“You’re not Making America Great.”
The emails and tweets came by the dozens. They bore all the hallmarks of a coordinated campaign. And they intensified as Trump time went on. The MAGAsphere targeted journalists who pointed out Trump’s falsehoods and flubs. Fox’s truth-tellers faced some of the most vociferous attacks because they were perceived to be turncoats. Fox insiders said the hate emails became nastier as Trump’s public loyalty demands became more and more extreme. Some news anchors tried to filter it out, while Neil Cavuto went a different way: He read the emails on the air.
“You, snap-on hair, you’re the fake freak who’s lying to the people, not the guy sitting in the White House,” a viewer named Paul wrote. Cavuto read it on air and took the opportunity to teach Paul a thing or two about journalism. Cavuto did not think highly of Trump, or of Hannity, for that matter. He thought Trump got bad advice from the prime time players, and he used his 4 p.m. show to urge restraint. Don’t go to war with Senate Republicans. Don’t tweet out “tacky insults” to critics. Don’t scapegoat reporters. “Mr. President,” he said one afternoon, “it is not the fake news media that’s your problem. It’s you.”
The base did not take kindly to these suggestions. Paul’s nastygram to Cavuto said “Trump will never talk to you now” because he knew the anchor was “fake news.” Cavuto replied by saying that he had never asked for a sit-down with the president, because he didn’t think he would get that much out of it. Cavuto recognized what Hannity would never admit in public—so much of what Trump said in interviews was uninformed or untrue.
Trump had a knack for looking people straight in the eyes and lying, even if, as Kellyanne Conway told me in July 2017, he didn’t “think” he was lying. When I said it was scandalous that the president was lying about voter fraud and wiretapping, just to name two issues, Conway said, “Excuse me? He doesn’t think he’s lying about those issues, and you know it.”
Trump also had a tendency to flip-flop, to flounder, to contradict himself. All of this degraded the value of interviews with him and, I confess, aides like Conway too. But most of Fox’s stars held tight to the notion that presidential interviews were inherently newsworthy. Cavuto was an outlier by opting out. Fox’s intramural competition to book Trump was fierce: Various friends slipped ratings reports to the president, sometimes verbally by phone, other times more formally by faxing and emailing printouts to various aides. Hannity, for example, wanted Trump to know that his show was much higher rated than Bret Baier’s show, so that Trump didn’t stray. Some of this ratings chatter was also about boosting Trump’s ego. In his mind, if Fox was doing well, it meant he was doing well. He interpreted Fox’s popularity as evidence of his own popularity.
After Trump’s first State of the Union address, in January 2018, he tweeted congratulations to himself for a ratings record: “45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in.”
Fox did rank No. 1, but it wasn’t the “highest number in history” for a SOTU, not even close. In a story for CNN.com, I wrote that eight other SOTUs were higher rated, including Obama’s first address of his presidency. That’s the part that irked Trump. A White House aide emailed me a few minutes after the story went up. He asked to speak on background and I agreed not to use his name. This aide said the president “was referring to the highest in cable news history. That’s why he mentioned Fox News as well.”
But that’s not what the president said. He said “45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history.” Then he mentioned Fox’s record separately. This was a stupid sequel to crowd-size-gate. So I pressed for an on-the-record explanation and asked: “Why hasn’t he issued a correction tweet?”
“There’s not much to correct,” the aide replied.
“His tweet was incorrect,” I said. “You’re saying he meant to say something else. Can you put this on the record?”
“It’s not incorrect,” the aide said. “He mentioned Fox News in the sentence immediately after.”
I was stuck in an alternative facts wormhole. But it reflected Trump’s priority: the ratings.
About a year into the Trump presidency, his speeches and interviews lost the pizazz that generated huge ratings. He started to phone it in, both literally and figuratively. When an interview “made news,” it was usually because Trump felt so comfortable with the hosts that he blurted out something inappropriate, like the time he said he tried to “stay away” from the Justice Department, “but at some point I won’t.” His aides tried to intervene and stop these chats from happening, but they felt they could only tell him no so many times in a row. The end result: his April 2018 call to Fox & Friends. Trump hijacked the Friends conversation from the get-go; when the hosts tried to ask him about his dealings with Michael Cohen, who had just been raided by the FBI, he railroaded them; and when they eventually tried to wrap the president, he kept rambling. “We’re running out of time,” Steve Doocy said. “We could talk to you all day, but it looks like you have a million things to do,” Brian Kilmeade said a couple of minutes later, trying to be polite. But no—the president just wanted to keep talking. When it was finally over, Kilmeade said, “We’ll see you next Thursday, Mr. President,” alluding to Trump’s weekly segment in the past. “The phone line’s open!” White House aides groaned. They were worried about his troubling admissions that could come back to hurt him in court, but Trump tweeted that he “loved” being on the show.
