Roger Ailes: Off Camera (11 page)

From the construction site we drove three minutes to Main Street in Cold Spring. At the end of Main Street, Ailes stopped so I could get a view of Dockside, formerly the site of a ramshackle restaurant that was bought and demolished in 1999 by the Open Space Institute and is now a passive-use park. “They took a place where a guy could sit and look at the water and drink a beer or eat a cheeseburger and turned it into a place for dogs to shit,” he said. “How the hell is that an improvement?”

Ailes clashed again with the émigré establishment when a group of artists staged an exhibition of sculptures along the river. Ailes loudly derided the exhibition as an “eyesore.”

“Roger has a commanding view of the marsh,” says Stewart. “His attitude was, ‘Look at all this ugly shit. They’re only there because they don’t pay taxes.’” Predictably, this didn’t go down well with the local cultural institutions that sponsored the show. “Roger put them in an impossible position. He humiliated them. Why would he go out of his way to do this?”

The answer was: retaliation. For some time, local authorities had wrangled with Ailes over changes he was making on his property, which, in their opinion, disturbed the environment.

“They told me that I had runoff from my property. I explained to them that God made water run downhill, not me. But since I had just bought the land below my house, they had nothing to worry about anyway.” When authorities tried to prevent him from putting a deer fence on his property, Ailes said that the fence was meant to keep the deer out of his flower beds and prevent his German shepherd, Champ, from killing the deer. He added that if any EPA inspectors came on his property to look for infractions, and there was no fence, the inspectors could also wind up as dog food. The fence is still standing.

The tour ended on Main Street, at the office of the
PCN&R
. The building has been restored by Beth to its quaint, early twentieth-century condition. An elevator has been installed for Roger, who has a hard time getting up and down stairs on his damaged legs. Even the anti-Ailes faction admits that the building is an improvement—no small matter in a town whose commerce depends, in large measure, on its pristine quaintness. As for the paper itself, it is, in the assessment of the
New Yorker
’s Peter Boyer, “distinctly better” than it was before Beth Ailes took it over. The new
PCN&R
hasn’t destroyed the social fabric of the town or opened the way for wrong-thinking Republicanism, as the grandees of the town feared. What it has done is to give readers, yeomen and émigrés alike, a choice of news. It is a Hudson Valley version of fair and balanced, and if the liberals of Cold Spring don’t like it, they have a lot of company all across the blue states of America.

FAIR AND BALANCED

When Roger Ailes rolled out Fox News, he gave it what he knew would be a provocative motto: “Fair and Balanced.” Nothing he has done since has so inflamed his critics. Fair and balanced is what the mainstream media have always claimed to be. Laying claim to it mocked the pretensions of the establishment. If the slogan had accomplished nothing more, that would have been sufficient for Ailes.

It is an American tradition for media organizations to christen themselves with self-regarding slogans and mission statements. When legendary newsman Adolph Ochs took over the
New York Times
in 1896, he published a declaration of principles setting forth his goals, including “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” He promised his readers “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The
Chicago Tribune
vaingloriously dubbed itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” The
New York Sun
boasted that “It Shines for All.” Not to be outshone, the
Baltimore Sun
offered “Light for All.” The
Los Angeles Times
put “Largest Circulation in the West” on its masthead; the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
trumped that with “Largest Circulation in the Entire West.” The
Longview
(Texas)
Daily News
proclaimed itself “An Independent Democratic Newspaper of the First Class, Unchallenged in Its Field.” In Nevada, the
Mason Valley News
, with a refreshing sense of proportion, still bills itself “The Only Newspaper in the World That Gives a Damn About Yerington.”

Television network divisions have adopted their own identities. ABC News enables its audience to “See the Whole Picture.” CNN is “The Most Trusted Name in News.” MSNBC “Leans Forward.”

Most subscribers to the
Chicago Tribune
didn’t actually believe that theirs was the uncontested champion newspaper of the world. CNN, to judge by its ratings, is far from being the most trusted name in news. And not even the most fervent admirers of the
New York Times
suppose that
all
the fit news is found in its pages. These are understood to be aspirational statements, not literal fact. They are not ordinarily regarded as scandalous assaults on the truth.

