Roger Ailes: Off Camera (16 page)

In many ways, Ailes’s views on gender have remained what they were when he wrote these words in 1989 (and, for that matter, what they were in 1969, and probably 1959). Ailes sometimes still refers to grown women as “girls.” He doesn’t like affirmative action for women any better than he does for ethnic or racial minorities. And, despite his old-fashioned notions of male gallantry, he is capable of shockingly bad manners in describing women who cross him. He infamously referred to Mary Matalin and Jane Wallace, the cohosts of a show on CNBC, as “girls who, if you went into a bar around seven, you wouldn’t pay a lot of attention, but they get to be tens around closing time.” When Paula Zahn left Fox for CNN, Ailes said he could have gotten better ratings with a “dead raccoon,” and a spokesman for Fox compared her new show to putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse. To Ailes, such talk isn’t a sign of disrespect or paternalism. It is a sign of equality. He talks about everybody that way, and if they can’t take a joke (or an insult), well, that’s their problem. Women, like men, are welcome to the club, but they have to be able to take a punch.

It also helps if they are beautiful. Ailes makes no apology for this. “Television is a visual medium,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with having good-looking people on the screen.” Some critics disagree. “When it comes to news readers, there is a look at Fox—blonde and attractive and somewhat interchangeable—that has gradually trickled down to the other networks,” says Mark Danner. Jon Stewart and other comics have made a running joke of the “dumb blondes” of Fox News. “Sure, we have news actresses at Fox, just like the other cables do,” says Brit Hume. “With a twenty-four-hour day, there are gaps to fill in, and they do news cut-ins or weekend jobs.” There is, in fact, a high density of beauty queens and runway models at Fox, but looks can be deceiving.
Fox & Friends
host Gretchen Carlson is a former Miss America who plays the violin, matriculated at Stanford, and studied at Oxford. Shannon Bream, an anchor of
Fox News Headquarters
, is an attorney as well as a former Miss Virginia and Miss Florida. Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the cohosts of
The Five
, modeled underwear for Victoria’s Secret, but she was also a prosecutor in San Francisco and L.A. Arthel Neville came to New York as a model with a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. Martha MacCallum, the coanchor of
America’s Newsroom
, worked for six years as a business correspondent at NBC and CNBC before joining Fox.

And not all of the beautiful women of Fox are blonde. Lauren Green was the third runner-up in the Miss America pageant in 1989, and is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is also unmarried, a fact that prompted one of the more bizarre on-air exchanges in the history of television news. During an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Fox State Department correspondent James Rosen said, “I close with a gift for you. You met this person once, I believe, but you really ought to know each other because this woman, I think you’ll have an interest in knowing her. She is one of our Fox News anchors in New York. Her name is Lauren Green. She is brilliant, she is beautiful, she is African American, she’s single, and she’s a concert pianist in her spare time.”

“My goodness,” Rice responded with diplomatic understatement. Rosen proceeded to hand her a CD recorded by Green and informed Rice that his colleague was “going to want to hear from you.” The exchange raised so many eyebrows that a mortified Green gave an interview to the
Minneapolis Tribune
to clarify her status. “I am very straight,” she said. “All Christian men, single and over thirty-five, can apply.”

For all his political incorrectness, Ailes sees himself as a pioneer in the area of employing women. “I was the first to put a female on as host of a prime-time show,” he told me. “That scared the hell out of the other cable networks.” Greta Van Susteren, who now occupies the ten o’clock spot, is nobody’s idea of a dumb blonde.

Megyn Kelly, on the other hand, is both blonde and brainy, and she has made good use of her glamour-girl image. She was discovered by Brit Hume, after his wife gave him a tape of Kelly (then Megyn Kendall) appearing on a local news show. “She looked stupendous and she had a really strong voice,” says Hume. He sent the tape to Roger Ailes, who hired Kelly without even having an open job. She’s a rising star: In addition to hosting her own show, she has appeared on presidential debates, and is scheduled to coanchor election night 2012. She is definitely being groomed for even bigger things.