Later in the year, he called the “Friends” again and defended his decision to hold a political rally at the same time a major hurricane was bearing down on the Florida panhandle. Earhardt saved her most important question until the end.
“Give me a nice one,” Trump said.
“So,” she said, beaming, “today is my father’s birthday.”
The president was in the White House residence, watching his three friends talk with him on TV—Earhardt in a tight, low-cut dress—and he knew just what to say.
“And your father’s first name is what?”
“Wayne Earhardt. Coach Earhardt.”
“And is he in South Carolina?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well that’s a great place. So Wayne, I just want to say you’ve done a fantastic job with Ainsley. I want to congratulate you. That is not easy, but she is a terrific human being and just a great person. Happy birthday and great job. Great work.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Earhardt said.
Doocy jumped in with a perfectly timed joke: “Mr. President, my neighbor is having an anniversary next week…”
“I know, I know, we could do this for ten minutes,” Trump responded.
Kilmeade thanked him for calling in, and Trump laid the praise on thick: “Thank you all, your show is a fantastic show, just keep it going.”
Then Doocy leaned in with the four wisest words of the whole conversation: “Go run the country.”
But Trump didn’t. His “Executive Time” that day continued until 11:30 a.m., when he Sharpied a couple of bills and lunched with Kanye West. In Trump’s mind, watching Fox was a key part of running the country. He rarely interacted with average voters, so Friends was the connection to his base. With some rare exceptions, the “Friends” went easy on Trump and Trump went easy on them.
Past presidents never had a space as safe as this, a place to turn for constant reassurance and reinforcement. Fox made it safer by signing up more pro-Trump commentators—not just to please the president but to please his super-fans. Execs and producers employed other deck-stacking tricks too, like setting up folksy diner segments called “Breakfast with Friends” where patrons were interviewed about politics and culture war issues. When it seemed like the interviewees were just repeating Fox and Trump’s positions right back to the interviewer, that was because the rooms were packed with Trump promoters. “The producers would strategically pick counties or towns that Trump won,” an insider told me, “to get the pulse of the people.” Well, one specific subset of people. When a hater interrupted one of the feel-good segments by holding up a “FOX LIES” sign and shouting “fake news,” Fox security escorted him out of the restaurant.
The Washington Post tracked down the protester, Bob Reams, who said “I just couldn’t help myself” when he found out that Fox was coming to town. “They have brainwashed so many of my friends and believe in just conspiracy theories and bullcrap,” he said. “It’s just sad to see my friends just turned into idiots.” In the Trump age, left-wing blogs filled up with stories about families torn apart by a loved one’s Fox News addiction. I heard those stories from staffers too: Some of their relatives resented what they did for a living.
“I feel like Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer said. “The audience has been RADICALIZED,” a longtime commentator texted me, in all caps, as he scrolled through his Twitter feed after a live shot on the daytime show America’s Newsroom. The amount of vitriol staggered him. Any momentary break from Trump was penalized. Decades of nuanced debates about the role of government and taxation and immigration were all distilled to a single question: Were you with Trump or against him?
The Fox brand was with him, but not every minute, not every hour, and that offended the viewers who believed Trump was owed complete obedience. At a 2018 rally, Trump himself even complained about the dissenting voices that showed up on Hannity.
“Do we love Sean Hannity, by the way?” Trump said to rallygoers in Montana. Trump had figured out that he could always revive a bored crowd by shouting out the names of Fox stars. “I love him,” Trump said over the cheers, in a scene that was being shown live on Fox during Hannity’s hour. “But here’s the only thing. He puts up all these losers that say horrible things! I’ve got to talk to him [about it].”
What was he talking about? Hannity hardly ever booked Dems anymore, but Trump said there was “one after another,” saying things like “Donald Trump, he’s lost it up here.” And then it hit me: He was griping about the clip montages that Hannity’s staffers strung together, usually showing people on CNN and MSNBC criticizing Trump. These montages were the raw fuel for the right-wing resentment engine. Producers assembled them with the help of a private Twitter account, shared by the show team, that provided a daily “pool of ideas” for the show, Hannity’s executive producer Porter Berry explained to The New York Times. The team had until nine o’clock each day to “pull it all together” and “build that argument.” Without those montages, without those foils from other channels, without those out-of-context clips, Hannity would have nothing to talk about. When my face popped up in the montages, my Twitter replies tab filled up with invective from his viewers, repeating whatever derogatory thing the feckless host had just said. “Humpty Dumpty!” “Stenographer!” Hannity’s more authoritarian-minded fans said things like “you should be arrested for treason” and “get fucked you commie piece of shit.” His most cultish viewers looked up my Gmail address and hurled insults there, and when I replied, they were often stunned to hear back from me. I think they forgot their hate object was a real live human being. I wanted to remind them.
