Roger Ailes: Off Camera (9 page)

Hume and Ailes first met during the 1988 presidential campaign, which Hume was covering for ABC. “Roger wasn’t a schmoozer, but he wasn’t afraid of reporters, either. He came at things as a straightforward political pro.” Nothing like a friendship developed, but they knew and respected each other.

In 1996, Hume’s ABC contract was up for renewal. He wanted to stay, but not as the White House correspondent. He flew up to New York and met for lunch with ABC News president Roone Arledge. It didn’t go well. “Roone was in a distracted mood. He spent much of the lunchtime dumping on Rupert Murdoch,” Hume recalls. Presumably Arledge raised the topic because Hume’s wife, Kim, had left ABC News to start as Fox’s Washington bureau chief. Arledge told Hume he was welcome to stay at ABC, but he wouldn’t get what he wanted—a more senior job as an analyst or anchor.

Hume left the lunch and considered his options. He admired CNN for its commitment to twenty-four-hour news, but he considered it an amateurish operation. He was more drawn to Fox, which was still in the planning stage. “I saw what Roger had done at CNBC, turning it into a great franchise. And I knew Rupert Murdoch a little bit. When he hired Roger I remember thinking, ‘I hope I hear from these guys.’”

He did. Ailes came to Washington, DC, in March 1996 and offered Hume the position of managing editor of the Washington bureau and a gig as anchor of the six o’clock news program, the Fox News “broadcast of record.” He would be up against Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather, the network Big Three. Hume was, he recalls, “thrilled.”

Hume’s first years at Fox were spent building a competitive newsroom staff in a journalistic environment that saw Fox as shaky at best and probably disreputable. It was a hard lift, but he had faith in Ailes. “That first year, Roger concentrated mostly on just getting up and running. He didn’t seem upset at all by the low ratings; he was willing to give it time. After that first year, he acted like, “All right, now that I have time to raise the ratings, I will. And he did.”

When the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the six o’clock show was still in the planning stages. Kim Hume recalled the way ABC’s
Nightline
had started out as a series of “Special Reports” on the hostage crisis in Iran. She suggested using that name and launching immediately. Hume called Ailes in New York, and was startled when he said, “Sure. Let’s start tonight.” It was, Hume says, “an amazing risk,” and it paid off. Fox
Special Report
built its eventual long-term success on its aggressive coverage of the scandal. Would Fox have been so eager to launch this type of news show had the president been a Republican? Hume says he isn’t sure. Ailes, for his part, was delighted to have his six o’clock problem solved. After that first show, he called Hume and said, “ABC, eat your heart out.”

Fox News was now up and running. Ailes had his team. Now he was ready to take on the world.

CABLE WARS

When Fox News started out, it got a generally skeptical and unfriendly reception from the journalistic establishment. Even reporters, who generally view any news media organization as a good thing (not to mention a potential source of employment), were largely disapproving. But no one greeted Fox News with more pure vitriol than CNN founder Ted Turner.

“I look forward to crushing Rupert Murdoch like a bug,” Turner told the press. He compared Murdoch to Hitler, which would make Roger Ailes a reincarnation of Goebbels, and followed up with an explanation, quoted by the
Los Angeles
Times
: “The late Führer, the first thing he did, like all dictators, was take over the press and use it to further his agenda. Basically, that is what Rupert Murdoch does with his media. . . .” The Nazi analogy was too much for the Anti-Defamation League, which rebuked Turner for trivializing the Holocaust. Turner apologized, but that didn’t prevent him from likening Murdoch to “the late Führer” a year later; or, in 2005, comparing the success of Fox News to the rise of Hitler.

Turner did more than call names. Having sold CNN to Time Warner, he was a member of the Time Warner board. Time Warner operated one of New York’s two cable systems; the other belonged to the municipal government. As a condition of the sale of CNN, a federal antitrust suit required Time Warner to offer its subscribers a second all-news channel. Turner used his influence to make certain that this would be MSNBC. This choice would have kept Fox News invisible in the nation’s media capital and ensured its failure as a national news organization.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former Ailes client, stepped in and threatened to take action, even raising the possibility of allowing Fox News to use the city’s cable system. Giuliani’s opponents pointed out that his wife (now ex-wife) worked at the Fox broadcast affiliate. Giuliani insisted his motive was to keep a new TV channel, which provided hundreds of jobs, up and running. Suits and countersuits followed, there was an acrimonious debate in the press, and eventually a settlement was reached. Time Warner Cable agreed to carry Fox News in New York City by October 1997 (and elsewhere by 2001). It was a sweet victory for Ailes and Murdoch over CNN, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Ailes likes to say that he has been up against eleven heads of cable news networks—six at CNN and five at MSNBC. Tom Johnson of CNN loomed the largest. He was the man Ailes needed to surpass to reach number one.

