Roger Ailes: Off Camera (13 page)

“Social Security and Medicare are more or less grandfathered in,” he says, but he would get rid of the Affordable Care Act and slash new federal entitlement budgets. “Teaching people dependency is a sin,” he told me. There is only one entitlement Americans need—the opportunity to live in this country.

Under President Ailes, taxes would fall and budgets would be slashed. “You can’t get anywhere bargaining over spending programs with the Democrats,” he says. “Whatever you offer, it isn’t enough. Say three billion and they demand nine. When you say no, we don’t have the money, they portray themselves as generous and us as stingy. That’s a trap we shouldn’t fall into.”

Unions, which Ailes considers job killers, would not have a friend in the White House. Neither would what he calls “extreme” environmentalists. “I want clean water and clean air and conservation,” he says, “but that’s not what extreme environmentalists are all about. For them it is a religion. They believe in trees and animals, not God.”

When it comes to foreign policy, Ailes is a hawk who believes in supporting friends all the way and spending whatever is needed to preserve American military supremacy. “Strength breeds peace,” he says. “Nobody walks into a bar and picks a fight with the toughest-looking guy in the place,” he told me. At the same time, he thinks his party has a tendency to underestimate the value of diplomacy. “There are deals that can be made, and should. It was a mistake to use the phrase ‘for us or against us.’ Of course, you maintain your core policy principles. But within each one of these is a broad range of practical conservative solutions. I’d hesitate to say this at a conservative gathering, but I think conservatives are sometimes too rigid.”

As an example of an exercise in mutual self-interest, he offers Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to help the United States bring down the Assad regime in Syria. “Putin is angry. He thinks the United States doesn’t take him seriously or treat Russia as a major player. Okay, fine, that’s how he feels. If I were president, I’d get in a room with him and say, ‘Look at the slaughter going on in Syria. You can stop it. Do it, and I’ll see to it that you get
all
the credit. I’ll tell the world it was you who saved the innocent children of Syria from slaughter. You’ll be an international hero. You’ll go down in history.’ Hell, Putin would go to bed thinking, ‘That’s not a bad offer.’ There will still be plenty of other issues I’d have with Russia. But instead of looking for one huge deal that settles everything, you take a piece of the problem and solve it. Give an incentive for good behavior. Show the other guy his self-interest. Everybody has an ego. Everybody needs dignity. And what does it cost? You get what you want and you give up nothing.”

Give-and-take is a principle Ailes lives by, a politician’s way of looking at the world. There is no chance that he will ever put it into practice in the White House. But it is an insight into how he conducts his business in the only house that really matters to him, the House of Ailes.

THE BOSS

At precisely two thirty in the afternoon, Roger Ailes walked down the hall from his office to the meeting room. Eight men—seven of them white—and one woman, all middle-aged and dressed in business attire, were gathered around the polished table. The room is functional, not fancy. The rear wall holds a battery of television screens silently showing all the cable news channels. The only art is a poster with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson that Ailes likes: “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” Sometimes visiting delegations meet with Ailes in this room; he serves them sandwiches and soft drinks and jokes about his girth. But there were no refreshments at this meeting. Ailes loosened his tie, draped his jacket over the back of the chair, and eased himself into what is, literally, the seat of power at Fox News. It is from here that Ailes exercises his influence, and the executives gathered at the table are what he sometimes calls, with only the faintest hint of irony, his “loyal lieutenants.”

The two-thirty meeting is one of two that take place every day. The first is at 8:00 a.m., an hour when Ailes is sometimes taking his son to school. On those mornings he is present via speakerphone. Zac sometimes pipes up with a question or story suggestion, which delights Ailes. “He’ll probably be a vice president by the time he’s twenty-one,” Geraldo Rivera once told me.

Like his prime-time talent, Ailes’s executive lineup doesn’t change much. He prizes loyalty and competence, and once he finds them he holds on. Bill Shine, the man who some think will be Ailes’s eventual successor, has been at Fox since the beginning, working first as the producer for
Hannity & Colmes
and now in his current post as senior vice president for programming. Shine, like Hannity, is a Long Island kid from a lower-middle-class background. He attended a SUNY college and broke into television at WLIG-TV, a New York–area CBS affiliate. It was Hannity who brought him to Fox.

Shine has the job of managing the vast egos of some of the Fox stars, as well as riding herd over about a hundred paid commentators. He is plainspoken and sharp-witted: When Ailes introduced me to the group as a writer working on a book about Fox News, he winced theatrically and said, “Write this down. My name is John Moody.”

I sat next to Michael Clemente, a large, open-faced, slightly unkempt man who, I noticed, refrained from laughing along with the others. In 2009, Clemente replaced Moody as vice president in charge of news as a part of Ailes’s well-publicized repositioning toward the center. Moody was moved to a job as head of the experimental News Corp in-house wire service. Clemente discontinued the controversial daily memo, but he sees nothing wrong with it. “I worked at ABC and CNN and I have friends at the other networks, and they all have variations on a memo. What company doesn’t?” Clemente holds his own meeting at seven thirty each morning, and then monitors the stories in progress during the day.

