. The media jumped on the story; Fox News is regarded as one of the most leak-proof institutions in America. Finally the secretive Ailes was going to get his (presumably filthy) laundry aired in public.

Ailes knew better. “I’m the mole,” he joked to a
New York Times
reporter at a party the night before the Carolina trip. By then, Ailes was aware that the mole had been found—Joseph Muto. He was caught on a hunch. The previous year, Beth Ailes had allowed the editor of the
Putnam County News and Recorder
, Joseph Lindsley, to resign after suspecting him of undercutting her with the staff and leaking information to hostile websites. Bad blood ensued; Lindsley, who came to the paper from the
Weekly Standard
at the recommendation of editor in chief (and Fox commentator) Bill Kristol, claimed he had been followed in Garrison by a Fox security man in a black Lincoln Navigator. Ailes said that it was a figment of his imagination. Lindsley had attended Notre Dame. Some suggested checking the Fox staff for other alumnae of the Fighting Irish. Perhaps it was a coincidence but one turned up: Muto, an associate producer of
The Factor
. Muto’s electronic fingerprints were found on the video that had been posted on Gawker. He was so caught that he didn’t even bother to deny it.

Muto’s revelations put him in a small club of Fox whistle-blowers. In 2001, Matt Gross, a junior figure at the Fox website, left the company. Two years later he charged that Fox reporters are lazy and that the network tries to provoke liberals and appeal to middle-aged white men. It is fair to say that the damage from those revelations was minimal. Gross is now an editor at
New York
magazine, a proudly progressive weekly.

In 1998, at a Fox affiliate in Tampa, two reporters, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, prepared a series of reports on the agricultural biotechnology company Monsanto and its use of bovine growth hormone. The company protested, the reports were not shown, and the reporters were let go. They filed suit against Fox, and a jury decided against them on all counts except the question of whether they were legitimate whistle-blowers. An appellate court overturned that charge, and the two found themselves out of work but lionized by environmentalists—including Ailes’s old friend Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Charlie Reina was a producer at Fox from 1997 to 2003 who, according to Brian Lewis, left after being told that he wouldn’t be getting the promotion he expected. Reina blew the whistle on the daily memo sent by John Moody to Fox bureaus around the world. “To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel’s daytime programming, The Memo is the Bible,” he told the Poynter Institute. “At the Fair and Balanced network everyone knows management’s point of view, and in case they aren’t sure how to get it on the air, The Memo is there to remind them.” Reina was also the source of the information that Fox news reporters had been invited by management to refer to suicide bombers as “homicide bombers.” Fox dismisses him as a disgruntled employee, and in any case, his charges didn’t amount to much. Everyone already knew about the “homicide bomber” usage (it was right there on the air) and as for the daily memo, it revealed the not very shocking fact that the management of Fox News was involved in shaping the news coverage of Fox News. These days, Reina occasionally writes critical articles about Fox for the
Huffington Post
, although he hasn’t been a source of any further scoops.

That’s pretty much the extent of the leaks from Fox News. The Vatican has had more leaks in the past sixteen years. Of course, the pontiff believes in turning the other cheek. The head of Fox News does not.

As we boarded the plane, the Internet was buzzing with developments on the Muto case. Ailes was continuously updated by Brian Lewis, who stayed attached to his BlackBerry. Ailes regarded Fox’s quick response as the first step of an effective deterrent action. The second step would be punishment. “He’s probably sorry he ever tried this,” said Lewis, to which Ailes muttered, “He will be by the time I get done with him.”

Soon after I met Ailes, he told me about a lesson he had learned from Chet Collier: “Don’t go out and shoot people. Just wait and they’ll come by into your crosshairs. Then you squeeze the trigger.”

Ailes revels in and works on his image as a badass. “In college, two buddies and I were drinking and we ran into a pack of frat boys,” he told me one time. “We took them on, twelve to three, and they kicked the shit out of us.” He has lots of stories like these, and he loves the bellicose picture they paint of him. When he first discovered e-mail he couldn’t resist responding to nasty critics with offers to meet him in Manhattan and settle things like men. He offered to pay the airline ticket for one online heckler. “One way,” he wrote. “You won’t be going back.” His staff eventually convinced him to give up the practice (as he subsequently attempted to convince an equally bellicose Rupert Murdoch to stay off Twitter).

It has been a long time since Ailes has had a physical fight, and he doesn’t look like he could do much damage these days. But he is fond of recalling rougher times, like the night he punched a hole in the wall of an NBC control room where he was producing
The
Tomorrow Show. “
It was just a drywall, and luckily I didn’t hit any beams. But somebody put a frame around the hole and wrote, ‘Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.’ I have my suspicions about who wrote that message. After all, if you have a reputation as a badass, you don’t need to fight.”

Ailes admits that he sometimes flies off the handle and, as he puts it, “creates bullshit.” This can happen pretty much anywhere. Not long ago, on a ball field near his place in Garrison, his nephew accidentally hit a baseball through the window of a 2012 Prius parked in a church lot. The owners were Koreans who didn’t speak much English, and they were extremely agitated. “It’s just a damn window,” Ailes told them. “I’ll pay for the damn thing.”

The owner was indignant. “We pray, you curse,” he said.

“Fine,” said Ailes. “Then let’s
pray
over the fucking window. Maybe that’ll fix it.”

“It was a ten-minute incident that I turned into an hour,” Ailes said when he told me the story. “Hell, it’s lucky they didn’t recognize me. It could have turned into a goddamn international scandal. But I
told
them I was sorry. . . .” He laughed. “Damn it, though, I was kind of glad that it was a Prius.”

