Murdoch's World (18 page)

The entire story played out during the home stretch of the 2010 elections, in which Republicans would take back the US House of Representatives.
News Corp had become a participant in the 2010 election cycle, with a $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association and another $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce to
defeat Congressional Democrats. The timing for Fox was propitious. In the US in 2010, the Tea Party protests strengthened, borne aloft by fear over the imploding economy and anger over the greater role of the government in health care. Much of the mainstream press was nonplussed at how to gauge this phenomenon. Fox News saw the development as a wave to ride.
“Roger [Ailes] may not have given the Tea Party life,” said Chris Ruddy, the CEO of NewsMax. “But he gave it oxygen to breathe.”

Juan Williams's firing transformed a dormant rallying cry from GOP backbenchers to eviscerate funds for public broadcasting into a central rhetorical element of their appeal to the members of their diehard base. And
officials at some NPR member stations were apoplectic. Complaining calls swamped volunteers and staffers answering phones during their seasonal fund-raising drives. (Donations went up at most stations but stayed flat at others. But local station officials wouldn't know that until later.)

Some of the complaints to public radio stations came from their own listeners. But many callers were fans of conservative radio shows on commercial stations or viewers of Fox News programs that were also stoking the flames. The Fox reflex was to rally behind a colleague. Chris Wallace told me in a hallway in Fox's Washington bureau that he “
will never forgive NPR for what they did to Juan.” But it was also the execution of a marketing ploy.
“Are you kidding me, NPR?” Jon Stewart asked incredulously on his show. “You're picking a fight with Fox News? They gave Juan Williams a $2 million contract just for you firing him. NPR, you just brought a tote bag full of David Sedaris books to a knife fight.”

Ailes's outrage was surely calculated to a degree. Nine months earlier, Ailes condemned
Murdoch's son-in-law, Matthew Freud, for comments in the
New York Times
critical of Fox News. Freud, the great-grandson of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was believed to be speaking for several of the Murdoch children.
Roger
Ailes shot back that Freud “needs to see a psychiatrist.” Schiller blundered by invoking the same word about Williams. Ailes knew exactly what he was doing.

A few weeks after NPR terminated Williams's contract,
Ailes attacked once again in an interview with a favorite reporter, Howard Kurtz of the
Daily Beast
and, somewhat bizarrely, of Fox's cable news rival CNN. “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude,” Ailes told Kurtz. “They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda.”

Ailes's vitriol
fit neatly with the extreme rhetoric being served up at that time by Glenn Beck. On one occasion, he offered listeners to his radio show a mind-set that would help them endure the Obama years: “You have to think like a German Jew [in] 1934.” The month we spoke, Beck used Nazi allusions to assail Al Gore's environmental activism. “The government and their friends are indoctrinating our children for the control of their minds, your freedom, our choice and our future,” Beck said on his show. “This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler Youth.”

When I pressed Beck to say whether he actually believed Gore sought a dictatorial or fascistic society, the Fox host replied, “I don't think Al Gore is going to put anybody in gas chambers. I don't think we're actually going down that road.”

“But when I heard him say, ‘Well, you know, your parents don't understand the things you instinctively know,' you've got to be kidding me, right? Next—why don't you have them report on me if they're not recycling as well?”

Beck spoke of Israel with glowing reverence. But he often pivoted, warning viewers as well about a shadowy government in a way that some of his critics said
evoked elements of anti-Semitic slurs. During an extended riff about the liberal billionaire financier George Soros, Beck called him “the puppet master.”

“He's known as the man who broke the Bank of England. The prime minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer. In Thailand he was branded the economic war criminal,” Beck said on Fox early in November 2010. “They also said he sucks the blood of people.”

Soros is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University and perhaps the leading American authority on Nazi rhetoric, noted that the Malaysian prime minister cited by Beck had also ranted that Jews were behind his economy's instability. Beck shockingly even claimed Soros as a young teen collaborated with the Nazis in his native Hungary. Soros had passed as the young Christian godson of a government official who was acting to save his life; at that time he witnessed the cataloguing of a Jewish family's belongings for confiscation. Holocaust experts agreed this anecdote did not constitute evidence of any fair notion of collaboration. “I haven't heard anything like this on television or radio,” Lipstadt told me, “and I've been in the sewers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial more often than I've wanted.”

Beck also tied Soros to a variety of philanthropies and media groups, including NPR, which received a $1.8 million grant lasting several years from a Soros foundation to help train reporters for local member stations to cover state governments around the country. The age of blogging and tweeting has fomented a culture in which people blithely call one another Nazis online and on cable TV and talk radio. But Fox News stood out amid mainstream media outlets for its ferocity and frequency in doing so. The
Washington Post
's Dana
Milbank found Beck had referred to Hitler or Nazis on his Fox News program hundreds of times.

The example was set at the top when Ailes accused NPR leaders of engaging in Nazi-like behavior.
Ailes ultimately apologized, but intentionally not to NPR. Instead, in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish civil rights organization, he said he should have instead called the NPR officials “nasty inflexible bigot[s]”—
not Nazis. The ADL's Abraham Foxman has served as a public exculpator for both Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, who has been a donor to the group. Murdoch received an international leadership award from the ADL the same month Williams was dismissed.