“I don’t want Pete fucking Hegseth taking my time slot.”
When Shep Smith was weighing whether or not to sign a new contract in early 2018, his potential replacement was a big factor.
Hegseth wasn’t literally up for the job, but Shep actively imagined all the things Suzanne Scott could do to take the teeth out of the 3 p.m. hour. Scott said she wanted him to stay, and he believed the network would be worse off without him. That’s why he committed to three more years. “I wonder,” he told Time magazine, “if I stopped delivering the facts, what would go in its place in this place that is most watched, most listened, most viewed, most trusted? I don’t know.” But he had his suspicions, and those were scary enough to convince him to sign on the dotted line. Fifteen million a year helped ease his concerns too.
Shep had struck his first $15 million deal back in June 2013 when Roger Ailes was still cutting the paychecks. The stunning raise was a consolation when Shep lost his 7 p.m. show. Ailes called all his stars into his conference room to talk about the new schedule. Greta and Hannity were both about to move time slots to make way for Megyn Kelly at 9. Shep was the odd host out—a decision that reflected Ailes’s view that the audience wanted red meat, not straight news, at dinnertime. So Shep was getting paid more to do less. Ailes also threw $10 million at a new studio just for Shep, dubbed the Fox News Deck, with walls of screens for the anchor and oversized iPads for the producers. That’s where Shep would continue to anchor his 3 p.m. hour, now with his name in the title, Shepard Smith Reporting, and that’s where he would anchor breaking news cut-ins during other people’s shows—all part of an effort to appease him and make the demotion look like a promotion.
But everyone around the conference room table knew what this really was. “We knew right then, this was never going to work,” a person in the room recalled.
It did work once in a while, when mass shootings and other horrors required hours of rolling live coverage. But Ailes’s other stars fought the “Fox News Deck” approach. They said they could handle any breaking news just fine by themselves. TV airtime was like water for these stars, necessary for survival. TV executives sometimes derided this as “red-light syndrome,” named for the light that shone atop the camera when it was live. “Everybody got very territorial very fast,” an insider said. “It took a huge toll. It changed everything.” The rest of the network didn’t want him, so he didn’t want them. He leaned into his happy life off-camera.
Shep had stopped dating in 2012 when he settled down with Giovanni “Gio” Graziano, a production assistant on his team who was twenty-three years younger. Gio was transferred to a job at Fox Business to avoid the obvious conflict. By the time Gawker revealed the relationship and outed Shep in 2013, Gio was gone from the company altogether.
Shep was the most prominent gay anchor at a network with an ugly history of antigay commentary. He later said he didn’t think he needed to “out” himself because “I didn’t think I was in.” It’s true that his coworkers and New York City neighbors knew about his personal life, but his viewers generally didn’t. He started to talk publicly about “the gay,” as he once jokingly called it, in 2016, while denying another Gawker report that claimed Ailes tried to keep Shep in the closet. He nonchalantly told a group of college students in 2017 that “I go to work, I manage a lot of people, I cover the news, I deal with the holy hell going on around me,” and then “I go home to the man I love, and I go home to family.” And the family part is what he prioritized as he felt the channel lurching further to the right, caring less about news and more about views he reviled. He cut back on work travel and booked vacations with Gio instead. He developed a reputation as one of those anchors who came in two hours before airtime on slow days. “He’s in at 1 and out at 4:15,” a source said. It’s no wonder why—the halls of Fox News HQ were not a happy place for him to be. Other hours of the Fox day were increasingly hostile to what he reported. Shep’s show was an island under siege. “When something is reported on Shep’s show, it doesn’t make it past the commercial break on Neil Cavuto’s four o’clock show,” Conor Powell said. “There wasn’t a continuous line of reporting” the way there was at other networks. Each time slot was someone’s fiefdom.
Before Trump was elected, a former colleague of Shep’s said, “he told me it was all about the money.” But once Trump took over the executive branch and much of Fox, it wasn’t “about the money anymore. It was about saying he’s holding down the mantle of journalism.”
Reporting the truth about Trump put Shep at odds with Hannity and the others who, Shep said, were there “strictly to be entertaining.” He talked about the opinion-slingers in ways that were deeply insulting to them. “I don’t want to sit around and yell at each other and talk about your philosophy and my philosophy,” he told Time. “That sounds horrible to me.”
What Fox did all day sounded horrible to him.
Shep’s jabs at prime time caused a stir, just like he intended. Hannity swung back at him in a tweet: “While Shep is a friend with political views I do not share, and great at breaking news, he is clueless about what we do every day.” Clueless! Yikes. “Hannity breaks news daily,” he insisted, speaking in the third person and listing the Trumpworld obsessions that Fox used to counterprogram and contradict the Mueller probe. Laura Ingraham also defended her staff. “Always liked Shep,” she wrote, “but his comments were inconsiderate & inaccurate.”