Kelly has a history of playing with the “dumb blonde” stereotype. In 2010, she went on the Howard Stern show, where she unflappably bantered along with the ribald host. She also posed for a provocative photo spread and interview with
GQ
. In the interview, Kelly was asked about false rumors that she and Brit Hume were having an affair. She denied it, but Hume thought it was funny (and flattering). At his retirement dinner he called being linked to Kelly in the press “one of the greatest experiences of my life. It’s not true. But it’s not impossible!” It got a big laugh, especially from Kelly, who was worried that the story might be believed. Ailes, who learned about the
GQ
pictorial and the Stern appearance after the fact, thought they were too racy for a serious journalist and told her so. Kelly told Ailes that she didn’t feel she had done anything wrong, but she also promised that it wouldn’t happen again. But that’s not to say that both Kelly and Ailes underestimate the appeal of attractive women on television.

Megyn Kelly’s office at Fox looks like a boutique. She has closets full of clothing and a shoe rack displaying twenty-five pairs of hot-looking pumps. “It is a credit to Roger and his makeup and hairdressing team that the women at Fox have such an ‘it’ factor,” she said. “The hairstylists, wardrobe people, and makeup artists here are better than at the other networks. They look to create a ‘professional glam’ and it works.” Kelly is realistic enough to know that what she does—what all successful television journalists do—is a form of show business. “The whole day at Fox is cast by Roger,” she says. “There are beautiful blondes, high school quarterbacks, brainiacs, and the entire spectrum.” She is content to play her part because she sees the results. But she is not a femme fatale on the air. She was a practicing attorney for nine years, and she can be a tough, abrasive questioner. “Megyn doesn’t back down for anyone,” Ailes says. “She can even stand up to O’Reilly.”

•   •   •

“I’ve been kicked out of every damn church I’ve ever belonged to,” says Roger Ailes. It is a buccaneer’s boast, meant to convey a hard-core irreverence. Ailes is not, by any means, a conventional born-again Christian of the Mike Huckabee variety, let alone Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. He wouldn’t use the word himself, but he is ecumenical. He donates considerable sums each year to a small Protestant church near his home in Garrison, although he is not on its membership rolls. He donates upward of 10 percent of his net income to charities, many of them religious, including an annual fifty grand to the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and another fifty grand to Catholic charities. He told me he’d be glad to give to Muslim charities, too, “if they disarm.”

Beth Ailes is a devout Catholic, and her husband often accompanies her to Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Loretto in Cold Spring; Beth occasionally plays the organ there. Their son is getting a Catholic education. Many of Ailes’s closest associates are Roman Catholics, including legal consigliere Peter Johnson Jr.; his two senior deputies, Michael Clemente and Bill Shine (as well as his former head of news, John Moody); and Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, anchorman Bill Hemmer, Bret Baier, Neil Cavuto, Doug Kennedy, and Megyn Kelly (to name but a few) are also practicing Catholics. For years, Fox had a permanent correspondent in Rome, Greg Burke, reporting on the Vatican (in June, Burke was appointed senior communications adviser to the Holy See). The network also employs Father Jonathan Martin as a full-fledged commentator on religious and church matters. Ailes told me he doesn’t see anything unusual about this, but it is; very few national media organizations have such a concentration of openly devout religious believers of
any
denomination. Fox has the reputation of being something of a champion of the church. That has been notable in Fox coverage of the priest sex scandals of the past decade. “Roger isn’t an apologist for the church,” says Neil Cavuto, himself a former seminarian. “We cover the news.” Cavuto is right: Fox has covered the story, but less aggressively and with less hostility than many other major news organizations. Chris Cuomo thinks this is due to Ailes. “Maybe he doesn’t light candles, but he also doesn’t let people go on the air and beat up Catholics,” Cuomo says.

In late May of 2012, forty-three Catholic archdioceses and organizations sued the federal government, on freedom-of-religion grounds, over the part of the Obama health plan that would require insurance companies to cover the cost of contraception for the employees of Catholic institutions and charities. A fight between the Catholic hierarchy and the White House is big news, especially in an election year, and Fox covered it that way. The other networks didn’t. On the day the suits were filed, ABC and NBC evening news broadcasts ignored the story altogether. CBS gave it nineteen seconds. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Fox talking heads turned this seeming indifference into an illustration of the way in which the media attempt to minimize the importance of the official Catholic point of view.

