Roger Ailes: Off Camera (19 page)

Finally Henry asked Ailes why he had been hired.

“I could see that you are a fair reporter,” Ailes said. “You’re earnest, and that comes across. This is a big beat and I need someone credible. The first day you go on the air for us, there’s going to be a bull’s-eye on your ass. You’re going to be a target.”

Ailes was right. At his first White House press briefing, presidential spokesman Jay Carney accused Henry of parroting Republican talking points. “He was testing me,” said Henry, and it gave Henry a chance to test Ailes. “I’ve worked at other places where if you mix it up with a White House spokesman, the network’s first instinct might be to appoint a task force to look into your behavior instead of backing you up.”

Henry’s apprehension grew when he got a message from Michael Clemente telling him to call headquarters. “I thought I might be screwed,” he says. Clemente, speaking as always for Ailes, assured Henry that Fox wouldn’t stand for Carney’s bullying. Henry was charmed. “It wasn’t the usual half-assed ‘Maybe you went too far.’ This was, ‘We stand behind our guy.’”

A few weeks later, at a press conference, the president himself threw a brushback pitch. Henry asked about assertions by Mitt Romney that Obama was weak on Iran. It was a fair question in an election year, one that invited a rebuttal by Obama. Instead, the president said, “I didn’t know you are the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.” This time, Henry took the jibe in stride. “I’m supposed to ask hard questions. If it were a Republican president, I’m sure Roger would expect me to do the same thing. Eventually New York, L.A., and Washington, DC, will start to catch on to what the rest of the country already knows: There are a lot of strong, honest reporters at Fox.”

In February 2012, Media Matters put out a book of Ailes’s horribles,
The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine
. The book itself didn’t concern Ailes much, although he saw to it that friendly websites and some Fox commentators reminded America that the coauthor, David Brock, the head of Media Matters, does not exactly have a sterling reputation for honesty, and that the organization, which was founded with the “help and support” of the obviously partisan Hillary Clinton, is a political group that enjoys a charitable tax status. What really annoyed Ailes was that Senator Harry Reid went to the launch party in Washington and praised the book publicly. “We already know that Anita Dunn and Valerie Jarrett were coordinating the Media Matters war on Fox News, and now here’s the majority leader of the Senate joining in. Two branches of government collaborating to shut down a news organization. What about the First Amendment? This is plain unconstitutional.”

Media Matters and its right-wing opposite number, Media Research Center, are not, and don’t pretend to be, objective or even open-minded analysts. They are partisan players, and their role is to find every possible way to discredit the opposition. This can be useful; there are enough mistakes in the media (and in the book-writing business) to keep armies of Washington-based nitpickers gainfully employed.

For Media Matters, Roger Ailes is one of the two Great Satans (Rush Limbaugh is the other). Every mistake or misstatement on Fox, which broadcasts 168 hours a week, is a premeditated lie. Every news story is an exercise in bias. Fox personnel are nothing but stooges in Roger Ailes’s propaganda machine. People who watch Fox News are morons, either by birth or as a result of exposure to the network.

Media Matters is constantly on the lookout for scientific-sounding support for its ideology. It thought it had found some in a study by the University of Maryland, published in 2010, that purported to find that Fox viewers were the most misinformed audience of any network. This was so exciting that David Brock led his book with it, and Media Matters disseminated the findings widely. Eventually it made its way to Jon Stewart. Stewart, in turn, appeared on Chris Wallace’s Sunday morning interview show. The invitation was a tribute to Stewart’s influence as a satirist (and, not incidentally, a refutation of the idea that Fox doesn’t allow its critics on the air). Stewart and Wallace argued back and forth about the merits of the network, and Stewart closed the deal with hard evidence. “Who are the most consistently uninformed viewers?” he asked rhetorically. “Fox News viewers, consistently, every poll.” Wallace didn’t argue. He probably didn’t know what Stewart was talking about. Neither did Stewart. PolitiFact .com, which belongs to the liberal
Tampa Bay Times
, pointed out what everyone who hadn’t bought the Media Matters hype already knew: The Maryland study did not demonstrate that Fox viewers were less or more informed than anyone else. Stewart, who suffers from an exceptional degree of intellectual honesty, publicly apologized.
*

A lot of the Media Matters oeuvre amounts to stating the obvious in terms of the scandalous. Fox reporting on the war in Iraq was more positive than that of other networks! Fox reporting on the Obama health care legislation was more negative! This doesn’t demonstrate that Fox reporting on these and other subjects is more or less correct, merely that it differs from what Media Matters regards as truth as measured by the distance between any story and Democratic Party talking points.

