Roger Ailes: Off Camera (15 page)

Neville joined Fox News as a correspondent and host in 1998. She is the daughter of Art Neville, the underappreciated member of the Neville Brothers, who is also a founder of the Meters. Neville majored in journalism at the University of Texas, became the first black on-air reporter at KVUE-TV in Austin, and did a nationally syndicated TV show before coming to Fox.

Soon after arriving, Neville followed family tradition and fell in love with a drummer. They moved to L.A. In 2002, she got an offer to join CNN as the host of her own program,
Talk Back Live with Arthel Neville
and as weekend coanchor with Anderson Cooper. Before taking the job, she called Ailes.

“I did it out of respect,” she says.

Ailes told her to go ahead.

In 2010, Neville returned with her husband to New York. “When I called Roger about coming back to the network, the first thing he said was, ‘You still married to that drummer?’” He was letting her know he remembered why she had left, and that he had given her his blessing. She hadn’t been disloyal and she was still welcome. “I feel very special about that,” she says.

Ailes has a knack for making his employees feel like friends, and his friends feel special. “Every time I meet with Roger he asks if I am all right and what do I need?” says Shep Smith. “When the meeting is over he says, ‘I love you.’ Roger is like a second dad. He’s good to me. He changed my life. I wouldn’t leave Roger any more than I would leave my brother. Roger doesn’t just teach you how to be a better broadcaster; he teaches you how to be a better man.”

Smith owes his career and his success to Ailes. A lot of people do.

Bob Beckel is a quintessential old-school political consultant, the kind of guy who worked hard during the day to make his candidates winners and harder at night, in the bars and clubs of America, to make himself a legend. A former football player and boxer, he could be a nasty drunk and he got into his share of brawls. He also developed a cocaine habit that was bigger than he was. The pinnacle of his career was managing Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign; he borrowed “Where’s the beef?” from a Wendy’s ad and turned it into a Mondale slogan. But managing the Democratic catastrophe of 1984 wasn’t really much of a credential. Beckel, who is funny and brash, was a better television performer than a political operator; he was scooped up as a talking head by various shows and caught on as a full-time commentator at CNN.

In 2002, Beckel was caught up in an extortion attempt by a prostitute. He says that he wasn’t involved with her, and he had been part of a police sting. In any case, he gave her a check with his signature on it, a surpassingly naïve thing for a celebrity to do, even as a favor to the cops. The incident made headlines and CNN dropped him. “I went from making $750,000 a year to working at the Government Printing Office for thirteen bucks an hour, that’s how screwed I was,” he says.

Ailes saved him with a job offer.

“Roger and I go back,” says Beckel. “We did the first
Politically Incorrect
with Bill Maher, on Comedy Central. We hit it off and stayed in touch. In the consulting business you make friends across the lines.”

In 2004, Fox invited Beckel to come on and do a guest spot. “I didn’t have a contract with CNN or anybody else, so I did it,” he says. Ailes turned it into a one-year contract, and he’s kept Beckel there ever since. In 2008, the gig became a full-time job, doing commentary on the Hannity show and, more recently, as the lone liberal member of the panel on
The Five
. “Roger cast that show as an ensemble—a femme fatale, a brainy woman, a leading man, a comedian, and a Falstaff. That’s me. Falstaff.”

Working at Fox was a difficult social adjustment. “You have to go pretty far to the left to be farther than I am,” says Beckel. “I got shit from all my liberal friends. At one point, some of them actually staged an intervention.”

It didn’t snap him out of it. Beckel stayed at Fox, but he continued to be active in the Democratic Party. One night he was sitting in the bar of the Capital Hilton Hotel when two young men, delegates to the Young Democrats convention, came over and began berating him. “Roger Ailes is worse than fucking Hitler,” one of them said.

“I lost it and put them both on the floor,” says Beckel. “I was embarrassed about this. Shit, I did it sober.”

The story got around Washington and made it to New York. Ailes sent Beckel a giant gift basket with a note: “Thank you for being loyal.” When Ailes saw Beckel at Fox, he took him aside and gave him some advice handed down from Bob Ailes: “When you get into a fight, always go for the thumbs.”