Johnson, like Ailes, came from a political background. After a brief career as a reporter for the Macon
Telegraph
, he earned an MBA at Harvard and worked for President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. When President Johnson retired to Texas, he took Tom Johnson with him, putting him in charge of LBJ Broadcasting, a company that included a TV station, KTBC in Austin. KTBC enjoyed a very profitable run as the monopoly station in Austin during the years Johnson was Senate majority leader and vice president. It made him and his wife, Lady Bird, very rich. In an irony the cynical Johnson would have appreciated, KTBC is now a Fox affiliate.

After the death of his patron, Tom Johnson served as publisher of the
Dallas Times Herald
, and then moved on to the
Los Angeles Times
as president and publisher. Ted Turner hired him in 1990 to run CNN. The timing was good. The first Gulf War was a high-water mark in Atlanta, and Johnson presided over the network for a decade.

“Ted found many of Rupert’s business practices reprehensible,” says Tom Johnson. The feeling was, of course, mutual. But Johnson did his best to keep out of the cross fire. “My job was to focus on running CNN. I left the Ted-Rupert battles to them.” CNN under Johnson never lost its lead to Fox; he had the good luck to leave in 2001. “If I had stayed, Roger would have rocketed past me,” admits Johnson.

In an effort to stay ahead, Johnson hired Rick Kaplan, one of the great producers in television history, to head CNN domestic news. Kaplan had many successes at ABC but one exploitable weakness: his friendship with Bill Clinton. When Kaplan came to CNN he brought this baggage along with more than forty Emmys. Ailes immediately dubbed CNN “the Clinton News Network.”

“Roger knew I wasn’t skewing the news for Clinton,” says Kaplan. “But I was a friend of Clinton’s, and how do you prove a negative?” Of course, Ailes was even closer to Clinton’s predecessor, George H. W. Bush, but everybody knew Ailes had worked for Bush in 1988 and helped him in 1992. Kaplan was supposed to be neutral. Kaplan called Ailes and complained that his own mother was upset by the Clinton News Network jibes.

Ailes offered to call Kaplan’s mother and explain that he wasn’t trying to be nasty; it was only business. Kaplan thanked Ailes but assured him that “my mom will never take your call.”

Nothing Kaplan did could stop the rise of Fox, and one of his mistakes cost CNN dearly. In 1998, as president of CNN-US, he oversaw the production of a new documentary magazine,
NewsStand
, which was billed as a synergistic
Time
magazine–CNN project. The first show, narrated by the New Zealand American journalist Peter Arnett, purported to be an exposé of U.S. troops using deadly sarin gas against civilians in Laos during the Vietnam War. The story was bogus. The network launched an internal investigation, which led to the firing of two producers and the resignation of a third. Arnett himself left soon thereafter. Tom Johnson issued a formal apology for allegations “that cannot be supported.” Throughout the affair, Roger Ailes remained publicly silent. There was no need to rub it in. CNN was supposed to be the responsible cable network, Fox the tabloid partisan. The fiasco in Atlanta spoke for itself.

There was another aspect to Ailes’s silence. He and Tom Johnson were close. “Roger and I represent two completely different political points of view, and we practice two different forms of journalism,” says Johnson. “At CNN we made the news the star; Roger’s style is more sizzling. I loved the competition. It improved us both, and it made CNN more aggressive. But—and this will surprise a lot of people—I enjoyed my personal friendship with Roger Ailes.”

Johnson takes Ailes’s claim to do “fair and balanced” news seriously. “CNN does a superb job with its hard news reporting,” he says, “but I think that Fox does a very credible job. I see a rightward bias on the talk shows, but not in their coverage of events.”

Despite their public rivalry, Ailes and Johnson sometimes quietly collaborated on matters of mutual importance. “Whenever one of our staffers got into serious danger in some of the world’s reporting hellholes, we always watched after one another’s personnel,” Johnson told me. During the Balkan conflict, he learned that American stealth bombers were going to strike a Serb television station. He contacted Ailes and advised him to get his people out of the way. Johnson also prevailed on General Wes Clark to cancel the operation, which would also have killed Chinese, Russian, and other foreign reporters. It was only when all the international correspondents had left that the station was demolished, with several Serb fatalities. On another occasion, CNN personnel in Iraq were threatened and forced to leave. Ailes quietly shared Fox footage with his rival.

•   •   •

“The 2000 election was a turning point for Fox News,” says Rick Kaplan. “Roger figured out that the country was at war politically, and that’s how he played it. We didn’t see it that way. And 2000 was the year that everything changed for CNN.”

Conservatives voted with their TV remotes throughout the campaign, and stuck with Fox on election night. It was Fox that first called the election for Bush, and other networks followed suit. The decision didn’t hold, and weeks of uncertainty followed. Although the issue was finally settled for Bush by the U.S. Supreme Court, Fox and the others had blundered with their premature announcements. Not only that, but by calling the result while some polling places were still open in Florida’s central time zone, Fox News had risked compromising the election.

After that fiasco, Ailes went down to Washington to participate in a congressional grilling. “Fox News acknowledges here that it failed the American public on election night and takes full responsibility for this failure,” he said. “These errors have led to much self-examination of the processes we used on election night, how the Voter News Service operated on election night, and our membership in the Voter News Service. Through our self-examination and investigation we have determined that there was no intentional political favoritism in play on election night on the part of Fox News.”

