The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (60 page)

“Stop right there, that’s not true,” Shea said.

Facts did not sway Yannitelli. “If you were stealing from me, I’d call 911!”

An hour into the contentious meeting, Ailes’s lawyer got up from his seat and took the microphone. After he tangled with Shea for a few minutes, demanding a one-on-one meeting, Shea jokingly asked if Volkman wanted him to burn the zoning proposal on the spot. At that,
Ailes stood up and intervened. Without giving his name—he was a man who acted as if he needed no introduction—Ailes began to lecture the supervisor.

“Civility above everything, please, Mr. Shea,” Ailes said, pointing the
fingers of his right hand at him. “Civility above everything, Mr. Shea. Sarcasm is not useful here, Mr. Shea.”

Ailes buttoned his suit jacket, lowered the microphone, and plunged his left hand into his pants pocket. He had the floor now.

“Apparently this process has been going on since before the Civil War,” he said. “This is, as you explained to me, the first night that private property owners were going to have a workshop.”

“Can I ask you why Mr. Volkman is here?” asked Democratic town board member Nancy Montgomery, who was sitting next to Shea. “He’s not a private property owner in this town.”

“In America you are allowed to have an attorney represent you who understands the law!” Ailes replied. Cheers, whoops, and whistles rang out from the balcony and the sides of the parquet. “But this is Philipstown,” Montgomery said. “This is a civil meeting where our community has come together to discuss—”

“Oh, this is not part of
America
?” Ailes said, waving his right hand through the air dismissively. “No.
No
. The private citizens of this thing have been overlooked. This isn’t even about me.”

Ailes turned to face the board. “Is it true that this document puts institutional interests above businesses and private citizens?”

Shea explained that the plan was designed to help nonprofits keep their open space out of the hands of real estate developers.

Ailes did not appear to be listening. “Why would everybody not be equal under the law: Businesses? Private—There’s probably no greater position to hold than to be a citizen of the United States. Why would their interests be subverted?”

Shea told him that no one was getting special treatment.

“So, they won’t be above the law and private interests?”

“No, they’re not going to be.”

“Fine. End of story,” Ailes said. He wanted to know if the law would regulate the size of his windows or the color of his house.

“No,” Shea said.

Ailes used the opening. After thanking the board and the citizens for their turnout, he had a lecture about American history to deliver. “George Washington said, ‘A violation of my land is a violation of my being,’ ” he intoned. “That is in our core for two hundred thirty years.”
Ailes loved to quote Washington, but this saying does not appear in any archive of Washington’s writings or speeches.

Ailes sat down and unbuttoned his suit jacket, then noticed that a
woman had been shooting a video of him with her iPhone.
“Take it off,”
Roger growled. He leaned forward and grabbed a chair, shaking it menacingly.

“What are you doing to the chair, sir?” she asked. Roger sat back and folded his hands in his lap.

The meeting continued for more than an hour as residents debated the pros and the cons of the zoning law. Ailes stayed until the bitter end.
After the meeting concluded, he approached Nancy Montgomery, who was cleaning up her papers at the white table.

“You’re the only one I haven’t met yet,” he said, by way of introduction. “You know, I’m just here for the little guy.”

“Do you even know what I do for a living?” Montgomery asked. Ailes had already turned around and was walking away.

“I’m a bartender, Mr. Ailes,” she said, calling after him.

Ailes stopped and looked back at her. “You’re just a
liberal Democrat
,” he said.

It was not Ailes’s politics that bothered Montgomery, although she was no fan of Fox. She didn’t like how he showed up in town one day and started throwing his weight around.

Later, Ailes had his own version of his exchange with Montgomery. “I made the mistake of saying, ‘I think Philipstown’s in America,’ and now she’s mad at me and goes against everything I’m for and hates me and wants to kill me,” he said.

The debate on the zoning reforms dragged on for another year while Shea met with citizens one-on-one to address their concerns.
In the fall of 2010, Ailes succeeded in getting a private sit-down with Shea and Joel Russell, a land-use attorney who had been consulting Philipstown on the zoning issue for years. On the day of the meeting, Ailes arrived at Town Hall with his bodyguard and Scott Volkman in tow. Ailes slapped a set of color charts down on Shea’s desk.

“What do you think of
that
?”

Shea looked down at the printouts. They showed ratings figures for Fox News and its rivals.