As he told the story, Ailes was already spinning it. “I do have a hair trigger, but I only use it on things that don’t matter these days,” he said. “I just do it to blow off steam, create some bullshit.”

It recalled Ailes’s boyhood awe at his father’s volcanic anger. Perhaps Ailes was thinking of it, too. “I told Zac, ‘Son, don’t ever act like your father,’” he said. “And Zac said, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’”

The other crisis du jour was an accusation by Newt Gingrich that Fox News’ support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor primary showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim when he dropped out of the race (Romney, on a visit to Ailes’s office, had complained that Fox favored Gingrich and Santorum). Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.”

Lewis nodded. Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.”

Lewis looked at his boss. They have been together for sixteen years and he has lasted because he is loyal and smart—smart enough, certainly, to know when an Ailes comment is better left unreported. “Doing PR for Fox News is like working on a permanent presidential campaign,” Lewis told me.

The Fox public relations division is a marvel of speedy response and harsh, often ad hominem, replies to critics. “I don’t start fights,” Ailes likes to say, “but I do counterpunch.” Some of those punches land below the belt. When the University of Maryland published its survey alleging that Fox viewers are misinformed, Michael Clemente responded by noting that the university had been ranked by the
Princeton Review
as one of the schools whose students do the least studying, and as the nation’s best party campus. “Given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was researched with,” Clemente said. More recently, Fairleigh Dickinson University published a poll purporting to show that Fox viewers were chronically uninformed. A spokesman for Fox answered, “Considering FDU’s undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling—their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed.”

Ailes took the same hard-line tack in dealing with the complaints of Santorum and Gingrich. “Santorum lost his Senate seat in Pennsylvania by seventeen points,” he said. “I suppose Fox was responsible for that. And Newt was in Congress all those years and just about none of his fellow congressmen are supporting him. That’s supposed to be my fault, too?”

Ailes had inflamed his enemies on the left by hiring Santorum, Gingrich, Mike Huckabee—and especially Sarah Palin—as commentators. Some critics charged that he was trying to buy up all the candidates for the presidency. The accusation rankled him because it was so obviously amateurish—an example of journalists who don’t know politics trying to impute dumb motives to him. “I knew when I hired them they weren’t viable candidates,” Ailes told me. “Huckabee couldn’t raise a dime for a campaign. Evan Bayh [a former Democratic senator from Indiana now on Fox] has a better chance to be nominated.” He publicly said that he had hired Palin because he knew she had no chance to be nominated. Palin fired back with a statement of her own: “I wonder if he is aware that the same thing was said about me when I ran for city council, mayor, and eventually governor.” Palin was still on the Fox payroll and Ailes decided later that week to placate her with a clarification—he had merely been referring to 2012.

When Palin first went to work for Fox, there had been righteous outrage at many of the other networks—here was another example of Ailes turning Fox into an annex (or the center) of the GOP. In fact, almost everyone wanted Palin; she had, according to a Fox insider, offers from CNN, CBS, and ABC. Now there were rumors, sparked by a recent appearance on NBC’s
Today Show
, that she was headed to the Peacock Network.

Ailes was untroubled by this. For one thing, it was far from certain that he wanted to keep her: Palin is an expensive commentator; Fox had helped build a studio equipped with a state-of-the-art camera, and a satellite, in her Alaska home. When I asked Ailes, somewhere over Kentucky, if he was angry at Palin’s appearance on
Today
, he shook his head. “She couldn’t have done
The Today Show
without my permission,” he explained. “We have a contract.” Ailes had agreed because he knew that if she did well on
Today
(which most critics thought she had) it would strengthen the journalistic cred of one of Fox’s star commentators. Allowing her to go on
Today
meant that the show owed him a favor. And the rumor that she might defect to NBC put pressure on ABC, whose
Good Morning America
was trying to displace
Today
’s long-standing hold on first place in the morning. For Ailes it was win-win-win, a three-cushion bank shot. And, as a bonus, Palin had to be wondering how much Ailes actually wanted her and what, when her contract expired, he would be willing to pay.

•   •   •

The flight to Chapel Hill took an hour and twenty minutes, and Ailes spent most of the time looking over typed notes for his speech. He had been working on it for some time, and using visitors as sounding boards for the remarks he intended to make. A few weeks earlier, a delegation of students from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces had come to see him at Fox. These were Ailes’s kind of students—officers just breaking into the senior ranks, dressed in suits, sporting neat haircuts, and with respectful manners. They were there to hear his views on a subject they were studying: how to ensure that the news media enhance national security.

“Good luck with that one,” said Ailes with a laugh. “That’ll be a new role for ’em.” He was in his customary place at the head of the table with his tie undone and his suit jacket thrown over the back of his chair. The officers stared at him keenly, as if this was their first brush with cynicism. But he knew exactly who they were. He meets with groups almost every day, and he doesn’t like surprises. He had scanned the bios of the officers. Only two had spent time at Ivy League schools, a telltale liberal credential to Ailes. The rest, he assumed, would be more or less sympathetic. Still, he wanted to make it clear that he had no apologies to make. After running through some of the statistics on Fox’s supremacy, he said, “We have our detractors, but they are always people we are beating. I don’t let it hurt my feelings. We are fair and balanced here. We always cover the news. We give Obama crap—that’s our job. When Bush was in, we gave him crap, showing pictures of Abu Ghraib and so on. We make mistakes sometimes and we correct ’em right away, but we have never had to take a story down, like the
New York Times
, CBS, and CNN.” It was a random selection: Ailes has a very detailed list of the self-inflicted humiliations of his mainstream competitors.