It’s a good thing for Beckel that he earned Ailes’s loyalty, because he has sometimes needed it. “When the show first started, I used the word ‘bullshit’ on the air four or five times. Roger took me aside and said, ‘If you do that again, I’ll put a five-second delay on the show.’ I haven’t done it again.” What he did do, on the Hannity show, was tell a fellow panelist that she didn’t “know what the fuck” she was talking about in a discussion about the efficacy of Head Start. Beckel said he didn’t realize that he was on the air at the time. Another time, referring to commentator Roland Martin’s suspension by CNN, he said, “The black dude got suspended at CNN for saying something on a tweeter, Twitter, twats, twits . . . sorry.” Not many people would get away with saying “bullshit,” “fuck,” and “twat” on a family network and keep their jobs, but Ailes protected him. Not only that, he saved his life. At a festive lunch Ailes hosted to celebrate the success of
The Five
, Beckel got a shrimp stuck in his throat and began turning blue. Ailes jumped up and pounded him on the back until he could breathe again. “All those years in the bars. I got shot at, stabbed, been in two car wrecks, and Roger saved me from choking on a fucking shrimp.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Ailes says. “It’s just human. If it is a pattern, or something done intentionally, that’s different. But you don’t fire anybody over a mistake.” In 2009, on a Mediterranean cruise, Bill Sammon regaled his conservative audience with a tale of inside news making. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had famously told ‘Joe the Plumber,’ an Ohio blue-collar voter, that there was nothing wrong with spreading the wealth around. “I have to admit that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched,” Sammon boasted. Fox critics learned about the speech and castigated Sammon for this obvious misuse of his position. There were rumblings in the Fox Washington bureau that Sammon should be replaced as bureau chief. Ailes reprimanded Sammon but he also let it be known that he didn’t consider it a firing offense. (Ailes himself made headlines, in 2012, when he said that comic Jon Stewart had once called himself a “socialist” in a barroom conversation. Ailes was derided by Stewart and others for what they portrayed as an exercise in right-wing witch hunting. Ailes, however, got the last laugh when a tape of Stewart describing himself to Larry King as “a socialist or an independent” turned up on the Internet.) Ailes watches out for his friends, but there are a lot of people out there who have his back, too. Some Friends of Roger are ideological fellow travelers or longtime employees. Others come from far outside what the public imagines his circle to be. People like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for example.

Roger and Rachel met at the White House Christmas party in 2009. Maddow was standing alone next to the tree when she saw Ailes break loose from a group of guests and walk in her direction. Maddow is the most provocative and successful cable host outside of Fox, but at that time she had been on the air for less than two years and she was still feeling her way. She also viewed Roger Ailes with considerable trepidation. But he introduced himself with an unanticipated compliment: “You’re not good yet but you have the talent to be good,” he said.

Maddow was intrigued. They struck up a conversation about television production. To her surprise, she found Ailes charming and friendly. The next day the
Huffington Post
ran a picture of the encounter, and Maddow sent Ailes a note. “I didn’t want him to think that I agreed with the
Huffington Post
’s implication that this was a scandal,” she says. Ailes sent a note back, assuring her that he had thought no such thing. It was the start of an off-the-record handwritten correspondence between them, mostly on the art of cable news. They didn’t try to change each other’s politics. “I think Roger’s vision is wrong, but he’s the most important Republican in the country,” she says. “The party is like an old Ford Pinto, a hunk of junk, into which he has installed a jet engine.”

“Rachel is good and she will get even better when she discovers that there are people on earth who don’t share every one of her beliefs,” says Ailes.

In March 2012, Maddow published her first book,
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.
The jacket featured predictable blurbs by Frank Rich, Glenn Greenwald, and other progressives—and one from Roger Ailes: “
Drift
never makes the case that war might be necessary. America would be weakened dramatically if we had underreacted to 9/11. However, Rachel Maddow makes valid arguments that our country has been drifting toward questionable wars, draining our resources, without sufficient input and time. People who like Rachel will love the book. People who don’t will get angry, but aggressive debate is good for America.
Drift
is a book worth reading.”

The endorsement was heartfelt. “I don’t reject a good idea just because it belongs to a liberal,” he says. “Conservatives sometimes underestimate the value of diplomacy. And we need to discuss and seriously vet wars like Vietnam or Libya before plunging in. It’s a point worth considering.”

Ailes enjoyed the surprise he knew his endorsement of Maddow’s book would generate. He also appreciated the opportunity to demonstrate his open-mindedness. He realized that praising Maddow would cause suspicion at MSNBC that he was planning to steal their brightest star. “I don’t want to recruit her but they’ll think I do,” he told me with a grin. “Hell, they’re paranoid over there.” Maddow’s book went to number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list, and although Ailes didn’t put it there, the publicity surrounding his blurb helped publicize her book. Everybody came out ahead. Once again, Ailes had made the gift of friendship work for him.

