Roger Ailes: Off Camera (18 page)

The first stop was the current FBN studio, where Ailes was greeted with collegial handshakes by the crew. There were markers and obstacles on the floor, and a nervous young cameraman warned him to watch his step. “I’ve been in television studios for fifty years,” Ailes said, and began firing off a barrage of questions. “Why are there no accordion lights here? How quickly can you turn around the set? How many shows are currently being shot here? How many could be? What is the actual height of the ceiling? What is the capacity of the backstage area?” He already knew the answers to these questions, but they would come up when he made his pitch for the new real estate. Ailes walked over to the huge windows facing Sixth Avenue. “What’s the stop on this glass?”

“.357 caliber,” said the engineer.

“At what range?”

“Close up,” the engineer said. Ailes nodded. You put a television show on street level, you had better be prepared for armed critics.

From the studio we went down to the ground floor. There was a TV screen in the elevator; a young woman was talking, although the volume was down too low to hear her. “Is she on our air?” Ailes asked.

“No. I think this is a spot for Fox International,” an aide said.

“The direction is crap,” said Ailes without emotion. “Lousy framing on the bottom of the screen and the camera angle is wrong. Check into it.”

Ailes always has one eye on the screen. One day I walked into his private office and found him on the phone deep in conversation with the head of the Fox Television Stations group. “I’m watching channel five right now and there’s something off with the shot,” he said.

On the screen was a morning interview show with two hosts, a man and a woman, and a guest. The conversation didn’t matter to Ailes; it was the picture. “You don’t see our guy’s smile,” he said into the phone. “All you see is him from the side. His ear. Nobody wants to see an ear shot.” There was a pause and then Ailes said, “There’s a problem with the damn framing. And when the guy leans forward, he blocks the guest. Everybody’s sitting on a three-quarter shot. People at home don’t get a sense that anyone is talking to them. Get it fixed.” He hung up and looked at me. “Television is painting the
Mona Lisa
and you have to do it every three seconds. Right now the head of the station group is calling the station director, who is about to call the executive producer of the show, who will”—he checked his watch—“be calling the line producer right about now and telling him, ‘Ailes says it looks like shit. Change the fucking screen.’ What the hell, I can’t help it. I’m still a director.”

We descended to the ground level and entered the cavernous Schwab space. Ailes clapped his hands to test the acoustics. “What is this, about twenty feet?” he asked, looking at the ceiling. “Eighteen,” the engineer said.

“We could put two floors in here,” said Ailes.

“Or lifts, so we could raise and lower floors,” said the engineer.

“Let’s not get too fancy,” said Ailes. “You start raising and lowering the floor, somebody will get stuck halfway up. Let’s not invent trouble.”

The engineer nodded. It was the response he seemed to be anticipating. When it comes to technology, Ailes isn’t enthusiastic. CNN had recently introduced a new graphic design with moving walls, which Ailes thought was foolish. “You’ve got Wolf Blitzer standing out there facing the camera, and suddenly the set moves and you’re looking at his rear end. Wolf’s a good journalist, but I doubt if the audience really wants to see some sixty-four-year-old short guy with his back to the camera. That’s a production mistake whether the walls move or not.”

Ailes isn’t an early adopter when it comes to equipment, either.

“Let CNN buy the new stuff and test it out, and when the technology is right I’ll come in like a ton of bricks,” he says. “One of the laws of television is that the head of engineering always wants new stuff. You spend a million dollars on some innovation and it turns out that nobody in the department knows how to use the damn thing. So they need something else to make it work. It never stops. When I see that the Framistan is working, we’ll get one. Hell, we’ll get two. But in the meantime, let CNN waste their money.” Framistan, it turns out, is a word Ailes loves. It became popular after it was used on an episode of
I Love Lucy
—it stands for unnecessary gear. “Framistans always need an additional Framistan. And this network isn’t going to run in the red.”

