Murdoch's World (10 page)

“A very large percentage of readers and viewers out there were really insulted and found their sensibilities offended,” Hume told me some years later. “I had always had the feeling that if somebody built a broadcast network that challenged that, that there would be a tremendous market for it.” Stories not being told by the other news outlets represented “low-hanging fruit,” the kinds of pieces that could be reported evenhandedly by anyone but were not selected for broadcast or publication elsewhere.

A push for new EPA rules might strike the
Washington Post
or CBS News as a story about the debate over cleaner water. Fox might frame the same story around small business owners struggling to keep pace with red tape from Washington.

Perhaps most important, Ailes instinctively recognized good television and understood how to create it—defining “good” as something viewers would want to watch and keep watching. It was close to Murdoch's definition of the public interest. In this case, Ailes knew that Fox's defining feature would require a highly cultivated resentment toward other news organizations. The “fair and balanced” slogan alone was an increasingly explicit assertion that mainstream press organizations
were not fair or balanced. “We report. You decide,” provoked the same reaction in viewers and the competition. On Fox, the news programs served to get out the mission statement: the other news organizations look down on you and your beliefs. Here, you're home.

Fox initially had to fight to force cable system providers to carry the network. Luckily for Ailes, he had a powerful friend in the nation's most populous metropolitan region.
Time Warner's refusal to welcome Fox in New York City caused Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to threaten to carry the channel (along with Bloomberg TV) on the city's public access station. Giuliani also implied he would revoke Time Warner's lucrative cable franchise for the city. His brass-knuckled tactics showed a preference for one for-profit over another. He argued that Time Warner was favoring its own station, CNN.

Murdoch had been angered by Time Warner's roadblocks. Ailes had run Giuliani's first, unsuccessful bid for the mayoralty in 1989, and they remained close. Top Murdoch executives (including Ailes) had spoken more than two dozen times with aides at City Hall to coordinate a strategy in a two-month period. The coordination was too cozy for the federal judge ruling on the case. “The city's purpose in acting to compel Time Warner to give Fox one of its commercial channels was to reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint. As a consequence,
Fox was the recipient of special advocacy,” wrote federal judge Denise Cote. “The city has engaged in a pattern of conduct with the purpose of compelling Time Warner to alter its constitutionally protected editorial decision not to carry Fox News. The city's actions violated longstanding First Amendment principles that are the foundation of our democracy.”

Yet Time Warner yielded. And Fox took advantage to build a greater audience. It covered the Clinton impeachment as ABC built
Nightline
on coverage of the Iranian hostage drama—an ongoing crisis with an uncertain outcome of national import. Only Fox News would tell the full truth, its tenor implied.

The pacing was fast, the graphics crisp and lively. Fox's Ailes wanted viewers to enjoy what they saw. And he made enough liberals part of the mix to ensure some ideological clashes. Ailes hired people he had battled during earlier political campaigns, including Geraldine Ferraro and Bob Beckel, Walter Mondale's campaign manager.
Children of such prominent Democratic families as the Kennedys and the Jacksons found work at Republicans' new favorite place to watch TV.

In 2000, Fox News covered the political conventions for the first time. In news from the Middle East, Fox won favor with many Jewish viewers by employing the term “homicide bomber,” rather than the more common “suicide bomber,” to keep the emphasis on the deaths of innocents, not the perpetrators. Fox painted those who did not climb on board its various campaigns as opposed to the country's well-being.

6

THE “FOG OF WAR”

ROGER AILES DEVELOPED HIS PHILOSOPHY as he shaped the media efforts of two presidential campaigns—Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush. Ailes knows how to make a candidate look presidential. And he also knows how to throw a punch. Ailes is not just more conservative than Murdoch but more steeped in the world of politics than his boss, who still thinks of himself as running a journalistic outfit. Ailes's key insight is defining opponents before they define themselves. And Ailes finds opponents all over.

Fox's PR shop, led by Ailes's longtime executives Brian Lewis and Irena Briganti, wears its reputation as a badge of honor. The two senior aides consider their performance a key component of their channel's ratings dominance and the billion dollars a year it generates for News Corp. There are moments when the essence of Fox News can be discerned most clearly in the maneuvers of its public relations department, not on the airwaves.

Whatever the story, reporters calling Fox News on a regular basis become inured to the onslaught of questions from Fox's public relations staff: What's the precise focus of the piece? What quotes are you using? Who else are you talking to? Why aren't you making these other points? These questions are intended to steer coverage, glean intelligence, head off unflattering conclusions, and even intimidate reporters from interviewing people at other cable outlets.

The deluge of queries can crop up at just about any network. But Fox's creativity far surpasses such controlling techniques, as it believes its bargaining position has solidified with its ratings lead.

My own early encounters with Fox's public relations representatives when I was a reporter and media critic at the
Baltimore Sun
showed them to be sharp and contentious.
On Election Day 2000, television networks announced and withdrew calls awarding the White House first to Al Gore and then to George W. Bush. The
Baltimore Sun
had arranged to have a young freelancer, a former intern for the paper, spend the night inside Fox's New York City studios. John Ellis, one of the top analysts on Fox's decision desk, helped Fox become the first network to call Bush the winner at 2:17
AM
. He was also in contact with his cousins, George W. Bush and Florida governor Jeb Bush. (Jeb's given name is John Ellis Bush.) When their consultations were revealed by Jeffrey Toobin of the
New Yorker
magazine, Fox spokesman Rob Zimmerman pressured me to convince our freelancer to get on a conference call with other reporters to refute the story. Zimmerman said Ellis was barely involved at all.