This was the “pissing in the tent” that Ailes always guarded against. Shep saw the tweets and laughed. He liked to get a rise out of people. Sometimes he did it by declaring that politics, the fixation of most cable newsers, was “weird and creepy.” His disdain bled through the TV screen. He’d rather cover a hurricane or a car chase. He absolutely loved the day two runaway llamas led Arizona police on a chase during his 3 p.m. hour. But there hadn’t been any South American escapees lately—or much time for non-Trump drama of any type.
“I miss doing that thing I used to do,” Shep said, “but I like this thing I’m doing now. I just wish everyone weren’t so angry about it all. I wish that we could have lighter moments and not always be on guard with each other.” He predicted that the cable news climate would get worse. In private, he blamed Trump for the madness and wondered why Hannity sold out. Was there more to the alliance than the public knew? Shep perked up his ears on Monday, April 16, 2018, when Michael Cohen’s lawyer was forced to reveal that Hannity was one of Cohen’s clients. Cohen’s team had tried to keep Sean’s name under wraps. But Cohen only had two other clients—the president and a Republican financier, Elliott Broidy, who hired Cohen to buy a Playboy Playmate’s silence. So what secrets was Cohen stowing away for Hannity? Did the Fox host have a woman problem? Did Trump know, and use the knowledge as leverage?
The news about Hannity’s connection with Cohen broke just before the start of Shep’s show. A reporter awkwardly mentioned the Hannity revelation at the top of the hour, but moved on as fast as she could, so Shep brought it back up. “Hannity’s producers are working to contact him,” Shep said. “Since it’s now part of the story, we’ll report on it when we know the rest of it.” Then he added with a smile, “A lot of people here know his number.”
Hannity was supposed to be hosting his radio show, but instead he was watching Fox’s coverage while texting with pals about how to handle this embarrassing disclosure. His radio producers scrambled to fill air. Hannity worked up a response that stated Cohen never “represented me in any matter.” Hannity had merely sought his pal’s legal advice, mostly about buying real estate, not about burying an affair. Reporters discovered that Hannity was, in fact, a mini real estate mogul: The Guardian’s review of public records linked Hannity to $90 million worth of investments on more than 870 homes in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Vermont.
The newsman wanted to know: Had his opinion counterpart told anyone in management about the extent of his relationship with Cohen? The answer was no—Hannity hadn’t disclosed a thing. He had the power to get away with it. Hannity pestered Fox for a statement clearing his name, and got one the next day. “We have reviewed the matter and spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support,” the network said. What Shep had told Time magazine rang true once again: “They don’t really have rules on the opinion side.” Every night Hannity railed against “elite” media types, like George Stephanopoulos, who, he said, had inappropriately cozy connections with the people they covered. Then he was proven to be exactly the kind of person he criticized. And nothing came of it.
Hannity’s pals said the Cohen connection was overblown. “Cohen gave him some advice once,” a family friend shrugged. He had an entire thicket of real lawyers, including David Boies, the Democratic lawyer of Bush v. Gore fame, and his agent David Limbaugh, brother of Rush. The Limbaugh connection extended to his office at Fox: Hannity’s assistant was David’s daughter Christen Limbaugh Bloom. Christen was like conservative radio royalty: The biggest talker in the country was Uncle Rush to her, and the No. 2 host was her boss. Christen wrote regular columns for Fox’s website. A sample column: “How to pray even bigger in the year ahead.”
Hannity rarely talked about his own faith, except for his nightly invocation of John 14:1, “Let not your heart be troubled,” which Jesus told his disciples before being crucified. Hannity usually uttered the words at the end of his show as he vowed to continue protecting the president.
On May 17, 2018, “wardrobe enforcer” Suzanne Scott was promoted to CEO. This was (1) a historic moment in TV news, the first time Fox News had a female CEO, and (2) another symbol of right-wing opinion winning and news losing.
Jay Wallace was promoted on the same day, to president of Fox News, reporting to Scott. They were almost equals, but Scott was on top, and that meant the talk shows known as “programming” were on top. “That’s what she prefers,” a news anchor grumbled to me. “She believes ‘programming’ is what works.” Scott took steps to make some of the newscasts talkier. She encouraged more segments with partisan guests. She liked when daytime newscasts played clips from Fox & Friends or Limbaugh’s radio show. In short, she promoted all the things Shep lobbied against.
Shep was on the record as saying “I think we have to make the wall between news and opinion as high and as thick and as impenetrable as possible. And I try to do that.” But his own bosses undermined him. Chief national correspondent Ed Henry, supposedly a rising star of the news division, became better known for his mornings on Fox & Friends and his nights filling in for Tucker Carlson. If there was a wall between news and opinion, Henry was walking through one of those “big, beautiful doors” Trump was always pledging to build. I spoke with numerous correspondents who thought it was outrageous. “Ed found a way to get ahead, it’s that simple,” one said. “And Suzanne loves him.”