Ailes nodded to Clemente, who gave a very quick rundown of the day’s news and where things stood. He began with the death of right-wing media provocateur Andrew Breitbart, whose scoops had recently brought down Congressman Anthony Weiner and helped precipitate the defunding of ACORN. Just a couple of weeks earlier, at the conservative CPAC convention in Washington, he had promised to display hidden tapes from Obama’s Harvard years with allegedly damning material. The AP was reporting that Breitbart had keeled over around midnight while walking the dog near his home in Los Angeles.

“How old was he?” asked Ailes.

“Forty-three,” said Clemente.

“They’re going to do an autopsy?”

Clemente said he didn’t know.

“When somebody threatens to use tapes like that, it can cause a lot of stress,” said Ailes. “Talk to his family. And find out where the tapes are and what’s on them.” (The tapes emerged a few days later; they were innocuous, Obama introducing a left-wing Harvard law professor, Derrick Bell, to a student demonstration.) “What’s next?”

“Mixed economic news from General Motors and Ford today,” Clemente said.

Ailes turned to Brian Jones, head of news operations for Fox Business Network. “How are those little electric cars doing?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question—everyone knew they were selling poorly.

“Have we done any business stories on building new cars in the North and the South?” asked Ailes.

Jones said no, not lately.

“Everyplace that has unions is doing lousy; the places where there are no unions are doing fine,” Ailes said. “Maybe somebody should go out to Trumbull County and ask, Would you rather have a union and be out of a job or vice versa?”

Clemente said, “Not much else. There was an Internet outage at the Pentagon today.”

“What was that all about?” asked Ailes.

There were shrugs around the table. Computers, cyberspace, these things happen. . . .

“How long did it last?”

“About half an hour,” said Clemente. “From what I understand, they got it fixed.”

“Wait a minute,” said Ailes. “There has to be an explanation. Get our Pentagon people on this. I want to know what caused this. Where in the Pentagon, what systems were affected, what part? Could something like this happen when incoming missiles were on the way? Did the critical systems go down?”

Clemente said he would get on it.

Back in his office after the meeting, Ailes shook his head over the equanimity with which the Pentagon outage had been accepted. “If a screen goes dark at Fox for half a minute I have the engineers up here explaining what the hell happened. I want to know what show of ours was on at the time, what shows were on the other networks. And that’s television, not goddamn national security.” Ailes is sometimes accused by his critics of not being a journalist, but he has a keen sense of skulduggery, honed by his years in politics. “I didn’t come out of news, I came out of life,” he says. “People will always come to rest if you let them. My job is to keep asking questions.”

The meeting shifted to Bill Shine and the subject of candidates appearing during primary season. The night before, Mitt Romney had appeared on
The O’Reilly Factor
. Ailes said, “I thought Bill was a little overboard fair to Romney.”

“Bill explained to him what he should be doing,” said Shine drily.

There were chuckles around the table. Ailes said, “Just be sure that he’s fair with Santorum tonight.” Shine made a note. A few weeks later, with the primaries going Romney’s way, Senator Santorum accused Fox—where he had formerly been employed as a commentator—of being in the tank for Romney. Ailes thought that was silly. “I don’t have a favorite,” he told me later. “I know them all.” During primary season, most of the Republican candidates, including Romney, paid courtesy calls on Ailes. Ailes also did his own scouting. He and Rush Limbaugh invited Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey to dinner in Garrison to explore his political plans. Christie is a candidate cut from the Ailes mold—blunt, funny, knowing, dedicated to small government and practical solutions—and although Ailes promised him nothing, he liked Christie. Limbaugh did, too. But in the end, the governor didn’t run.

The voice of Bill Sammon, the Washington, DC, managing editor, came from the speakerphone on the table. “We’ve got an interview with some guys from the first U.S. commando unit, in World War II—they were the basis for Tarantino’s
Inglourious Basterds,
” he said.

“Wasn’t that the story of the Richard Burton movie,
Devil’s Brigade
?” Ailes asked.

Sammon, who is a generation younger than his boss, said he had never heard of
The Devil’s Brigade.
(Sammon was wise not to yes-man his boss’s memory; Ailes was wrong.
The Devil’s Brigade
starred William Holden.)

Ailes told the group that he had received a note from Barbara Walters asking if Sarah Palin, now a Fox contributor, could appear as a guest on
The View
. This was a sore point. Walters is an old friend, but Palin had embarrassed Fox News by announcing her decision not to run for president on a rival radio talk show. In the end, Ailes didn’t have to decide. Palin, who felt her family had been slandered on the program, told ABC that she had no intention of appearing on the show.

