Murdoch's World (13 page)

Sammon went on, however, to justify that speculation, telling the Hillsdale crowd that it proved well founded after the government bailed out banks and car manufacturers: “The debate over whether America was headed for socialism seemed anything but far-fetched.”

Amid those bailouts and stimulus spending, Bill O'Reilly could be found in full-fledged populist dudgeon against the liberal social engineering government bureaucrats he said were favored by the new president. Hannity had been newly unshackled from liberal cohost Alan Colmes and hammered the White House. And most outraged
and outrageous was Glenn Beck, recently arrived from CNN Headline News, who quickly doubled the audience of Fox's 5:00
PM
time slot.

In those early days of 2009, I marveled as I watched Beck on set at Fox News in Manhattan and interviewed him in a waiting room off his studios. In person, Beck was self-deprecating and often buoyant. On Fox, he depicted a bleak country run by shadowy forces.
Beck brooded about whether FEMA was setting up concentration camps. He would later take credit for doing the heavy lifting to disprove the theory to which he had given so much airtime. Beck did not simply hammer away at the idea that Marxist thinkers had mentored Obama throughout his life. Only partially in jest, Beck also repeatedly invoked Stalinist imagery in characterizing the administration's proposals.

As for his own politics, Beck invoked an affinity for a group of politicians from an earlier era. “I have become more and more libertarian every day—more and more against both of these parties,” Beck said, adding, “I have just become
much more like the Founding Fathers. I just wanted to be in a place that understood that.” Presenting himself as a modern-day Patrick Henry—give me liberty or give me death—Beck played the role of a scholar sorrowfully unearthing sad truths. Beck was a masterful broadcaster, keenly conscious of every element of his performance. And he was self-aware enough occasionally to wink at its ridiculousness. For the moment, Fox was just fine with the whole package: the divisive conspiracy theories, the flights of fancy, the grandiose self-aggrandizement, all of it. He was the network's newest star.

On the news side, Fox worked hard to win recognition for its anchors. The network's primary news anchor was
Shepard Smith, a maverick figure in the basement studios of Fox News in Manhattan. Deeply tanned, truly mischievous, proud of his red state roots in Mississippi, and fit to the point of being gaunt—he would puncture pomposity wherever he encountered it yet struck appropriately respectful tones without lapsing into sentimentality during sensitive moments on
the air. Smith was equally capable of apparently spontaneous takes on torture, gay marriage, and even the news business itself.

On several occasions, according to several colleagues, he refused to promote themes that recurred on other Fox shows.
He liked to rattle O'Reilly in the hallway and openly mocked Beck on the air. His occasional shouting matches with high-ranking colleagues over stories made fewer headlines. Smith was cheered for saying what he thought, especially by non-Fox journalists, and Fox kept rewarding him with new contracts in the high seven figures. His ratings were strong, and publicly executives cited his unexpected sallies as part of Fox's claim that it let employees say what they thought while reporting the news straight. Behind the scenes, executives would occasionally argue that Smith was cheered for saying opinionated things that fell on the left side of the political ledger. More proof, they claimed, of the mainstream media's ingrained bias.

Bret Baier, a competent reporter who had covered the White House and Pentagon, took over Hume's responsibilities as the chief political anchor. A genial presence with a million-watt smile, Baier had a show that was often the second-highest rated in cable news, behind Fox's
O'Reilly Factor
, with roughly 2 million viewers a night. While Baier's
Special Report
relied heavily on reported segments, fully one-third of the show was consumed by a discussion he moderated among pundits dubbed the “Fox News All-Stars.”

I reviewed six months' worth of Baier's panels and
found a consistent formula: two clear-cut conservatives and another analyst. That other person was sometimes a Democrat or liberal—say, former Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers. But often that third slot was filled by a reporter from a news outlet that strives not to adopt ideological outlook in its reporting, such as Politico or the
Washington Post
. As I told Baier, his panels' blend of personalities seemed to underrepresent the left and also to cast nonideological reporters as liberals. The pattern suggested Fox defined balance as a counterbalance
to other media outlets rather than a program that in itself was fully balanced as the network's executives pledged.

In the months that followed the inauguration, the relationship between Obama's camp and Fox News curdled. On September 9, 2009, Beck described Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor picked to lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as “a man that believes that you
should not be able to remove rats from your home if it causes them any pain.” Sunstein had indeed written about animal rights for a law review article and explored the trade-offs in putting a primacy on human priorities and impulses, though he hadn't really made the argument Beck ascribed to him.

The next hour, on Baier's program, Fox News correspondent James Rosen told viewers:
“Rats could attack us in the sewer and court systems if all of Cass Sunstein's writings became law.” The
relevant passage from Sunstein's article was not quoted even in significant part to viewers. “If rats are able to suffer—and no one really doubts that they are—then their interests are relevant to the question of how, and perhaps even whether, they can be expelled from houses,” Sunstein wrote. “At the very least, people should kill rats in a way that minimizes suffering. And if possible, people should try to expel rats in a way that does not harm them at all.”