Shep professed not to watch Fox & Friends, but Henry’s back-slapping on the show was precisely the problem. Shep used his new contract and his Time magazine interview to speak out about it. The solution, he said, was steadiness: “If we start making changes, if ratings go down or viewers scream too much and we make changes to accommodate, we are in extreme dereliction of duty. I cannot do it. I will not do it. I’ll quit. I’ll stop doing it completely.”
To that threat, Hannity might have responded, Please do.
In the halls of the White House and in the pages of The Washington Post, Hannity acquired a new nickname: “Shadow chief of staff.”
The I-don’t-give-a-shit, just-having-fun Hannity was gone. Yeah, he was all smiles while golfing with Trump and Bill Shine at Trump International Golf Club, but Hannity’s friends said he was feeling the stress that came from counseling Trump at all hours of the day. There were many days when the unpaid position was a source of tension—like a needy friend who called and called but never took advice. “He doesn’t know how to get out of his own way,” Hannity complained to a colleague.
Setting aside whether any of this was appropriate for a TV performer to be doing, it was intense work. Hannity thought Shine could help calm the White House seas, and he wanted to rehab his out-of-work pal’s career, so he ramped up his campaign to get Shine hired after Hope Hicks left the White House in March.
Given his proximity to the president, Fox executives had serious concerns about whether Hannity’s phone was being targeted by foreign governments. He took precautions, but it was a huge problem for the corporate IT department. Hannity had the access and attitude of a White House aide without any of the government protection. Many people wanted to know what he and the president were gabbing about. And this didn’t just apply to Hannity: I know of a prominent Fox host who found spyware on their phone and traced it back to a nosy foreign ally.
In June 2018 Hannity flew to Singapore for the overhyped summit between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Back in New York, Fox & Friends Weekend host Abby Huntsman was narrating live coverage of Trump’s arrival when she accidentally called POTUS a dictator. No one in the control room noticed her “meeting between the two dictators” gaffe, and neither did her guest. But Twitter erupted with laughter. She really didn’t mean to say it, but sometimes, she had to admit, Trump sure acted like a dictator wannabe.
All the cable newsers went wall-to-wall with summit coverage. Chris Wallace and Bret Baier led Fox’s news coverage from Singapore, but Hannity scored the exclusive post-summit sit-down with the president and worked to spin the trip in Trump’s favor. Through these promotional Q&As, “the first snapshot of history gets filtered through a sympathetic lens,” Politico pointed out.
Reporters who covered the White House marveled at Hannity’s ability to stop Trump from making news. Whenever Hannity would be granted precious time with Trump, the say-anything president would just repeat his greatest lines and lies. According to The Daily Beast, Trump sometimes mocked Hannity “for being such a suck-up,” specifically calling out “the low-quality laziness of the host’s questions.” Trump wanted a little bit of a challenge! But he kept saying yes to Hannity’s interview requests.
After taping with his best man, Trump held a rare press conference and took real questions from real reporters. Hundreds of credentialed journalists streamed into the ballroom at the Capella Hotel and hoped to be called on. Their attention was Trump’s power source, and he didn’t even try to hide it. When he called on One America News, he heaped praise on the channel’s “beautiful” coverage of him. When he called on Time magazine, he asked, “Am I on the cover again this week? Boy, have I—so many covers.”
There was a seat in the front row with a piece of paper labeled “government official,” reserved for Hannity. Journalists snickered about it, but there was nothing they could do about this perversion of norms. Well, nothing except document it and try to convince people that this was not normal or right. And ultimately not good for the country.
While in Singapore, Baier bombarded Sarah Sanders with interview requests. “We flew all the way here,” he said. Baier was the opposite of Neil Cavuto—he believed presidential interviews were paramount. He lobbied the West Wing constantly and he was ticked off that his opinion peers landed all the interviews. This was a sign of weakness on Trump’s part, he thought. Trump eventually gave Baier ten minutes on board Air Force One before taking off. It was a repeat of the O’Reilly Super Bowl Sunday interview: Baier pointed out that Kim “is a killer. I mean, he’s clearly executing people.” And Trump responded with false equivalencies. “He is a tough guy,” and besides, he said, “a lot of other people have done some really bad things.”
The news cycle was unforgiving. Trump one-upped himself every hour, dodging this scandal or that screwup by delivering some other shock. “In the Trump era,” Brian Kilmeade told an interviewer, “there are three major stories every day. It used to be one big story every three days.” Cable news shows live and die by the rundown, a computerized list of every script and guest and graphic and video clip, but in the Trump age the rundown was “thrown out,” in TV parlance, so often that it became a running joke among show teams. “Trump just tweeted, throw out the rundown!”