“Fox is outperforming any other cable news network!” Ailes said.

“Well, there are a lot of stupid people out there,” Shea deadpanned.

Ailes guffawed. “Ha! A friend of mine said that, too.”

The bluff pleasantries were brief. Ailes let out a blast about zoning bureaucrats depriving him of his property rights.
“It was ninety percent inaccurate,” Russell later said. “That rhetoric was over the top and basically
was straight out of Fox News. He kept talking about how he had a young son and his son wouldn’t be able to live in the America he knew.”

Shea told Ailes that he was misinformed about the zoning restrictions, which triggered another eruption.

“I’ll see you out of office!” Ailes snapped. “I’ve never lost a campaign I’ve been involved with!”

Shea looked at Russell. “Are you hearing this stuff? There are laws against this sort of thing.”

Volkman shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m not hearing any of this,” he muttered. “I’m here to talk about zoning.”

For two hours, Shea and Russell attempted to calm Ailes down. It turned out that Ailes’s concerns were not totally unfounded: a zoning map had incorrectly marked his mountaintop property with a scenic designation, which could have limited some development. Shea and Russell immediately assured Ailes they would make the change. As the conversation wound down, Ailes told the men that he would spend millions if necessary to keep dangerous elements out of the town.
To that end, he was thinking about buying Mystery Point, a 129-acre plot of land with a nineteenth-century brick mansion that overlooks the Hudson, to turn into a corporate retreat for Fox. “That’s up for sale,” Ailes said. “I could buy it in a heartbeat. You know why I’m interested?”

The men stared back at him.

“I hear a group of Chinese investors are looking. I’m not going to have some Chinese investors set up a missile silo right across from West Point.” Shea and Russell waited for the punch line that never came.

Getting to know Ailes changed Shea’s mind about Fox News.
“I used to think it was showmanship, or theater,” he later said. “I was really naive. I was awakened to the reality it’s not made up. The profit is part of it, but it is ideology-driven.”

P
utnam County resident Gordon Stewart did not attend the town hall at Haldane, but he heard postmortems the next morning. It provided one more data point that the “Ailes problem,” as a friend called it, would not be going away. Unlike many in Philipstown’s progressive set, Stewart did not immediately begin to fret about Ailes’s increasing power in the community. Although Stewart and Ailes had crossed paths only a handful of times, they had shared history. Born on the South Side of Chicago in 1939, Stewart was originally, like Ailes, a midwesterner of modest means.
He moved to Ohio for college, studying history and music at Oberlin, and in a remarkable coincidence roomed there with Roger’s brother. (
“He was an easy guy to get along with,” Robert Ailes recalled.) Stewart’s peripatetic career, like that of Ailes, intermingled the worlds of politics, entertainment, and business: Stewart had worked as a theater director, as a presidential speechwriter, and as a vice president of the American Stock Exchange. Though a Democrat—he had served as Jimmy Carter’s deputy chief speechwriter and helped craft what came to be known as the “malaise” speech—he respected his conservative neighbor’s formidable talent. In the late 1980s, while working as an executive at an insurance industry trade association, Stewart had invited Ailes to address a group of corporate chieftains. “He talked about how television is the Enrico Fermi nuclear reactor of contemporary society, and how it shapes everything,” Stewart recalled.

In 2005, after living many years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Stewart and his wife bought a place in Garrison. They looked forward to watching their young adopted daughter run in the backyard and swim in their pool. Stewart often dropped by Pete’s Hometown Grocery on Main Street to pick up a copy of the
PCN&R
. Reading the articles each week, he did not at first see glaring signs of right-wing agitprop. He especially liked the paper’s tough coverage of a contract dispute at the local school board.
Shortly after Stewart gave a quote to the
PCN&R
criticizing the Garrison school, he bumped into Ailes in Manhattan at lunchtime at Michael’s, a restaurant frequented by media executives.

“We gotta get together on this, that school sucks!” Ailes said to him.

“What’s your problem with it?” Stewart said.

“There’s no Christ child on the lawn at Christmastime!” Ailes said. “They have all this fucking Kwanzaa stuff, they have this Hanukkah shit, and you can’t even get Jesus! They think it’s illegal. You can’t show any flags. So I’m
not
sending our kid there.” As Stewart turned to leave, Ailes told him to stay in touch. “Call me,” he said.