No, Framistans weren’t what Ailes wanted. He was looking for a window display, where passersby in the heart of midtown Manhattan could see for themselves that the journalists of Fox Business were hard at work—and that they merited prime real estate. He needed a window and he needed a slogan. The next time I came by, he had both. A huge banner was draped over the old Schwab office. It read “Fox Business News—the Power to Prosper.”

“THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN AMERICA”

During the presidential campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama was upset by Fox News, which by then was in its sixth year of cable dominance. He was being treated deferentially (and, in some quarters, worshipfully) by most of the media, but getting roughed up on Fox, especially by Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. A sit-down was arranged with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes to get Fox’s mind right.

Ailes recalls that the meeting took place in a private room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan (White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to relate the president’s version). Obama arrived with his aide, Robert Gibbs, who seated Ailes directly across from Obama, close enough for Ailes to feel the intention was to intimidate him. He didn’t mind; in fact, he rather appreciated the stagecraft, one political professional to another.

After some pleasantries, Obama got to the point. He was concerned about the way he was being portrayed on Fox. Ailes responded that the news coverage thus far had been fair and balanced, and would continue to be. Obama said that his real issue wasn’t the news; it was Sean Hannity, who had been battering him every night at nine (and on his radio show, which Fox doesn’t own or control). Ailes didn’t deny that Hannity was anti-Obama. He simply told the candidate not to worry about it. “Nobody who watches Sean’s going to vote for you anyway,” he said.

Obama then asked Ailes what his personal concerns might be. It is a politician’s question that means: What can I do for
you?

Ailes said he was mainly concerned about Obama’s strength on national security issues. The candidate assured Ailes that he had nothing to worry about.

“Well, why are you going around talking about making cuts in weapons systems?” asked Ailes. “If you’re going to cut, why not at least negotiate them and get something in return?”

Obama said that Ailes had been misinformed; he was not advocating unilateral cuts.

“He said this looking me right in the eyes,” says Ailes. “He never dropped his gaze, which is the usual tell. It was as good a lie as anyone ever told me. I said, ‘Senator, I just watched someone say exactly that on my computer screen before coming over here. Maybe it wasn’t you, but it sure looked like you and sounded like you. I think it was you.’”

At that point, Gibbs stood and announced that the session was over. “I don’t think he liked the meeting very much,” says Ailes.

Relations between Ailes and the Obama administration were bad from the start, although in his first few months in office the White House focused most of its media fire on Rush Limbaugh. But under the surface there was considerable tension, and it came to the surface with the Van Jones affair.

Jones was the environmental activist appointed in 2009 by Obama to the newly created position of Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Jones wasn’t well known, but he seemed to be an attractive, well-qualified Yale lawyer whom
Time
magazine had named one of its “heroes of the environment.” But Fox, led by Glenn Beck, took a closer look at his background, which included youthful involvement in a radical organization, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) and, more recently, advocacy for convicted murderer—and alleged political prisoner—Mumia Abu-Jamal. Beck also claimed that Jones had signed a petition suggesting that the Bush administration may have been complicit in the attacks on September 11, 2001 (a claim he waffled on and then denied). And Fox reported that Jones had referred to congressional Republicans as “assholes,” for which he apologized. All this was too much turbulence for the White House. Jones was allowed to resign, and spokesman Robert Gibbs remarked coldly that President Obama did not endorse Jones’s statements but “thanked him for his service.”

Roger Ailes and Van Jones had tangled before. In 2007, Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus announced that they were going to cosponsor two debates, one Republican, one Democratic, in the 2008 presidential primaries. This wasn’t unprecedented; Fox had cosponsored a debate with the CBC in 2004, in Detroit. The Nevada Democratic Party had recently agreed to hold a debate on Fox. Grassroots reaction had forced the Nevadans to cancel, though, and there was pressure for the CBC to do the same. The effort was led by a group called ColorOfChange.org, which accused Fox News of racism and called the CBC’s decision to partner with it “shamefully out of step with most black voters.” Van Jones was the cofounder of the group.

After Obama won the nomination, ColorOfChange.org, along with MoveOn.org and other progressive groups, launched a nationwide petition drive aimed at branding Fox a racist network. The petitions, which had 620,000 signatures, were delivered to Fox headquarters.