•   •   •

Geraldo Rivera is Roger Ailes’s favorite Latino journalist. He broke into the news business as a mouthpiece for a group every bit as radical and separatist as the New Black Panthers. In the late sixties, the Young Lords, a Chicago Puerto Rican street gang, transformed itself into a militant nationalist organization modeled on the (original) Black Panthers. A small delegation of New Yorkers traveled to Chicago and got permission from the Young Lords to open their own New York branch. In 1969, they made headlines with a series of public demonstrations, such as setting mountains of uncollected garbage on fire on Third Avenue and “liberating” property and redistributing it to the poor. At a time when the country was suffering from collective jitters caused by political assassinations and urban rioting, the general public found the Young Lords frightening, which was the point. The situation exploded when the group seized a Manhattan church and held it for eleven days. The publicity was enormous. Eventually 105 Young Lords were arrested. Their lawyer and advocate was a charismatic young Puerto Rican Jewish attorney, Geraldo Rivera.

Rivera was a natural media star, and he soon got job offers from clueless TV news directors desperate to find out what was going on inside a previously unknown community. He was hired by ABC, which billed him as “the first Latino reporting for a national network.” But Rivera was more than a token. He did important exposés of life in the city, covered international conflicts with bravery and flair, and wound up as the senior producer and star correspondent of ABC’s
20/20
newsmagazine.

Geraldo, who fashions himself “a barroom brawler, a guy who pushes back,” made a lot of enemies at ABC with his flamboyant, ego-driven style of reporting. When Rivera publicly criticized Roone Arledge for spiking Sylvia Chase’s story on the romantic relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Arledge fired him. He spent the next few years doing syndicated tabloid television shows, some of which made him a laughingstock. He did a talk show in which a skinhead punched him in the nose. His after-dark exploits made him a staple of New York gossip columns. He was making money, but for a serious journalist, which is how he saw himself, it was humiliating. He wanted professional rehabilitation, and in 1994, when Roger Ailes hired him at CNBC, he got it.

“Roger is my blood brother,” Rivera told me. In 1996, when Ailes led his jailbreak from CNBC to Fox, Rivera didn’t join. He couldn’t afford to; he had a $30 million contract. But after 9/11, when NBC declined to send him to the Middle East as a war correspondent, he turned to Ailes. “If you get out of your contract, come on over,” Ailes told him. Rivera signed with Fox for about half of what he had been making and wound up where he wanted to be, a war correspondent in the middle of the fighting (and the center of the television screen).

Rivera is rich and famous and patriotic. But on social issues, he is an outspoken advocate for positions Ailes opposes. During the Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2011, Rivera did three live broadcasts that were clearly and proudly sympathetic to the demonstrators. And he is an outspoken supporter of amnesty for illegal aliens. Ailes kids him about this: “What are you, running for king of Mexico?” he asked after Rivera’s book on immigration came out—but Rivera says he has never been told what stories to do or how to report them.

Despite their political differences, Ailes and Geraldo are close friends, and on Latino issues, he is a sounding board. During the Republican primary campaign, Rick Santorum traveled to San Juan to stump for Puerto Rican votes, claiming he had a good chance to win. The subject came up at an editorial meeting. Fox had political reporters covering the election, but Ailes wanted an expert opinion.

“What does Geraldo say?” he asked Bill Shine.

“Geraldo thinks Santorum is wrong,” Shine said.

“Yeah, me too,” said Ailes, dismissing Santorum’s Puerto Rican strategy. And that was that.

There are other journalists at Fox News who come from Hispanic backgrounds. Juan Williams was born in Panama. Kimberly Guilfoyle of
The Five
is the daughter of an Irish father and a Puerto Rican mother. Correspondent Julie Banderas’s mother is Colombian. They all allude to their ethnic backgrounds from time to time, but they are American journalists who happen to have some Hispanic connection. In a country in which Latinos and their children are now the largest single ethnic group (or collection of Spanish-speaking subgroups), every media organization wants to reach and cultivate that market.