Roger Ailes often boasts that Fox hasn’t had to take down a story in fifteen years. Lately he has amended that: He says he means a major story, like Dan Rather’s career-ending, unsupportable allegations that George W. Bush dodged his Texas Air National Guard duty; CNN’s bogus Tailwind scandal; NBC’s rigged “exploding GM truck” affair, or that network’s subsequent firing of three employees for doctoring a 9-1-1 tape to make it sound like George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin for racist reasons (which may or may not be the case). But Fox has made plenty of mistakes. Shep Smith once announced the death of a pope a full day before the pontiff stopped breathing. On another occasion, Smith got his tongue twisted in an embarrassing way, reporting that while Jennifer Lopez considers herself a neighborhood girl at heart, her actual neighbors are “more likely to give her a curb job than a blow job . . . rather, ‘block party.’” In both cases he apologized; in the latter, Ailes thought it was funny. And during the war in Iraq, Fox hired a bogus lieutenant colonel as a military analyst. Upon closer investigation, his entire army résumé consisted of six weeks of basic training.

A more serious incident took place in the early days of the Afghanistan war. On December 6, 2001, Geraldo Rivera reported on an incident in which “our men” had been killed by friendly fire. Six days later, David Folkenflik reported in the
Baltimore Sun
that Rivera had not been at the battleground but hundreds of miles away. Rivera explained that he had confused the friendly fire incident with a similar one. Ailes, as usual, stood by his man: Fox issued a terse statement on December 26, acknowledging that its correspondent had made an “honest mistake,” since corrected. The story might have ended there, but Rivera demanded an apology from Folkenflik for questioning his honesty. Rivera grew more irate when the Center for Media and Public Affairs awarded Folkenflik a prize for investigative reporting. Rivera still insists that he was guilty of nothing more than reporting in the midst of the fog of war. Folkenflik, now a media reporter for NPR, not only rejects this explanation but has publicly chided Ailes for failing to issue an on-air retraction.

None of these errors were partisan. But that can’t be said for three on-air incidents that took place during the 2008 primary campaign. In one, E. D. Hill, host of the daytime
America’s Pulse
, wondered aloud if the greeting candidate Obama shared with his wife was actually “a terrorist fist jab.” Hill apologized the next day on the air. Within a week Fox canceled her show and her contract wasn’t renewed. She wound up as an anchor and host on CNN. Around the same time, Fox reported a story taken from a conservative website that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was circulating rumors that Obama had been educated in Islamic schools in Indonesia. The story was false, and John Moody sent out a curt note to the staff reminding them that merely appearing on a website did not qualify a story as credible. “We violated one of our cardinal policies,” Moody told me. “We went on the air without knowing what we were talking about.”

News analyst Liz Trotta made it a trifecta. Discussing a remark by Hillary Clinton about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, she said, “Now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh, Obama. Well, both if we could.” She apologized the next day for what she called a “lame attempt at humor,” adding that it was a “very colorful political season, and many of us are making mistakes and saying things that we wish that we hadn’t said.” True, but the mistakes were all insinuations that Obama was connected to terrorism, Islamic radicalism, or Al Qaeda.

There were other misfires. In 2009, Sean Hannity showed footage of a crowd at a Michele Bachmann rally against Obamacare; it turned out to be video from a much larger rally held two months earlier. Hannity apologized the next day after he was busted by Jon Stewart. A week later, Gregg Jarrett reported huge crowds at a Sarah Palin book signing, with what turned out to be video from a 2008 campaign rally. Fox again apologized for the mistake the next day.

