The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (63 page)

The first Fox primary debate proceeded on May 5, 2011, in Greenville, South Carolina, without an A-list candidate. The aspirants on the stage were a bunch of also-rans: pizza mogul Herman Cain; former governors Gary Johnson and Tim Pawlenty; former senator Rick Santorum; and Congressman Ron Paul. Ailes’s Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, had assured Fox executives that bigger names would show up, but Sammon proved to be misinformed. The debate confirmed what a mess the field was—a mess partly created by the loudmouths Ailes had given airtime to and a Tea Party he had nurtured.

M
eanwhile, Ailes had his hands all over the campaign in his backyard. It was also a mess. Democratic town supervisor Richard Shea was up for reelection in November 2011. Ailes wanted him out.
“I still owe you one for that article,” he told Shea, referring to his comments in
The New York Times
. Since the volatile town hall meeting on zoning, their relationship had settled into a stalemate. But a few months before the election, Ailes asked Shea to meet him at the
PCN&R
office on Main Street. “What you should do is hire an opponent to run against you and then you win,” Ailes said. Shea later told others he wondered if Ailes was secretly taping him to set him up.

The campaign season was unlike any the community had seen.
The Ailes-backed conservative candidate, Lee Erickson, who owned a welldrilling business in town, sent out nearly a dozen high-gloss mailers to voters and conducted telephone push polls against Shea. Then, in October, Erickson refused to attend a debate that Gordon Stewart and Philipstown.info were organizing at the Haldane School.
Stewart even promised to publish the website’s questions in advance, but Erickson was unswayed.

On the day of the
PCN&R
debate, Ailes engaged in a bit of psychological warfare. The latest issue of
Newsmax
magazine had a
cover story about Ailes, calling him “The Most Powerful Man in News.”
That day, several local politicians, including Shea, received hand-delivered copies of the issue, with candy-colored tabs affixed to the pages of the glowing profile. “Using his instincts about on-air talent and the assault on American values, Roger Ailes has set the new agenda for TV journalism. But he’s decidedly not the kind of media mogul described by his liberal critics,” the article read. The text seemed tailor-made to rebut a series of articles about Ailes that had recently appeared in national magazines. Ailes had included personal notes with the magazine, at least one of which read, “Be careful what you say about my wife.” That night at the Haldane cafeteria, Shea was overheard asking Ailes about the
Newsmax
story and his note: “What’s up with that?”

“Oh, I sent that out to everyone,” Roger said, and smirked.

After Beth gave opening remarks to the crowd of 150, Joe Lindsley’s replacement, Doug Cunningham, moderated. Over the course of the debate, Erickson hurled Ailesian putdowns. He called Shea “King Richard” and criticized his “disappointing level of arrogance.” Erickson, who had cofounded the property rights group Citizens of Philipstown, mainly
went after Shea’s zoning legislation. Shea remained unflappable. “One of the things I’m most proud of is the zoning,” he said. Instead, Shea accused Erickson of distorting his positions. He said his opponent “went up and down [Route] 9 spreading a campaign of disinformation to business owners, riling people up.”

The consensus in town was that Shea dominated Erickson that night. On Election Day, after an Erickson supporter went up and down Main Street in colonial garb stumping for his candidate,
Shea won decisively by 518 votes, or 58.8 percent of the vote to 41.2 percent for Erickson. It should have been an augur of things to come. The
PCN&R
succeeded in monopolizing access to Philipstown Republicans, but failed to get Erickson into office. The same dynamic was about to play out on the national stage.

R
epublicans referred to the 2012 campaign as the “Fox News Primary.”
“It’s like a town hall every day on Fox News,” Kansas governor Sam Brownback told
The New York Times
not long before the Iowa caucuses. “I like Fox, and I’m glad we have an outlet, but it is having a major, major effect on what happens.” For both the candidates and Ailes, the Fox Primary was a ratings boon but a branding challenge.
In the last eight months of 2011, GOP presidential candidates made more than six hundred appearances on Fox News and Fox Business while largely ignoring non-Fox media. (
“I’m sorry, we’re only going to be doing Fox,” Gingrich’s spokesperson, R. C. Hammond, told a CNN producer on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in Des Moines.) Their face time on Fox during this period totaled seventy-seven hours and twenty-four minutes. But as Fox’s pundits and anchors pushed the candidates into the conspiracy swamps of Fast and Furious, the gun-running debacle, and Solyndra, the bankrupt solar panel company, Fox risked alienating independent viewers—and voters.