In the fall of 2009, Stephen Ives, a documentary filmmaker, invited Stewart over to his house in Garrison. A group of neighbors were gathering there to brainstorm ways to confront Ailes. They called themselves the Full Moon Project, but Stewart liked to call them “the Cold Spring Village Commune.” The folk singer Dar Williams was the gravitational center of this constellation of politically active residents. As the conversations unfolded over several weeks, an idea took shape. The Full Moon Project would launch an online publication to rival the
PCN&R
. There
was even a plan to start a Media Matters–like watchdog group to police right-wing bias in the
PCN&R
. They called it the Rapid Response Team.

When Ailes got wind of the meetings, he called Stewart and asked him whether he was a member of the “Full Moon conspiracy.” Stewart laughed.

But by the time of the zoning town hall at Haldane in April 2010, Stewart’s benign view of the
PCN&R
was changing. Under Joe Lindsley’s editorship, Stewart saw undeniable evidence that the paper was taking on a partisan tack. He also heard a string of troubling stories of Ailes threatening locals who stood in his way. “You want to see a Fox News truck parked outside your place? I can have one up here
tomorrow
,” he said to one.

It struck Stewart how disconnected Ailes’s simplified vision of the town was from the diverse reality Stewart had come to know. “Until Roger showed up, no one much cared what your party affiliation was,” Stewart said. “With nine thousand people it doesn’t work too well. It’s hard to demonize people for party affiliation when they all know each other. Scaling Rogerism and Foxism down is a disaster.” A canny businessman, Stewart sensed opportunity. The Full Moon meetings had produced a lot of talk, but Stewart was ready for action. He set out in secret to launch a local news website to take on Ailes directly.

O
n Tuesday morning, July 6, 2010, Lindsley was at his desk at the
PCN&R
working on the coverage of the Independence Day parade, which Roger and Beth had revived in 2009 after a thirty-year absence, when he let out a grunt. While searching the Internet, he came across the bylines of two
PCN&R
writers, Michael Turton and Liz Schevtchuk Armstrong, writing about Putnam County news on a site called Philipstown.info, which he had never heard of before, the proprietor of which was none other than Gordon Stewart. Alison Rooney, the copy editor, had also defected. Lindsley pushed his chair back from his computer and called Ailes. “What does this mean? Are we going to have trouble getting the paper out?” Ailes asked in light of the staff walkout. “Absolutely not,” Lindsley replied. The lineup was already settled with a July Fourth recap and Federalist Paper no. 78.

The following day Ailes called Stewart and screamed at him for stealing
his
people. Stewart returned the bluster. “You’re a big United States Constitution guy,” he said. “The last time I checked, indentured servitude
is illegal in the United States. I didn’t steal them. They
left
. They don’t want to work for you.”

“I can give them all health insurance and they will quit and come back!” Ailes replied.

“Good. At least then I will have reformed your miserable labor practices.”

Stewart’s newsroom, set up across the street from the
PCN&R
in a former aromatherapy shop, posed a significant problem for Ailes. Despite the small-town stakes, it was a rivalry freighted with larger symbolism: for the first time since launching Fox News, the media business was changing in ways Ailes did not fully understand. The Internet was a wave washing over every corner of the communications industry. Newspapers and magazines had been the first casualties. It was only a matter of time until cable television began to suffer, too.
“There was no push to innovate technologically,” a former senior Fox executive said. CNN invested millions in the latest gadgetry such as touch screens and holograms. Fox didn’t. Ailes, the executive added, felt “his core audience of older, white viewers preferred the simplicity of a traditional television newscast.”

Ailes decided to sit down with Stewart in New York to gauge his intentions. Over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour meal at Fox News, Ailes was surprisingly open about his lack of knowledge of new media. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he told Stewart. “I have the same problem with you that I have at Fox News. I don’t do a lot of web at Fox News.” Ailes indicated if he gave away content for free on the web, his viewers might not pay for cable bills. “I’d be eating my own lunch,” he said. The best Ailes could hope for was a war of attrition. “I’m going to run you out of money,” Ailes assured Stewart. “What he didn’t know is, I don’t have any money,” Stewart later said. “My deal with my wife was, if you want to spend the money you earn on the website, it’s better than a blonde and a red sportscar.”