In March 2010, Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia state director of rural development for the federal Department of Agriculture, gave a speech at a chapter of the NAACP. In it she told the story of a white farmer who had appealed to her office for help to save some land. Her first reaction, she told her audience, was unsympathetic. She recalled the persecution of her family in the Jim Crow South and felt gratified that the shoe was now on the other foot.

The speech was recorded. Andrew Breitbart got a copy of it and shopped it around. Various websites, including Fox News, picked it up, and the story caused a furor. Sherrod was contacted by her bosses in Washington and forced to resign. The head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, denounced her. Bill O’Reilly took up the case as a clear example of racial discrimination by an Obama administration official.

But, it turned out, the story Sherrod had told her audience came with a happy ending. She overcame her own prejudice, helped the white farmer, and learned a valuable lesson about fairness and tolerance. That part got left out of the video. The NAACP backtracked, exonerating Sherrod and condemning the deception. President Obama personally called Sherrod and let her know he was sorry for the way the Department of Agriculture had responded. And, on
The Factor
, Bill O’Reilly made his own mea culpa. “I owe Ms. Sherrod an apology for not doing my homework, for not putting her remarks into the proper context,” he said.

“The Shirley Sherrod thing was a mistake,” says Michael Clemente. “We went to air with it too early and it wasn’t checked properly. My job is to make sure that something like that never happens again.”

•   •   •

In the fall of 2011, Roger Ailes told journalist Howard Kurtz that he was turning down the partisan heat at the network. Ailes didn’t say so, but he had already decided that, in the interest of a more moderate tone, he would have to get rid of Glenn Beck.

Beck came to Fox from CNN in 2009, and turned five o’clock—a perennially weak hour on the Fox schedule—into a bonanza. Beck contained multitudes—nerdy professor, slapstick comic, born-again preacher, shock jock, weepy recovering addict, man of destiny—and they all fought for airtime with chaotic results. Some of his colleagues at Fox considered him insane. But it was hard to argue with success. Beck was the biggest thing on the air at five o’clock, and five leads into the six o’clock news and then into prime time. For a while, he was worth the aggravation.

Beck had a way of settling on odd subjects, such as the villainy of Woodrow Wilson, and riding them for days. He compared victims of a mass murder at a camp near Oslo, run by the Workers’ Youth League, to the Hitler Youth. He did a three-part series on George Soros, who, as a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy in occupied Hungary, had helped a Nazi seize Jewish property to protect his own life. Beck’s source was Mr. Soros himself, who told the story in a
60 Minutes
interview with Steve Kroft, adding that he felt no guilt about it and that if he hadn’t done it, someone else would. The ADL’s Abe Foxman issued a statement denouncing Beck’s description as inappropriate and offensive. “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say—inaccurately—that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific.” There was jubilation on the left—not usually a Foxman fan club—for this condemnation, but Beck responded by displaying a letter he had only recently received from Foxman thanking him for being “a friend of the Jewish people and a friend of Israel.” Foxman subsequently explained that Beck was no anti-Semite, he was simply not aware of the nuances and sensitivities at play.

The following Holocaust Remembrance Day, a group of four hundred rabbis published an open letter in the
Wall Street Journal
asking its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, to sanction Ailes and Beck for the use of the word “Nazi” and other Holocaust imagery. Ailes dismissed them as a bunch of political rabbis—a not unreasonable characterization of the organizers of the letter, the left-wing Jewish Funds for Justice.

“Roger’s politics are less crazy than everybody thinks they are,” says Rick Kaplan. “When something goes off, he deals with it. That’s why he replaced the five o’clock show.”

The final straw was the mass rally Beck staged at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Beck was already despised by many blacks for speculating that Obama hated white people. Convening a mass gathering at the site of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and featuring King’s niece, the Reverend Alveda King, delivering a conservative “I have a dream” message of her own—was infuriating to many viewers. Ailes didn’t like it much, either. When Al Sharpton called him to complain, Sharpton was surprised to hear Ailes say he would “take care” of it.

Ailes’s method was patience and diplomacy. “To be fair, Glenn showed signs of wanting to leave,” he said. “He felt restricted here. Sometimes he seemed too busy to concentrate on the show. And his emulating Martin Luther King was over the top.”