“Fair and balanced” is different. Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the
Times
, wrote a column about it in May 2012, calling it “a slogan for the suckers” that intentionally masks the fact that Fox News, in its coverage as well as its commentary, is unfair and unbalanced, and outside the norms of conventional journalism. It was not Keller’s first swing at Fox News and its founder. The previous year he told an audience at the National Press Club that “the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general. I think it has contributed to the sense that they are all just, you know, out there with a political agenda, Fox is just more overt about it . . . the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past.” Keller was unaware at the time that the day’s moderator, Marvin Kalb, the founding director of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was a contributor to Fox News. “My problem with Fox News isn’t that it is conservative,” Keller told me in a phone interview in the summer of 2012. “My problem is that it pretends not to be conservative. ‘Trust us, everybody else in the media is liberal’ is the attitude it takes . . . the tenor of Fox News is different.”

Roger Ailes doesn’t disagree that Fox is different from other news organizations. He often illustrates this point with a story about meeting a man at a cocktail party (presumably on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, although the venue changes in retellings) who complains about Fox News coverage. Ailes asks him if he is satisfied with what he sees on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and PBS. The man says he is very satisfied. “Well,” says Ailes, “if they all have the same take and we have a different take, why does that bother you? The last two guys who succeeded in lining up the media on one side were Hitler and Stalin.”

•   •   •

“The first rule of media bias is selection,” Ailes says. “Most of the media bullshit you about who they are. We don’t. We’re not programming to conservatives, we’re just not eliminating their point of view.”

All news organizations practice editorial selection. “News” is not an objective and empirically measurable outcome, like a baseball score or yesterday’s temperature. As newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann famously noted, the world is full of activity. Editors and gatekeepers operate a searchlight, scanning the globe. When they spot something of interest to them, they pause to illuminate it.

The choice of what to illuminate is not self-evident, but somehow the mainstream media tend to arrive at a consensus about what does and does not constitute a story. This consensus, for national and international stories and cultural issues, has traditionally been set primarily by the
New York Times
, which is the morning newspaper of almost every network news executive. It is a cardinal principle at Fox to avoid doing this.

“We try to avoid pack journalism and concentrate on what is important to viewers,” says Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news. “A lot of journalists feel that if they all do the same thing in the same way, they are safe. That isn’t the case here. And we are less dependent on the
Times
.”

“I was in key positions determining the news agenda at ABC and CBS,” says Av Westin. As he sees it, the good old days are gone forever, thanks to Ronald Reagan (who ended government regulation of the airwaves), Rupert Murdoch (who brought British tabloid standards to television), and, of course, Roger Ailes. “Ailes arrived in this environment, and it was clear that he would do anything to get ratings,” he told me.

According to Westin, TV was once in the hands of great, disinterested figures like CBS founder Bill Paley, and operated by public-spirited local station managers. This, of course, is preposterous. The networks were always corporations and they often intervened in the activities of the news division when they saw a threat to their corporate interests. For example, ABC altered a
20/20
story on used car dealer–insurance company scams because some affiliates thought it would offend sponsors, Westin says. Westin assured me that he never had a case in which news management imposed its political point of view. But there was no need. “We all batted from the left side of the plate,” he says. Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” exemplified the myth of the neutral and politically disinterested television journalist. In a generally admiring biography of the avuncular Cronkite, published in mid-2012, historian Douglas Brinkley reveals the extent to which the CBS anchor was an active player in Democratic politics. In the wake of the book, NBC’s Chris Matthews—another Democratic player in those days—confirmed the open secret of pervasive bias in the “golden age” in a speech at the National Press Club.

“The big networks for years had establishment liberalism as their basis of true north,” he said. “That’s what they were—Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow—establishment liberals. Everything was liberal, basically, but it was a point of view and they laughed at Goldwater. Cronkite mocked him with the way he pronounced his name . . . [Cronkite] had a point of view and we all knew his point of view. He was a liberal the whole time he was in television.” Matthews thinks that despite this (or, perhaps, because of it) Uncle Walter was an honest reporter. But Matthews is a liberal himself. If Cronkite and the vast majority of television journalists had been conservatives, right-wingers probably would have considered them honest and fair.

Cronkite was venerated by other television journalists inside CBS News and beyond. His politics were not seen by them as an issue because they were shared. Westin told me that in his many decades in television news, he could recall only two senior journalists whose views ran counter to the prevailing ideology—Howard K. Smith, who supported the war in Vietnam, and Brit Hume, who was suspected of having a cozy relationship with President George H. W. Bush.

Matthews informed his audience that the days of reflexive and authoritative “that’s how it is” TV journalism were over. “It’s too complicated. It’s too many points of view,” he said. “Today those points of view are more transparent, they’re more acknowledged.”