Kevin Magee, the Fox Business News executive vice president and former vice president in charge of radio, raised his hand. Magee has been with Fox for ten years. Before that, he was a producer at CNBC and ABC. “CNN radio is shutting down,” he said.

“CNN radio is shutting down?” Ailes repeated. Shep Smith once told me that the only thing more important to Ailes than beating CNN is CNN losing to Fox: “I wouldn’t say he wants everyone over there dead, but it’s close.”

Cheered by the good news, Ailes raised the subject of Syria. Marie Colvin, an American reporter for the British
Sunday Times,
had just been killed by a bomb while covering the siege of Homs, and he wanted updates on the situation there. “Jesse Jackson called me today,” he said. “He wants to go to Moscow and protest the Russian government supporting Assad. I told him that we’d look into the possibility of coverage. We have to open a new front in Syria or a shitload more people will die. Assad’s murdering journalists and silencing them. It’s troubling when a country goes silent. Somebody talk to Walid Phares [a Fox Middle East commentator] and let’s find out what the terrorists are up to over
here
these days. Somebody get in touch with Ray Kelly about it.” Kelly is the New York City police commissioner. He is also the father of Greg Kelly, an anchorman at the Fox affiliate in New York, which is supervised, like all the affiliates, by Ailes.

The two-thirty meetings are a function of the news of the day. Ailes throws out ideas, but he doesn’t usually insist. No Fox News crew visited Trumbull County to find anti-union autoworkers. He wanted to make a general point, not order a specific story. But that happens, too, usually via
Fox & Friends
or
The Five
.

In mid-March, Clemente had come in with a column that had been published that day by David Ignatius in the
Washington Post
. Ignatius reported having seen Al Qaeda documents, including a message from Adam Gadahn, the Al Qaeda media adviser to Osama Bin Laden, on how best to disseminate a video celebrating the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Clemente read aloud:
“It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox, let her die in her anger.”

“That’s great,” said Ailes.

“There’s more,” said Clemente.
“From a professional point of view, they are all on one level—except Fox News channel, which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks objectivity, too.”

“We should put this up on a billboard in Times Square,” said Ailes. Ailes is famous for putting up billboards, but there was no need.

A couple of hours later on
The Five
, Greg Gutfeld, one of Ailes’s favorite comedians and a rising star at the network, read the memo and added that it “sounds like it was written by Media Matters.”

Ailes had come from a big lunch and he had walked in yawning, but the Gadahn memo picked him up. “What else do we have?” he asked. Clemente said that the government’s numbers on inflation had just come out. Many conservatives suspect that the Obama administration has kept the index artificially low. “We should figure out the actual costs for a middle-class family,” Ailes said. “My God, it costs hundreds of dollars a month just to feed a family. Hell, a kid can go through a box of cereal in no time. You know what a box of cereal costs?” He didn’t wait for an answer. I guessed that he probably knows. He once told me that his mind automatically registers small details. “I pass a Lowe’s on the way home,” he said. “I look at the parking lot and notice how many cars are there compared to how many there were last time. It tells me how the local economy is doing.”

Brian Jones made a note to look into it. Clemente added another tidbit. “George Clooney and his father were arrested protesting outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington,” he said.

“The
dad
!” said Ailes. “That’s sick.”

Bill Sammon was on the speakerphone again. He mentioned the developing case of parents who filed a wrongful birth suit against a physician who failed to alert them to the fact that their child would be born with Down syndrome. “Wonder how the kid will feel when he grows up and finds out about it,” Sammon said. Heads nodded in agreement. Abortion is one of the subjects that Ailes feels strongly about, and he doesn’t keep his view to himself. Around that time, Ailes was interviewed by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons on his podcast. Simmons asked why Hispanics seem to be overtaking African Americans as the most influential ethnic group of color. Ailes snapped that it is because so many African American mothers abort their babies.

This afternoon Ailes wasn’t in the mood for a discussion of moral philosophy. The night before, he had watched a pop culture quiz on
The Factor
that pitted Steve Doocy against Brian Kilmeade, his cohost on
Fox & Friends
. “They got every single answer wrong,” Ailes said. “I don’t know what that was. Maybe it was O’Reilly trying to make them look bad. We should look into it.” I thought he might be kidding, but Shine made a note of it.

Ailes had a couple more items on his agenda. He reminded everyone that electrical work was being done in the “Brain Room,” the sexy name he has given to what is the Fox research computer center. “They say it has to be rewired,” he said darkly. “Fine. But I want the name of everyone who goes in there.” He was also concerned about the possible ill effects of Internet social media being used as reliable sources on the air.

“Tell our young producers to be careful about what we put on the screens. And round up five or six people in the building who know the most about social media, put them in a room, and ask them what they know that we don’t know. Make it an hour discussion and I want to see a report on it. Oh, and tell the young producers that the screen needs refreshing. I’d give a bonus to them for higher ratings. We have to incentivize them. Meals or something.”