But certain stories still managed to break through. When Trump returned from Singapore, it was the forced separation policy. The administration was breaking up thousands of families for crossing the southern border into the U.S. The utter inhumanity of the policy catapulted it to the top of the national news agenda—and another Fox host reached her breaking point. This time it was Huntsman.
Huntsman told friends that she had lots of “hard days” on the curvy couch, lots of days when she struggled to figure out how to defend the administration’s actions and antics. Kids in cages was too much. Huntsman’s seven-month-old daughter, Isabel, was on her mind. Her cohost Pete Hegseth was a father of four—and this was unfolding on Father’s Day weekend—but he somehow stuck to Trump’s talking points. “They’re getting school and soccer and video games and three squares and two snacks,” he said, taking the word of a government that lied incessantly. Later reports revealed that some of the migrants were in squalid conditions, with inedible food, overflowing toilets, and deficient medical care. “Treated worse than dogs,” one seventeen-year-old Honduran boy said. But Fox & Friends stayed on its default setting—outrage at the way other media outlets were covering the story. That was sometimes the only way to skate by shameful Trump news. But Huntsman slipped in how she really felt, as subtly as possible. “Where we are right now is not sustainable,” she said. “The United States has always been the good guy. We’ve always been the ones—”
Hegseth interjected: “We’re still the good guy!”
Yes, but that’s “why we need to figure this out,” she said.
Huntsman had been quietly talking to ABC executives about leaving Fox and joining The View. But she’d been on the fence, feeling grateful to Fox, feeling reluctant to give up what she had. Family separations tipped her off the fence and onto ABC.
Why did so many others stay? That’s the question I am asked most often. After Hannity became the face of Fox News and indulged in offensive conspiracy theories, after the network turned a blind eye to Trumpworld’s mendacity and hypocrisy, after it resorted to self-censorship to avoid angering the base, why didn’t others follow Carl Cameron and Clayton Morris and Conor Powell and Abby Huntsman out the door?
For some it was about absolute devotion to the Trump cause. They cared about remaking the courts. Rolling back abortion rights. Taking on China. But for many it was about money. Anchors and correspondents making more than $1 million a year don’t think they’ll make that much money anywhere else. They worry that they’re not really marketable to other networks, and they’re usually right.
The money was just part of it. “We have a strong sense of family. We protect each other,” an anchor told me. “When someone’s going through a tough time at home, Fox takes care of them. Don’t underestimate that.” When Bret Baier and his family members were in a serious car accident after a ski trip in Montana, Suzanne Scott immediately offered to send a plane from 21st Century Fox’s private fleet.
Numerous employees also cited the investments Rupert and Scott made to clean the place up. New HR executives and protections against workplace harassment—hotlines, training sessions, councils—were tangible if imperfect evidence of change. Gleaming new studios and luxurious new offices were a big morale boost. The new second-floor newsroom opened in January 2018 and Studio J debuted in June. Upstairs on the twentieth and twenty-first floors, renovated offices for the talent were a huge deal. Anchors were able to design their own offices with standing desks, big closets, and couches for naps between live shots. “We all came in and said, ‘This is a game changer,’ ” a daytime host said.
For talent too there were all the fringe benefits that come from being a major-league player at a media conglomerate, like $10,000 wardrobe budgets and priceless Super Bowl tickets. For those who could stomach the Trump cult and could navigate the internal fiefdoms, it could be a happy place to work. And there was no denying the influence of the platform. When the head writer of Fox & Friends quit, about twelve months into the Trump presidency, there were whispers around the office that he couldn’t stand the Trump sycophancy anymore. He told his ex-colleagues he was “mentally beat down.” Fox posted a job wanted ad for his replacement, and Vox.com declared, “the most influential job in America is open.”
On July 5, 2018, Trump gave in to Hannity’s pleas and hired Bill Shine as his deputy chief of staff for communications. Shine’s first assignment was small but supremely important to the president: Fix the lights.
The president hated the way his events looked on TV. So on July 9, the night Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Shine got to work. He fiddled with the camera angles and fretted over the backdrop. According to Axios, “he showed the president three different lighting options and Trump selected his favorite.”
It was a made-for-Fox event. The White House held an unveiling at 9 p.m. Eastern, introduced on Fox by Hannity, who called it “one of the most important and consequential decisions in American history.”
A key function of right-wing media was counterprogramming. With the family separation policy stoking outrage, the special counsel hard at work, and the Democrats poised to make gains in the midterms, the Kavanaugh news gave the Trump-Fox conservative base something to cheer about. Laura Ingraham watched the announcement in the East Room, then conveniently walked out to the North Lawn to host her 10 p.m. show. She was grinning from ear to ear.