Journalists have a very hard time admitting, or even detecting, their own biases. But Ailes, by providing an alternative take, has made those biases obvious. For example, after Fox News scooped the
New York Times
by a week on the story of apparent malfeasance at ACORN that led to its bipartisan defunding by Congress, the
Times
found itself in the embarrassing and revealing position of assigning a journalist to monitor what was being reported by Fox News and other conservative news organizations.

Conservatives consistently and angrily denounce the
Times
as a left-leaning paper—a charge that is usually dismissed by its senior executives and journalists. “The
Times
isn’t in anyone’s pocket,” Bill Keller told me. “We did a lot of tough reporting and published a lot of critical comment on Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, and other liberal Democrats.” This is a standard defense, but it misses the point. Of course the
New York Times
sometimes reports negatively on its favorite public figures and issues. So does Fox News. During the 2012 primary campaign, at least three of the losing Republican candidates accused the network of being in the tank for someone else. When President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, anchorman Shep Smith played the clip and said, “The president of the United States, now in the twenty-first century.” A few minutes later, he asked Bret Baier if the Republican Party would do the same or oppose it, “while sitting very firmly, without much question, on the wrong side of history. . . .” And it was Fox that broke the story about George W. Bush’s drunk-driving record a few days before the 2000 election. “Hell, that could have cost him the presidency, but we had it so we reported it,” Ailes told me.

“One of the things that make Fox different is the way Roger frames stories,” says Rick Kaplan. “Take the issue of choice. On the broadcast networks, if they do a story they will probably center it on young girls and how hard it is for them to find an abortion provider. Roger might do the same story and focus it on adoption and how young girls can arrange one. That’s the sort of conservative angle that broadcast news doesn’t usually pick up on.”

In the spring of 2012, the case against the
Times
’s liberal bias got an unexpected witness—Arthur Brisbane, the paper’s own public editor. In a column he wrote that spring, Brisbane charged the
Times
with failing to cover the Obama administration with sufficient tenacity or skepticism (he noted that the newspaper’s senior editors had even written a highly sympathetic biography of the incoming president). And in his valedictory column, at the end of August, Brisbane sharpened his indictment. He wrote:

I . . . noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that the
Times
’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz–like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds—a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When the
Times
covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism—for lack of a better term—that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of the
Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in the
Times
, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

Brisbane concluded with praise for what he called Times Nation—loyal readers of the paper online as well as in print, all across the world. But he added a cautionary note. “A just-released Pew Research Center survey found that the
Times
’s ‘believability rating’ had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’ rating. Can that be good?”

To Roger Ailes, it can be very good indeed.

•   •   •

A few weeks after Bill Keller publicly assailed “fair and balanced” as “a slogan for the suckers,” Ailes retaliated.

In a speech at Ohio University, he called the
Times
a “cesspool of bias,” and its reporters “lying scum.” He was reacting to a
Times
story written more than a year earlier by Russ Buettner about allegations that a senior News Corp executive had encouraged Judith Regan, the mistress of disgraced New York police chief Bernard Kerik, to lie to federal investigators about Kerik, who was being considered for the post of secretary of Homeland Security at the time. Kerik’s patron (and Ailes’s friend) Rudy Giuliani had presidential aspirations. Regan charged in a lawsuit that Ailes advised her to mislead investigators to protect Giuliani. Ailes recalls it differently, and his recollection is backed up by a letter from Regan affirming that he did not try to influence her to lie about Kerik. Ailes thought the article on the matter, which the
Times
ran prominently, was unfair, and he used the speech in Ohio to settle a score. He later let it be known, via a Fox spokesman, that he regretted the remarks, although he never apologized publicly. He told me that he likes and admires Jill Abramson, the
Times
’s current editor in chief, whom he has known since she was a reporter covering the 1988 presidential campaign. Abramson wasn’t the editor at the time of the offending article; Bill Keller was.

The
Times
, for all its flaws, is a great newspaper, self-critical enough to employ aggressive ombudsmen like Brisbane and willing to acknowledge specific mistakes. It is also open to occasional stories that depart from the general tone of the paper. I know this from personal experience. Several years ago I wrote a cover story in the
New York Times Magazine
on Rush Limbaugh; its lack of venom occasioned howls of protest from Times Nation, but Keller defended it as fair-minded (which it was, if I do say so myself). I never had any doubt that it would be published the way I wrote it. I agree with Keller that the
Times
has a certain kind of journalistic integrity “embedded in its DNA.” As he put it, “Good reporters see it as part of their job to second-guess assumptions, including their own.”