It was a case of Ailes being unable to put his party’s goal of winning independents ahead of his personal views.
“He doesn’t like green energy—period,” a senior producer said. “He says all the time that no one in America has died from nuclear power, but fifteen people have been chopped up by those damn windmills.” For Ailes, Fast and Furious was a passionate cause. “He wants indictments. He thinks [Attorney General Eric] Holder should resign and go to jail for the death of a federal agent. He won’t be happy until he gets it,” the producer said.

Branding issues aside, the Fox Primary was a cunning programming
ploy. It gave Ailes’s audience a new reality TV show with a revolving cast of characters to follow. In May 2011, Mike Huckabee ginned up interest in his weekly Fox show by promising to reveal his presidential ambitions live.
“Governor Huckabee will announce tomorrow night on his program whether or not he intends to explore a presidential bid,” his producer, Woody Fraser, teased in a press release. “He has not told anyone at Fox News Channel his decision.”
On the night of May 14, when Huckabee announced he was not running, ratings soared to 2.2 million.

But when the action took place off his set,
Ailes, like any director, went wild.
In October, Sarah Palin made the mistake of breaking the news that she would not be running for president on Mark Levin’s talk radio show. “I paid her for two years to make this announcement on my network,” Ailes told Bill Shine in a meeting. Fox was left with sloppy seconds: a follow-up interview with Palin on Greta Van Susteren’s 10:00 p.m. show, after news of Palin’s decision had been drowned out by Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs’s death. Ailes was so furious that he considered pulling Palin off Fox entirely until her $1 million annual contract expired in 2013. Shine told Palin’s agent, Bob Barnett, that Palin was at risk of being “benched.” After conferring with Palin, Barnett called Shine back and told him that Palin recognized the misstep. But tensions between Palin and Fox did not subside.

Ailes questioned the spine of the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney.
In a private conversation with Bill Kristol, Ailes said, “Romney’s gotta rip Obama’s face off. It’s really hard to do. I did this with Bush Sr. He was uncomfortable with ripping Dukakis’s face off. George had to tell Barbara, ‘Look, this is Roger’s thing.’ It made Barbara uncomfortable that George was going so negative, but I had to rip off Dukakis’s face.”

Romney’s shaky interview with Bret Baier on the afternoon of November 29 proved Ailes’s point. For days, Romney had been declining invitations to appear with a roundtable of “All-Star” pundits.
Romney’s campaign did not think it would look “presidential” for the candidate to be surrounded by Fox News commentators lobbing questions at him. Finally, they reached a compromise. Bret Baier would interview Romney at a Conchita Foods warehouse in Miami, where the candidate was on the trail. But just because Baier agreed to travel to Florida did not mean he was going to go soft. After rattling off a list of Romney’s flip-flops on climate change, gay marriage, abortion, and immigration, Baier confronted
Romney about his position on universal health care. “Do you believe that that was the right thing for Massachusetts?”

“Bret, I don’t know how many hundred times I’ve said this—” Romney stammered. “This is an unusual interview.” The back-and-forth continued for several excruciating minutes.

When the cameras cut out, Romney complained to Baier about the exchange. Not coming prepared had been Romney’s first mistake. Insulting Baier was his second. The following night, Baier appeared on
The O’Reilly Factor
and reported Romney’s off-camera tantrum.

At times, it seemed that Ailes was using Fox to manufacture moments of excitement around alternative candidates.
After receiving just 9.4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich bounced back in South Carolina.
His springboard was a fiery on-air exchange with Fox analyst Juan Williams at a debate in Myrtle Beach held on Martin Luther King Day. Williams, who is black, asked Gingrich about his campaign trail comments that inner city children lacked a “work ethic” and should work as “janitors” in schools. Weren’t these remarks “insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?” “No,” Gingrich shot back. His answer was greeted with rapturous applause. “Only the elites despise earning money,” he said.
Gingrich carried the state’s primary five days later.