In a subsequent book,
Muzzled
, Williams argued that the termination of his contract was part of a larger pattern of the suppression of unwelcome opinions. I suggested to him that it was a complicated case to make amid the cacophony of the blogosphere and the explosion of new social media sites such as Twitter and Tumblr.

“There are lots of platforms and lots of points of view out there. It's like going to a New York City street,” Williams responded. “You hear the cabs honking, the kids screaming, the ice cream truck. You can hear everything out here. But I think to myself . . . the experience that most Americans have is that they bite their tongue on a regular basis.”

Williams's termination by NPR took an emotional toll, leading to fears his career would be hurt and that he would be considered a bigot. Williams wrote that his editors at NPR were unhappy with his previous book—
Enough
—in which he criticized liberal black leaders. Williams said he was told by an NPR executive (whom he would not identify to me) that his thinking and his book were not in sync with the kind of African Americans valued by the network.

The record tends to belie his perception. NPR's
Morning Edition
, one of the network's most highly rated programs and one of the most listened-to radio shows in the country, devoted nearly eight minutes to an interview with Williams about
Enough
, a notably lengthy duration for the program. The conversation was used to kick off a week of stories about leadership among African Americans.

The muzzled Williams was allowed to make his case in print interviews, on Fox News, on the
Daily Show
with Jon Stewart, on NPR's
Diane Rehm Show
, and on other public radio programs as well.

In early January 2011, NPR's board of directors released a report from a law firm that found Williams's contract had been terminated
lawfully but that there were managerial failings in how it was carried out.
Weiss resigned after it was clear she was no longer welcome at the network for which she had worked a quarter century.
Schiller was ousted a few months later. Her top fund-raising executive was taped in a stunt by young conservative activists posing as Muslim donors eager to trash Jews in the media. He had been captured making remarks deeply dismissive of conservatives and Tea Party members. That the thirteen-minute version of the tape initially posted online badly distorted what occurred at the lunch didn't matter. Nor did the fact that Vivian Schiller was not present.

It was April 2011. Ailes was riding high. But across the Atlantic, at another vital outpost of Murdoch's World, carefully constructed defenses were starting to fall.

11

“AS BAD AS WE FEARED”

BACK IN NOVEMBER 2005, THE
News of the World
had published a brief item about a royal limb out of joint. Prince William had to put off a mountain rescue course after pulling a tendon in a soccer practice with schoolchildren. He had been
“crocked by a ten-year-old,” the paper's royals editor, Clive Goodman, reported.

“He has to wear a knee brace if he wants to do anything other than walk, to stop it getting any worse,” one friend of the prince had “confided.” The economical, 156-word article detailed the injury, the circumstances, the location, the hospital, the course of treatment, and the inside joke from a friend about Prince Harry's nickname (“Sicknote”).

Aides to the princes complained to police that someone was accessing their phones. Many of these remarks—such as Harry's nickname—had been uttered in voice mails, not conversation.

Goodman's reporting drew on the help of an athletic man with an eager-to-please affect named Glenn Mulcaire. In his early twenties,
Mulcaire had sought to work for military intelligence. Those who interviewed him said Mulcaire wasn't military intelligence material—but encouraged him to set up his own business one day. He dabbled in private investigation, scouring through records on behalf of insurance companies and doing some work protecting clients from unwanted media attention. That helped him pick up work around the margins for
News of the World
.

Mulcaire had been a soccer player too, known as “Trigger” for his quick-whip left foot. When opportunity presented itself, he joined the roster of a new lower-rank professional team, AFC Wimbledon, and scored its very first goal in 2002, a shot taken from beyond the penalty box that whistled past the diving goalie. “You don't get better than that in this sport,”
Mulcaire told a sideline reporter after the game. “It's still hard to take in, really.” But he added, “to be honest, we should have scored a lot earlier.” AFC Wimbledon lost to Bromley, 2–1. “Trigger had his moment of glory,” his coach said later. “Talk about his five minutes of fame. He had his five minutes of fame, and he loved it.”

Mulcaire could never beat that opening shot. He did not possess the talent, drive, or luck to make it to elite levels of the game in the UK or even star in the lower ranks. He left AFC Wimbledon the following year after an injury. He was thirty-three. With a dead end,
the time was right to return to a private investigator's life. Soon he had steady work from
News of the World
. By 2006, Mulcaire had a signed annual contract with the tabloid that exceeded £100,000. The tabloid's editors
had adopted a bit of cloak and dagger to hide payments to Mulcaire—itemizing his bills with receipts for “Alexander” and “Paul Williams.”

Hacking someone's cell phone messages turned out to be
a surprisingly easy task. It required two people, or at least two phones. On the first, a hacker called someone on his or her mobile phone. On the second, he dialed again, but because the line was tied up, the call would be sent straight to voice mail. Callers were given the option of leaving a
message or retrieving voice mail messages. In almost all cases, mobile phone service providers had left the default setting for the code to gain access to voice mail messages as “0000” or “1234,” trusting cell phone users to set up their own. Most did not. Of those who did, most users selected their birthdays. Private detectives like Mulcaire could readily acquire those, too.