Sunstein, the author and editor of several dozen books, is an unconventional liberal who has written provocatively about regulation but was often defended by conservative colleagues for his intellectual rigor. He was an advocate of “opt out” versus “opt in” strategies, for example, advising companies to adopt a policy that assumed employees would contribute several percent of their annual salaries to retirement funds, unless they affirmatively chose not to. Studies showed people were more likely to save money for retirement if the choice was presented as an expectation.

Obama soon gave interviews on the same Sunday to five political talk shows, but pointedly not to Fox.
Fox News Sunday
host Chris
Wallace vocally objected on air. The Obama administration, he said, was made up of
“the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my thirty years in Washington.”

IN FALL 2009, a delicate task confronted Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, the special master overseeing the American corporations that received billions of dollars in bailout money. The surge in unemployment and mortgage defaults stoked anger toward corporate chieftains who received huge compensation packages, further fueled by the taxpayer dollars funneled to their companies. Even so, a backlash was already building among many conservatives against government intervention in the private sector, though many economists backed the bailouts. Much of that fury was reflected in the comments of hosts and guests on Fox News.

On October 22, 2009,
Feinberg announced that salaries for the top executives at those seven big companies would be cut by 90 percent for the following year. Treasury public relations staffers scheduled a session to lay out the plans for reporters for newspaper and wire services in what is called a “pad and pen” session (meaning no officials would comment on tape).
White House and Treasury press officials conferred over email how best to get their message out over the airwaves. At first, Treasury aide Jenni LeCompte said, the White House would invite reporters for big legacy TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, plus NPR. They'd keep it brisk: logistics allowed for eight minutes apiece. Then CNN and Bloomberg TV were added. But the bureau chiefs for the other TV networks asked,
Why not Fox News?

Unknown to them, Dag Vega, the White House director of broadcast media, had earlier emailed to LeCompte: “We'd prefer if you'd skip Fox please.” (The emails came to light only later, when obtained by a conservative legal activist group.) The administration's move
backfired. Ailes pointed out to executives at other networks that Fox shared the costs of the joint television pool for White House coverage and questioned whether it raised First Amendment questions to exclude only one outlet. The bureau chiefs not only hung together, they started talking about it to the
New York Times
. Other publications and sites pounced. Fox, naturally, treated the story to unrelenting coverage.

White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki emailed a colleague: “brett [sic] baier just did a stupid piece on it—but he is a lunatic.” The next day, Psaki sent out a barbed joke to Treasury's LeCompte: “I am putting some dead fish in the fox cubby—just cause.” Thin skin and trash talk were saved for posterity on White House email servers. As the pool of networks involved expanded, Fox's White House correspondent was actively courted to come in to talk to Feinberg as well. Fox executed, and broadcast, as much of an interview on the subject as any of its competitors.

Publicly, administration officials denied intentionally blocking Fox. Yet an internal email from deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest contradicted these denials, as he urged press staffers to hang tough: “We've demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews.” Within a day, White House officials admitted they had intentionally kept Fox away from Feinberg. And not just Feinberg: Fox should not expect Obama or top-level officials back on its airwaves anytime soon.

“
We see Fox right now as the source and the outlet for Republican Party talking points,” Anita Dunn, then the White House communications director, told me. She wasn't simply taking issue with the big-name opinion hosts. Dunn argued the supposed wall between Fox News programs and the sprawling opinion shows had proved utterly porous. The network, she said, had decided to infuse the ideology of its opinion hosts into their news shows to deliver exactly what its audience craved. “It's fine if that's how they want to build their business model. We understand that. And it's working for them and we
understand that, as well. But we don't think we need to treat them as though they are a news organization the way other news organizations here are treated.”

Michael Clemente, Fox's most senior hard news executive, joined Fox after decades at ABC News. He argued that
other news outlets had bathed the president in a positive glow. Fox News alone asked the tough questions, Clemente said. His team would continue to do its job despite the rebuke from Obama's White House, he said, drawing on sports for metaphors: “You know, Michael Jordan used to do the same thing. He'd yell at the refs a bunch at the beginning of the game on a simple foul . . . and it just sort of brushed [the ref] back a little bit. That's fine.”

THE BREAKOUT star on the news side, however, was clearly Megyn Kelly, who made a quick ascent from legal correspondent to anchor, with her good looks often blinding Fox viewers to the fact she was smart and tough.

University of Pennsylvania students serving as Republican monitors on Election Day in November 2008 took footage with handheld digital cameras that captured Kelly's imagination. They taped several members of the New Black Panthers swaggering outside a polling station in a heavily black part of Philadelphia.