A lot of people at the White House thought that Obama had let Jones go too easily. “He was very close to Michelle Obama in particular,” says Bob Beckel. “She blamed Fox for getting him fired. After that, a lot of Democrats grew leery of even coming on Fox.”

Not long after the Jones episode, the White House press office set up five-minute interviews for each of the networks with Kenneth Feinberg, the “pay czar.” Fox was excluded. It was the first time anyone could recall that an administration had banned a network from the press pool. The Washington bureau contacted Ailes, who went to work.

Ailes had been expecting something like this, and he was prepared. “Roger doesn’t believe in blind rage,” says Woody Fraser. “He believes that if you have to fight, you build for it. When this happened, he was ready.” Ailes contacted the heads of the other networks, reminded them that they were all equal partners in the costs of the pool, and that what happened to Fox could happen to them, too. He also mentioned the possibility that barring Fox could be a government violation of press freedom. The networks got the message; nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of the First Amendment. Fox got its interview with Feinberg.

About this time, the White House spokesman Gibbs began saying that Fox wasn’t a real news organization. At a briefing, ABC correspondent Jake Tapper asked him how Fox differed from the other networks. “You and I should watch sometime around nine o’clock tonight or five this afternoon,” Gibbs replied. Those were the times the Glenn Beck and Hannity shows aired. “I’m not talking about [Fox] opinion programming, or issues you have with certain reports,” said Tapper. “I’m talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?”

“That is our opinion,” Gibbs replied.

The White House was not winning this particular battle. The Democratic base hated Fox, of course; bashing it played well on campus and in the big blue states and cities. But Fox had millions of viewers, and surveys showed that a great many were liberals or moderates. At the height of the crisis, Ailes met with David Axelrod in New York.

The meeting was cordial but it didn’t end the tension. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, went on CNN’s
Reliable Sources
and revived the “Fox isn’t a news organization” meme. “I think what is fair to say about Fox, and certainly the way we view it, is that it really is more of a wing of the Republican Party,” she told host Howard Kurtz. She added that Fox viewers during the 2008 campaign, which took place on the backdrop of the financial collapse, would have concluded that “the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN.”

Dunn was mistaken. Fox News, like all the other news networks, reported incessantly on the financial meltdown and its consequences. No Fox viewer could have missed it. Fox talk show hosts, especially Beck and Hannity,
did
focus heavily on Ayers, ACORN, and Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and to an extent that was partisanship (Hannity is a self-declared Republican who refers to the GOP as “we”). But Fox also had a very valid journalistic reason to pursue these stories. The mainstream media (abetted by the Republican candidate) barely reported on Ayers, Wright, and ACORN at all. Unburdened by such inhibitions, Fox had almost daily scoops on the background and associations of the little-known Obama. Fox viewers knew
more
, not less, than the viewers of other television news (or, for that matter, the readers of the major newspapers).

In the midst of the face-off between Fox and the White House, Roger Ailes made a rare television appearance on ABC’s Sunday show,
This Week.
Barbara Walters was the substitute host and she wanted a ratings smash, so she brought on Ailes to spar with Arianna Huffington and Paul Krugman. Ailes very seldom appears on TV, and the show competed directly with Fox News’ own interview program, but a friend is a friend. Walters was after fireworks and Ailes provided them. Arianna Huffington rebuked Ailes for allowing Glenn Beck to engage in uncivil and extreme language on his show. Ailes said that Beck had apologized, but that he, Ailes, didn’t want to police language on the air (in fact, he was already figuring out how to get rid of Beck, but he wasn’t about to say so on ABC). Huffington pressed her point.

“It’s not about the word police,” she said. “It’s about something deeper . . . the paranoid style [used by Beck] is dangerous when there is real pain out there.”

Ailes’s candidates never come to a debate unprepared, and neither does he. “I agree with you [about the need for civility],” he said. “I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor— . . .”

“That was never by anybody that we had—” Huffington protested.

“But then it really went nasty, and I thought, Gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out. . . .”