Ailes had another surprise up his sleeve. Shortly after he endorsed Maddow’s book, he announced that he had hired a new commentator: Santita Jackson, a Chicago radio talk show host who had recently lost her job. She was looking for a new gig, which her father happened to mention to Roger Ailes. Her father is Jesse Jackson.

“My father and Roger have known and respected one another for forty years,” she told me. “My whole family is very supportive of my coming to Fox. Roger is a very authentic man, and he takes me as I am. It is an opportunity for both of us to broaden the conversation.”

Quite a few bloggers and pundits on the right as well as in the African American community were disconcerted by the fact that Ailes hired Santita Jackson. Few people realized that Jesse Jackson, of all people, is a friend of “Brother Roger.” Fewer know that Santita Jackson is one of Michelle Obama’s closest friends: Jackson is a godmother to Malia Obama. Having her on board at Fox, in an election year, gives Ailes an interesting channel to the White House. It makes Fox more difficult to assault as a bastion of racism. It means that one of the nation’s premier civil rights leaders owes him. And, as an extra bonus, it is sure to cause a little heartburn for Jackson’s chief rival, Al Sharpton. After all, Sharpton has daughters, too.

MINORITY REPORT

Black History Month is celebrated by every television network, and Fox News is not an exception. Ailes commissioned a series of human-interest stories for the occasion, and he was here, in the conference room next to his office, to preview it. On hand were half a dozen members of the production team that put it together, all of them black or Hispanic.

The stories they screened were well done and unexceptional—a segment about a black opera singer who has overcome obstacles to achieve stardom, a piece about a polo team from inner-city Philadelphia, the profile of an adventurer/cancer patient who had ventured where no African American adventurer/cancer patient had traveled before. Ailes was especially interested in an interview with David Dinkins at Gracie Mansion, which Dinkins once occupied as New York City’s first (and only) black mayor. These days Dinkins is a professor in the practice of public affairs at Columbia University. “Dave is a friend of mine,” Ailes told the group. “I go up to Columbia every fall and teach his class. I make sure that the kids up there get a balanced education at least once a year.” This was greeted with mild laughter. Ailes punctuates his meetings with stream-of-consciousness banter and throwaway lines. When we first entered the room he introduced me as someone writing a book about him and added, “A report by Zev will be sent to your parents.”

“I was up in Harlem at a church for Martin Luther King Day,” he told the group. “There was this cute eighty-five-year-old lady sitting next to me, and when they sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ she held my hand.” I expected him to say that it had been a moving moment of racial harmony. What he said was, “Overcome, my ass. I think she was trying to hit on me.” There were more titters.

Racial identity politics are not Ailes’s “thing.” He belongs to a generation that was raised in a time and place where forward-thinking people accepted MLK’s famous exhortation to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, as the gold standard for racial aspiration. In Ailes’s America, everyone would share Middle American, middle-class values and blend into a single national culture. He sees the celebration of racial differentness as balkanizing. “Every month is something else,” he said. “I’m waiting for Lithuanian Midget Month. You know what? One of my relatives actually
was
a Lithuanian midget.” This got a real laugh. Evidently it was the first time he had tried it out. “You are either American or you aren’t,” Ailes told me later. “Being American, living here is the only entitlement you need.”

The next order of business was a report on the Ailes Apprentice Program, which is one of his proudest achievements. Every year, half a dozen minority kids are selected and given yearlong paid internships in an aspect of television news. Ailes says that graduates are guaranteed a job. So far, there are more than thirty former apprentices employed at Fox News in some area of television journalism. Ailes started the program as his version of private-sector affirmative action. “I noticed that the kids who got internships here were mostly white kids with contacts,” he told me.

“Somebody knows somebody here, gets the kid in, and then helps find him a mentor. Minority kids didn’t have any opportunities like that, so I decided
I’d
be their contact.”

Ailes says that no other network has a similar program. Neither do the other divisions of News Corp. “There are no minorities in our film division, and they’re a bunch of liberals. I don’t wear pins or ribbons but I do give out jobs.”

Sometimes these are dispensed on a whim. A few years ago, Ailes noticed that the cleaning woman in his office was wearing a lot of makeup. He asked if she was going to a social event after work. She admitted that she had been in a makeup room and hadn’t been able to resist giving herself the full treatment.