Ingraham was a steady ally for the nomination fight, and far from the only one. Whenever the White House needed help with the nomination, Shine phoned his former network. Kavanaugh’s pivotal interview defending himself from Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation was awarded to Fox’s Martha MacCallum. Trump reminded his Twitter followers to tune in. MacCallum’s questions were tough, but most of Fox’s commentary around Kavanaugh’s combative confirmation hearing was in his favor. A female staffer told me that several of her colleagues were so troubled by the tenor of the Kavanaugh coverage that they brought it up in therapy. Overworked television producers seeing therapists is nothing new, or in any way unique to Fox, but the rah-rah win-at-any-cost defense of Kavanaugh was triggering for some.
Supreme Court watchers said Kavanaugh’s use of the Fox airwaves was extremely unusual and at odds with his commitments to neutrality and nonpartisanship. “The Supreme Court must never be viewed as a partisan institution,” Kavanaugh said at his confirmation hearing, leading NBC’s Chuck Todd to ask: “How impartial can a Supreme Court nominee be when he goes on Fox News—of all possible platforms—to defend himself?”
Blasey Ford was a credible witness. But Kavanaugh bulled his way through the hearing and told the world about his frat-boy love for beer. During a break in the testimony, Andrew Napolitano said the judge “dug himself out of the hole” he was in. Another Fox commentator got himself buried: Right-wing personality Kevin Jackson tweeted that the Kavanaugh accusers were “lying skanks,” and “TO HELL with the notion that women must be believed no matter what.” The tweet went viral, and Fox management went looking for Jackson’s phone number. Before the hearing was over, his contributor contract had been terminated. Fox said his reprehensible comments “do not reflect the values of Fox News,” raising the question, did all the other smears reflect the values of Fox News?
After Kavanaugh was sworn in on October 6, Trump claimed that Blasey Ford’s allegations were part of “a hoax set up by the Democrats.” The word he always wielded to vilify the Russia probe (“Russia witch hunt hoax”) suddenly had a new application.
“I think it is important to understand that the use of the word ‘hoax’ cues a particular cognitive frame,” Georgetown University sociolinguist Jennifer Sclafani told me. “Democrats and Republicans use frames to talk about political issues in different ways, and the choice of words activates a particular understanding or frame of the issue. For example, whether we talk about ‘gun control’ or ‘Second Amendment rights,’ we are talking about the same political issue. But our choice of terms tells the audience where we stand on the issue.”
Sclafani said Trump used “hoax” to discredit the Democratic framing and reinforce his own political identity. “His use of ‘hoax’ works in the same way as his repetitive claim that any news that undercuts his authority is ‘fake’ news,” she said. “While both these words have denotative (literal) meanings of falsehood, their connotative (contextual or social) meaning is to undermine the authority of the person or organization peddling the news.”
Poll after poll showed how scarily effective this was. Through “hoax” and “fake news” and “witch hunt,” Trump and Fox changed the language of politics. Everything existed along a pro/anti dividing line. The Bush years weren’t consumed with talk of “pro-Bush” versus “anti-Bush” factions. The Obama years weren’t defined by “pro-Obama” or “anti-Obama” lingo. But in the Trump age, the “pro-Trump” and “anti-Trump” labels were everywhere. Partisans expected everyone to pick a side, and for those who abstained, a side was picked for them.
Trust in institutions was low and getting lower, especially among Republicans. “We are careening dangerously from a high-trust to a low-trust society,” libertarian editor Matt Welch wrote in November 2018. The reasons were innumerable, but the Foxified portrayal of fellow citizens as enemies undoubtedly was a factor. Trump’s media allies worked to convince the base that everyone was a lying liar, so Trump’s sins weren’t that bad, and at least Trump was on their side. And Trump led a hate movement against media outlets that weren’t on his approved list. After a rousing rendition of “CNN sucks” from the crowd at a West Virginia rally, Trump said, “They really do stoke the fires of resentment and chaos,” while he stoked those same fires himself. One of the big problems was that he was surrounded by people who didn’t call him out on the hypocrisy or the dangerous rhetoric. In exchange, those loyal wingmen were rewarded with soft landings.
In October 2018, at Trump’s recommendation, Hope Hicks was appointed chief communications officer for Fox News’s corporate parent. Hicks barely knew a thing about Hollywood PR or corporate earnings, but she knew the right people. And she came quite highly recommended by reporters on the Trump beat. Plus, the job gave her an excuse to move to L.A. and get a Land Rover. She interviewed for the job with Lachlan Murdoch, who would be the CEO of Fox’s remainders once Disney took control of the entertainment assets. The company was in limbo, and the current heads of PR were leaving because they didn’t want to work for a suddenly-much-smaller company. But for Hicks, who needed someplace to ride out the Mueller probe, it was a cushy landing. Her new office, right down the hall from Lachlan’s in Building 88 on the Fox studio lot, was four times the size of her White House cubbyhole. She hung a 2017 inauguration proclamation on her wall.