When I talked with our freelancer, she said Ellis had actually bragged to her that night that he would greatly influence the network's call. Furthermore, though she had remained late into the night, she left before the Bush decision played out in full, as she had to show up early the next morning for her day job at a financial trade publication. I called Fox back, saying the editors had decided against putting the freelancer on the spot to defend the network. What's more, I said,
even if she were to speak out, she wouldn't confirm Fox's version of events. Zimmerman told me it was clear the
Baltimore Sun
's fairness was in doubt.

The inconclusive election results—“RECOUNT” in the inevitable on-screen caption—did not damage Fox and served as one of the episodes the channel used to cement the loyalty of its viewers. One of the secrets of Fox's success lies in its ability to draw viewers who stay tuned to the one channel for much longer than other cable stations. The aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks marked another such opportunity. Fox News proudly flew a graphic flag in the corner of its screen. Anchors wore flags in their lapel pins. MSNBC and CNN rushed to catch up.

Little more than year after the election, early one morning in December 2001,
I called Fox in trying to sort out the basis of a story by the network's new chief war correspondent, Geraldo Rivera. He had been a swashbuckling investigative reporter, then a network news magazine star, a tabloid talk show host, and finally a political talk show host under Ailes at CNBC. Still under contract to CNBC in the fall of 2001, he had bristled at the idea of staying behind a desk while a war raged elsewhere, quit his CNBC talk show, and rejoined Ailes at Fox. Rivera soon traveled to the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.

He was, Rivera announced, on a quest to track down “the dastardly one” (his personal term for Osama bin Laden). On an early December day, he showed footage from Afghanistan, twice in a twenty-four-hour period, in which he prayed over the site where he said three American soldiers and numerous allied Afghan fighters had been killed by a US bombing raid in what was euphemistically called a “friendly fire” incident. He said he had seen their tattered uniforms and showed himself, on video, reciting the Lord's Prayer.

There was, however, a problem: Rivera filed his report less than a day later from Tora Bora, a cave complex in the White Mountains
roughly three hundred miles northeast of the site where the bombs actually fell in Kandahar. I talked to reporters in Afghanistan, people who handled logistics at rival networks, senior staffers with international relief agencies and human rights groups active there, and US military officials. None of them thought the journey from Tora Bora to Kandahar and back was feasible by road in less than twenty-four hours, while an official at the Pentagon said Rivera certainly had not hitched a ride with US forces or aircraft.

When I asked how he could have made the round trip down and back in a single day, given the bombed-out roads, the rival warlords, and the highway bandits patrolling what routes were functioning, a Fox News spokeswoman angrily asked whether I was saying he made it up. By the time the network consented to an interview, deadlines approached. Because of the nine-and-a-half-hour time-zone difference in Afghanistan, they said, Rivera was asleep and unreachable.
Wait a day, and we'll give you Geraldo
. By that point, we could have run a story without speaking to him. But my section's editors and I agreed it would make the story much stronger to talk to Rivera. I imposed one condition: that he would talk to no other reporters that day. Fox News agreed.

The next day, Rivera gave me a vivid and livid interview by satellite phone. But he interspersed his anger toward what he clearly saw as my impertinence with a fascinatingly self-aware account of the various twists and turns in his career. Finally Rivera said he had been confused by another, similar friendly-fire incident that killed a group of Afghan rebels: “The fog of war,” he said. As contemporary newspaper reports and accounts by human rights groups subsequently demonstrated, that separate incident involving only Afghans did not happen until the following week.

The
Fox PR people had taken some protective steps. Despite their promise, Rivera also spoke to Associated Press television reporter David Bauder. In this interview, Rivera boasted that he carried a
gun despite journalistic conventions advising against it. Such bravado created the fear that armed reporters might appear to Al Qaida fighters little different from combatants, and then all journalists in war zones would become targets. The AP's global reach ensured that Rivera's tale of packing heat drained the appetite for any other controversies he might have engendered. Hundreds of newspapers published Bauder's story. Fox's Irena Briganti left a message on my voice mail, suggesting only minor media outlets paid attention: “Reuters and MarketWatch?
Pretty pathetic placement, my friend.”

I wrote a second article, a few days later, weighing whether a television news network had an obligation to acknowledge and correct an error such as the one Rivera had made. The Drudge Report picked that one up—and the second story ricocheted around the world. Fox put out
a tepid statement to the Associated Press between Christmas and New Year's Eve—a media dead zone—stating that Rivera had made an “honest mistake.” No formal correction appeared on air. All this
landed me on Fox's blacklist. I later learned that internally staffers called it
“Irena's doghouse”: the constantly changing catalog of offenders that PR staffers review on a regular basis.

After about fifteen months, Zimmerman called me to say Fox was wiping the slate clean. I continued to work with the public relations department on what I consider to be a professional basis—profiling such Fox anchors and hosts as Shepard Smith, Brit Hume, Bret Baier, John Stossel, and Glenn Beck. The PR department's retribution was meant to punish me and to warn others. But it was not personal.

A year or two after I broke the Rivera story, Fox News invited me as a guest to the White House correspondent's dinner. It was a deeply inside joke for the amusement of its publicity department and the small world of media reporters who took any note. The
Baltimore Sun
paid the cost of my $135 ticket. And I had a good time, dining and drinking, without guilt, among the same Fox News staffers who had been told not to talk to me for more than a year. Years later, when my wife and
I married, the Fox News PR team sent over an exquisite bottle of champagne from a 2002 vintage—specifically picked by Brian Lewis, Briganti pointed out, to honor a prize I won for the Rivera story. Nice touch. It was a shame to have to return it.