Ailes was intrigued. She told him she was a single mother from North Africa whose dream from childhood was to be a beautician. He decided a grand gesture was called for, and sent her, at the network’s expense, to a prestigious cosmetology school, and then enrolled her as one of the first Ailes apprentices. Ailes didn’t want me to think that this was mere altruism. There was something in it for him, too. “I had seen her around the office and noticed she was always in a good mood,” he told me. “That’s critical for a makeup artist. They’re the last ones the talent encounters before going on the air. If they are negative people, they can bring down the show.”

Eric Deggans is the head of the media monitoring committee for the National Association of Black Journalists. His job is to chart how black journalists are faring on television news networks, and he is not a fan of Fox. He says he has never heard of the Ailes Apprentice Program.

“He doesn’t know because he doesn’t want to know,” says Ailes. “After all, it can’t be true if I’m the one who’s doing it.”

Deggans says that Fox News reflects a “white gaze,” which is undoubtedly true. It is also true for every other mainstream news organization. In 2000, Av Westin noted the problem in
Best Practices for Television Journalists: A Handbook for Reporters, Producers, Videographers, News Directors and Other Broadcast Professionals on How to Be Fair to the Public
, an authoritative guide published under the auspices of the Freedom Forum. Chapter 3 is titled “Bias,” and it sets forth the situation across the spectrum of TV news. “The conventional wisdom among most assignment editors is that white viewers will tune out if blacks or Latinos are featured. . . . There is no question that a lack of racial sensitivity affects new judgment. It is a problem that goes to the heart of fair and balanced presentation of the news on television.” The situation has changed since then. It has gotten worse, on TV and in print. According to a survey done by the American Society of News Editors, the number of minority journalists
declined
by 31.5 percent between 2001 and 2010, a finding Kathy Times, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, called “horrifying.”

A Nielsen survey taken in 2010 reveals that blacks made up only 1.3 percent of the Fox audience (compared to 20 percent for both CNN and MSNBC). An overwhelming percentage of African Americans are Democrats and supporters of Barack Obama, and many tend to see Fox as the opposition. They aren’t wrong, either. But in comparison with the industry standard, Ailes’s minority employment record is pretty good. His very first hire at Fox was Lauren Green, now the network’s religion correspondent. Wendell Goler is senior White House and foreign affairs correspondent. Brian Jones is number two at the Fox Business channel. Harris Faulkner, Arthel Neville, and Charles Payne are all anchors or coanchors. There are others, as well, including a number of contributors and paid analysts.

To many African American journalists, simply going to work at Fox News makes a black journalist inauthentic and, in some sense, a collaborator with the enemy. “Fox may have black people on the air, but that doesn’t create diversity,” insists Eric Deggans. Not surprisingly, this attitude irritates black journalists who work there. “I got a lot of passionate how-could-you’s when I started at Fox,” says Arthel Neville. “But I never encountered racism there. Believe it or not, the only incident I had with racial undertones was at CNN, when an executive there said she wouldn’t hire a woman named Lakisha because she’d probably have an attitude. Nothing like that has ever happened to me or anyone else, as far as I know, at Fox News.” Her sole complaint about Ailes is that he hasn’t provided a hairstylist who knows how to deal with her hair. “The service at the network is basically for white women,” she says. “I have to pay a hairdresser to do special chemical treatments.”

The idea that black reporters and commentators at Fox are house Negroes on the Ailes plantation is infuriating to Jehmu Greene. She first met Ailes at Harvard University in 2005, where they were both participants in a panel discussion about the junction of pop culture and politics. Greene was there as the past president of Rock the Vote, the MTV initiative to register young voters (she subsequently served as president of the Women’s Media Center, a nonprofit founded by Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, and as a national director of the Democratic Party’s Project Vote, a group that worked closely with other groups, including ACORN, to build the Obama majority). She recalls the Harvard event, which was moderated by Tom Brokaw, as “very white-centric. I was the only person of color on the panel, and the only woman on the panel. I had come to talk about Rock the Vote, but nobody cared about it or what I had to say about it—except for Roger.” She was surprised by their instant rapport. “I found him very authentic. In that world you don’t meet a lot of authentic people. It felt good that night to know there was one person in the room who recognized my value.”