Some in Romney’s camp blamed the outcome on Ailes.
Stuart Stevens, Romney’s media strategist, later told Romney’s advisers that he thought Ailes put a black newsman onstage as a way of symbolically putting Obama in a room filled mainly with white conservatives. Gingrich’s defiant retort, red meat in the cradle of Dixie, was a symbolic smack-down of the president.

In one editorial meeting, Fox News executive Suzanne Scott wondered aloud if Ailes was damaging the party by stoking on-air death matches. “You can create a Reagan through an intra-party fight,” Ailes responded. “If there’s a fight, we should be the one doing the shooting.”

B
y any measure, 2012 was shaping up to be a phenomenal year for Ailes:
Fox News was on track to make $1 billion in profit, the network was in the driver’s seat during the fractious Republican primary, and it still was crushing its cable news rivals. And yet, to some who knew him, Ailes seemed to be consumed by increasingly paranoid and morbid thoughts.
“Listen, one out of every twenty-five people in America is a psychopath,” he told his executives. Petty grievances and past battles triggered outsized responses.

In the fall of 2011, Ailes found himself in a row with Google after the company co-sponsored a GOP debate with Fox at the Orlando Convention Center in Florida. Michael Clemente had worked hard to develop the relationship with the Internet search giant, but the relationship did not last long. Ailes was furious that the third hit in search results for his name was a liberal blog called rogerailes.blogspot.com (“Not affiliated with the fat FOX fuck,” the blog informed readers at the top of its homepage). Ailes told Fox executives that he wanted Google to push the blog’s ranking down. Google told Fox that they did not intervene in such matters. Afterward, Fox canceled the partnership and did not co-host future debates with Google.

Ailes spoke frequently about death.
“I’d give anything for another ten years,” Ailes would say. Having a child amplified these sentiments.
“I don’t want the kid growin’ up in a fouled-up world,” he told a reporter.
“He has common feelings of a parent who wants to protect a son,” a close colleague said. “The thing is, most parents don’t run a television network.” To prepare Zachary for his absence, he gave him an accelerated education.
When Zachary was twelve, Roger set up a summer internship for him at the Manhattan-based PR firm the Dilenschneider Group, whose founder, Robert Dilenschneider, was Ailes’s personal PR consultant. Each morning, Zachary would put on a coat and tie and get driven in Roger’s News Corp SUV to the office.
Around this time, Roger told a journalist that he set aside boxes filled with keepsakes. Besides family photographs and letters, the contents included a pocket-size copy of the Constitution (“The founders believed it and so should you,” he wrote on it), press clippings lionizing his accomplishments, some gold coins (“in case everything goes to hell”), and Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
, with a note inscribed on the opening page:

But there was more on his mind than his own mortality. He sometimes feared the worst for Zachary.
In February 2012, Gordon Stewart received an unexpected, hysterical call from Ailes.

“You’re putting a target on my son’s back!” he screamed. “You’ll be responsible if something happens!”

Stewart, who had to hold the phone away from his ear, asked Ailes what on earth he was talking about.

That week, Philipstown.info published a brief item about recent hearings of the local planning board. The final paragraph reported that Ailes and his neighbor were seeking approval to adjust the line between their properties, which were owned by “Hudson Valley 2009, formed by Roger Ailes; Viewsave LLC; and Gerald Morris.”

“I’ll sue you!” Ailes yelled into the phone.

The article, he said, put Zachary in danger because it disclosed the existence of a trust. He began fulminating about unrelated disputes, including the old charge that Stewart encouraged his employees to quit without giving notice. “You must know I did no such thing,” Stewart said.

“You’re a liar!”

“Roger, since you called and I said hello, you have insulted my integrity, called me a liar to my face, have threatened me with a lawsuit, accused me of potentially being an accomplice to the murder of your son,” Stewart said. “Can you explain to me how you can expect that approach will advance the purpose of your calling?”

Ailes paused. “You need to get help!” he blurted out and hung up.

An hour later, Ailes called back. This time, he calmly asked Stewart to take down the article from the website. Stewart told him he would get back to him. After discussing his concerns with his editor, Kevin Foley, and the reporter on the story, Stewart called Ailes and informed him that he would not be removing it.