Ailes and Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, got into it over the still-pending health care legislation. Krugman charged that Fox had intentionally obscured the meaning of the bill. Ailes replied that the bill was thousands of pages long. Krugman said that legislation is always long. Ailes pointed out that the Constitution is considerably shorter. Looking back on the exchange, Ailes is dismissive. “All Krugman wants to do is give away money. That’s his answer to everything. He’s a dope but nobody wants to say it because he’s won awards.”

The topic that most interested Walters was the Fox-Obama dustup. “You have had your own back-and-forth with the White House,” she said to Ailes. “They were not very happy with you, banned you for a while. Have you kissed and made up? Is it hunky-dory?”

“Well, they tried to ban us,” Ailes replied. “They wanted to break the pool but the other networks stepped up and protected Fox on it, because it was . . . interference with a contractual relationship and sort of tramping around on the Constitution. . . .”

“But now you’re okay?”

“We’re fine. I mean, we were—it was not as bad as it was played, and things are not as great as they should be, but we have a good dialogue. And I saw the president and his wife at the media Christmas party. They were very gracious, very nice, both of them. And we have a dialogue every day with them.”

Ailes didn’t originally want to go to the Christmas party: Getting around is hard for him, and he’s already been to the White House. But it was an opportunity to introduce his son to the president, and so he and Zac went to DC. They stayed at the Jefferson Hotel because it has short corridors, and ate from room service.

At the party, when Ailes reached Obama in the receiving line, the president said, “Here comes the most powerful man in America”—a joking but pointed reference to an article that had recently dubbed the Fox chief with that title. Ailes leaned in to the much taller Obama and said, “Don’t believe that bullshit, Mr. President. I started that rumor myself.”

Ailes was never concerned that the White House would actually close Fox out. And there was value to him, with his own base, in playing up the drama. Meanwhile, at his direction, the Fox bureau in Washington was finding a modus vivendi with the White House. “Even in the darkest times, when White House officials said outrageous things about our news product, we still had communications with the president’s staff,” says Bret Baier, the anchor of Fox News’ 6:00 p.m.
Special Report
, who replaced Brit Hume. “Sometimes it was surreal. Anita Dunn would be outside telling reporters that Fox News is the media arm of the GOP while we were inside the White House working with people in the administration. We understood at the time that what Dunn and some others were doing was putting on a political show.”

As Ailes predicted he would, Obama caved. He needed the Fox audience. Three days before the health care bill passed Congress, he gave Baier an interview. It was contentious, but it didn’t lead to a new boycott. “Obama understands the power of Fox in an election year,” says Baier. “We still don’t have the kind of access to the president that others have—Chris Wallace and I have each interviewed him once, and O’Reilly has had him on twice. I think he’s been interviewed on NBC something like fifteen times. But we’re not blacklisted anymore.”

By the time Ed Henry joined Fox News in the summer of 2011 as senior White House correspondent, hostilities between Fox and the Obama administration were in a lull. Henry had been the senior White House correspondent at CNN, and he understood the cease-fire would be temporary. The new job would be a combat assignment.

Henry had his doubts about joining Fox. CNN was a sinking ship—everyone there knew it. But he was concerned about being stigmatized as a right-wing propagandist. The concern was assuaged when he met Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer at a Washington dinner and the liberal jurist told him that the news show he watches every night is
Special Report
because he finds the reporting so straight.

But Henry had another concern. The job offer had come from Michael Clemente. He had never actually met Roger Ailes. “All I really knew about Roger was the caricature of him as a right-wing ogre,” he says. But he trusted Clemente and he decided to take the job.

“After the deal was done, I took the train up to New York to meet Ailes,” he recalls. “There was a sense of mystery around him, which I felt while I was in his waiting room. When I finally walked in, he looked at me and said, ‘This company was doing great and then we hired you, and now it’s all fucked up.’” Then he burst out laughing. Henry got the full Ailes treatment—the profane banter, the cynical asides, and the camaraderie that goes with joining the team. He found himself wishing he had a camera to record it.