As he did with Rachel Maddow, Ailes struck up an improbable friendship with Jehmu Greene. The Women’s Media Center was trying to train young feminist activists in getting their message out, and Ailes volunteered to help. “Roger invited me to bring in a cadre of progressive women for a studio training session at Fox,” she says. “Each one left that day with a professional reel. And to be clear, these were women who disagreed with him on 101 percent of the issues.”

Greene had done a lot of talking head stints on MSNBC and CNN, but she was never offered a job. In 2010, Ailes hired her as a full-time analyst. Most important, she says, she is allowed to be herself.

“I’m a Democrat through and through. I have no desire to preach to the choir. At Fox I get a chance to talk to the movable middle.”

It bothers Greene that her fellow progressives, white as well as black, regard Ailes as a bigot. “The left has a hard time coping with Roger’s success,” she told me. “They want cartoon characters. I know plenty of progressives who talk a good game on diversity, but it isn’t reflected at all in how they operate. Roger walks the talk. America is very far from being a postracial society. I know that. But Fox News is postracial. This is the first time I’ve worked in an environment where I haven’t felt barriers of race and gender.”

It is easy to dismiss Greene, Neville, Juan Williams, and other black Ailes fans as self-interested. They are, after all, on his payroll. But it is hard to argue that they haven’t been allowed to express themselves on the network. In a Republican candidate debate in South Carolina, Williams took on Newt Gingrich’s statement that blacks should demand “jobs, not food stamps” and his suggestion that black kids bolster their weak work ethic by doing part-time janitorial work, for pay, at school. “Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” asked Williams, who was booed by the mostly white, conservative crowd. This is Fox’s core viewership and there were a lot of complaints, but Ailes loved the way Williams had gone after Gingrich and the publicity it engendered. Here was proof on a national stage that Fox would go after Republicans aggressively; and besides, Ailes was getting sick of Newt’s bombastic campaign.

In April 2012, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts, got busted by her opponent, Scott Brown, for having claimed to be a Native American. Her employer, Harvard, had listed her as a woman of color (in fact, the only woman of color) on the faculty of the law school. The story turned out to be not just bogus but ridiculous. Warren said she had 1/32 Cherokee blood, which, even if true, wouldn’t have qualified her for Cherokee tribal registration. She couldn’t even prove the 1/32nd claim. Worse, she tried by pointing out that her aunt had once said of Warren’s grandfather that he had “high cheekbones, like all Indians do.”

The scandal was an Ailes trifecta. It underscored the ludicrous and self-serving nature of racial preferences based on “blood.” It made Harvard Law School look gullible (while unintentionally emphasizing how few women of color actually teach there). And it could play a role in keeping the former Ted Kennedy seat in the Senate in Republican hands.

Fox took up the story with vigor. In a panel discussion with Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, Jehmu Greene came to Warren’s defense. “You see Scott Brown really questioning her qualifications because he has to appeal to white, working-class voters who feel marginalized because of affirmative action,” said Greene. “This smells real stank to women who do not like being called on their qualifications.” She added that Tucker Carlson, a conservative contributor, was the sort of person this would appeal to—a “bow-tying white boy.” At the end of the segment, Kelly apologized to the audience for a violation of the network’s standards. Conservative cyberspace exploded with demands that Greene be banished for her racist remark. Typical was a column by Mychal Massie in WorldNetDaily. “Think of the level of betrayal Greene exhibited. She has been a Fox News contributor for a long time, and during all of that time, as she smugly sat arguing her leftist point of view, she secretly looked upon Carlson and every other white person with prejudice . . . if Fox News has any integrity, it should immediately and without apology fire Jehmu Greene.”

Ailes didn’t fire Jehmu Greene. On the contrary, he had every reason to be pleased with her. Mediaite, a website headed by former MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams, wrote that “perhaps Fox isn’t as beholden to its decidedly right-leaning audience as many believe . . . the lack of punishment may also show that Fox has no interest in being the ‘PC Police.’” Roger Ailes couldn’t have made these points any better.

•   •   •

In
You Are the Message
, Roger Ailes had offered this advice:

A woman who acts like a man in the workplace is as silly as a man who acts like a woman in the workplace. Many women have felt, with some justification, that if they didn’t toughen up and act macho, and be one of the boys, they would never get along. Women: Stay true to your identity. Whatever you do keep in mind that, as in all communications, your tone of voice, the expression in your eyes, the attitudes conveyed by your face and body will determine how others interpret your words. And above all keep your sense of humor and your sense of perspective.