The statement was self-serving and self-evident, like those of the other network chiefs. What mattered is that Ailes was in the company of Tom Johnson, his old nemesis Andrew Lack of MSNBC, and senior representatives of the Big Three broadcast networks. It was a sign that Fox News had arrived at full parity. A few months later, Ailes had the additional satisfaction of learning, via a vote count conducted by the
New York Times
, that Bush
had
won in Florida. To paraphrase Dan Rather on a different matter, the call had been journalistically wrong but factually correct.

The 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington ushered in another Fox milestone. Other networks seemed unsure of how to deal with the shock of radical Islamic terror, but Ailes had no doubt. He immediately stocked the network with hawkish talking heads, many from the military; displayed American flags in the network’s graphics; and began wearing an American flag lapel pin, a symbol that was adopted by on-air personnel. This gesture offended some mainstream journalists, like Av Westin, who broke into television journalism under Edward R. Murrow and became a senior figure at CBS, then ABC. “At ABC I had a rule—no campaign buttons in the newsroom,” he told me proudly. The rule was supposed to ensure objectivity. Perhaps it did. It also obscured the fact that virtually everyone at ABC News was a liberal Democrat.

Some members of the network old guard protested to Ailes. At a media gathering in New York City, Morley Safer of
60 Minutes
laid into him for allowing his people to wear their patriotic sentiments on their lapels. “I’m a little bit squishy on killing babies, but when it comes to flag pins I’m pro-choice,” Ailes replied.

In fact, the wearing of American flag pins was voluntary at Fox. Like the other networks, Fox didn’t and doesn’t allow campaign buttons.

While other networks looked for a balance between journalistic detachment and the patriotic mood of the country, Ailes was a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “He sent word that we have to cover both sides fairly, but not to be ashamed to want America to win,” says anchorman Bret Baier. He also sent a note to President George W. Bush encouraging him (as a private citizen, he later said) to hold massive public support for the war by fighting it in an uninhibited way. “The only thing America won’t forgive you for is under-reaching,” he wrote. At the time, Ailes was far from the only supporter of the “war on terror.” Senior Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, favored invading Afghanistan and Iraq. The Democrats in the Senate endorsed both wars. A great many mainstream media organizations fell into line. And, of course, Republicans enthusiastically supported the president. Polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans were with the president. But Ailes remembered Vietnam, where sentiment had turned around, largely due to the media. All three of the TV networks, led by Walter Cronkite at CBS, turned against the war after 1968. Thanks mostly to Fox News, no monopoly of mainstream networks and like-minded reporters now wields that kind of unchallenged influence or power.

•   •   •

In January 2002, Fox surged ahead of CNN, and never looked back. It soon outpaced CNN and MSNBC combined. A record number of people were watching cable news, and all three channels were covering basically the same stories. It was a chance for the public to compare the three, and the Nielsen numbers revealed that they preferred the Fox product. This was greeted with dismay and anger on the left. Within a year, Al Franken, Michael Moore, and a slew of journalists published anti-Fox books. Franken’s was titled
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
, and had a picture of Bill O’Reilly on the cover. O’Reilly went ballistic and insisted that Fox take legal action. Ailes complied, but a federal judge threw out the suit on the reasonable grounds that the book was protected by the First Amendment and that Fox couldn’t plausibly claim ownership of the term “fair and balanced.” The publicity around the case helped make Franken’s book a national bestseller, and set him on the road to winning a Senate seat in Minnesota.

More than politics or patriotism was at work in Fox’s rise to preeminence. “Roger is one of the few visionaries in the television business,” says Rick Kaplan, who faced Ailes not only at CNN but later as head of MSNBC. He found fighting Ailes to be a punishing experience. “At times, I felt like Muhammad Ali up against Joe Frazier,” he says. On the screen Ailes, with his flashy graphics, bumper music, constant controversies, and nonstop promotion, was more Ali than Smokin’ Joe. Up against him, CNN seemed plodding and staid. “Roger understood cable news before anyone else. He realized that it isn’t like broadcast news, an hour or two a day. It’s a twenty-four-hour operation, which means that a good part of it has to be about opinions. At CNN we tried to do a 24/7 ‘broadcast of record’ but it didn’t work.”

“This is a fifty-fifty country,” says Chris Wallace. “There is no reason that Fox should get two-thirds of the cable news audience. A liberal tilt isn’t inherently boring. But Fox is more entertaining and more interesting, and that’s because of Roger. If he took over any network it would instantly become more successful. He’s the most interesting figure in broadcasting.”

A lot of outside critics agree. “Ailes cultivates his outsider persona. His charismatic stamp is all over Fox News,” says Professor Richard Wald, the former president of NBC News and “ethics czar” at ABC News, and now a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. “Suppose Bill Moyers was a libertarian. Change him from Lyndon Johnson’s boy to Barry Goldwater’s boy, but with the same unctuous personality. He wouldn’t have been able to attract an audience.” Luckily for Moyers, PBS evidently doesn’t care.