Hicks didn’t have anything to do with the news channel headquartered in New York, but the eventual Mueller report contained a passage that revealed a ton about her assessment of Fox. Interviewed by Maria Bartiromo one month before he fired Comey, Trump was questioned whether it was too late to ask Comey, who was four years into a ten-year term, to step aside. “No, it’s not too late, but you know, I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. After the interview, according to Mueller, “Hicks told the president she thought the president’s comment about Comey should be removed from the broadcast of the interview, but the president wanted to keep it in, which Hicks thought was unusual.” Hicks’s belief that she could unilaterally cut a chunk out of a Fox interview was never explained.
For a sign of the synergies between Fox Corp and Trump, one had to look no further than Hicks’s very first press release in the new job. It was an announcement of corporate support for the First Step Act, the prison reform act supported by the president, the ACLU, the Kochs, and Kim Kardashian West, among others. Hicks later testified that Jared Kushner called her and “asked if this would be something that Fox would be interested in supporting.” Insiders interpreted Hicks’s press release as a nudge at Mitch McConnell, who was holding up the bill in the Senate. Once he allowed a vote, it passed, and Trump hailed it as a grand achievement, a useful weapon in his reelection war chest.
Bill Shine also symbolized the Trump-Fox soft landing arrangement. Incredibly, he was still paid by Fox even after joining the Trump administration, thanks to his generous multiyear severance agreement with the Murdochs. He cashed $3.5 million from Fox in 2018 and another $3.5 million in 2019.
Once he fixed the lights, Shine tried to get a grip on the White House comms operation. His main contribution was the end of Sanders’s daily press briefing. Reporters wondered what he did all day. Trump called him “No Shine” behind his back and soured on him, just as he did with so many other new hires. Shine’s soft landing was a gig on the reelection campaign.
Kimberly Guilfoyle had a more successful transition into the Trump orbit. She was forced out of Fox in mid-2018, though in retrospect her days were numbered as soon as Ailes was forced out. The leader of “Team Roger” had generated quite a few HR complaints that couldn’t be ignored by the Murdochs. The top lawyer for 21st Century Fox, Gerson Zweifach, had to get involved. Chief among the accusations: that Guilfoyle went around the office showing off dick pics on her phone. She claimed the pictures were from her male suitors. One of the people who saw the pictures told me, “I thought, ‘She’s single, he’s single, what’s the big deal?’ But flaunting it at work was a violation.”
There were other issues too—and sources pointed out that most of the complaints were lodged by women. The bottom line, one colleague said, was that “she was very open about her sex life. Too open.” An HR investigation dragged on for months. “If Kim were a man, she would have been out much sooner,” a person with knowledge of the investigation said. (Guilfoyle’s lawyer said, “Any accusations of Kimberly engaging in inappropriate workplace conduct are unequivocally baseless and have been viciously made by disgruntled and self-interested employees.”)
In the spring of 2018 Guilfoyle made her Trump love literal. Depending on who’s telling the story, she either seduced Donald Trump Jr. or he decided to pursue her. Junior’s impending divorce from Vanessa, the mother of his five children, was first reported in March, and when he was first seen in public with Kim in May, Page Six said they had been dating “for a few weeks” already.
Guilfoyle “knew how to use sex to get ahead,” in the words of one friend, and some of her colleagues suspected that she was hitching herself to Junior for more than purely romantic reasons. According to them, Guilfoyle had been told months ahead of time that her last day at Fox was July 1. Undeterred, she fought to stay on the air. “She had Trump calling Rupert, lobbying on her behalf,” one well-placed source said. “She thought Rupert would do nothing to her once she was with Trump Jr.,” another source said.
In June, I asked Fox PR how the president’s son’s girlfriend could feasibly cohost a show about politics. Fox dodged the question because the answer was, she couldn’t. Maybe it was true love—but l’affaire Don Junior also supplied an alternative storyline on the day she departed Fox, several weeks after the original deadline. Guilfoyle said she was leaving to go campaign with Junior. That’s when Yashar Ali, writing for HuffPost, published a story saying she did not leave voluntarily. Ali had been chasing rumors about Guilfoyle’s behavior for months. She knew he was working on a story, and before the end of the day Guilfoyle’s lawyers were threatening to sue him and HuffPost. Ali followed up a week later with a detailed accounting of her workplace escapades, noting the Junior angle: “Some people at Fox News were concerned that easing her out of the network would be slowed or halted due to the Trump family’s close relationship with Murdoch.” Alas, Rupert hated feeling like someone was manipulating him. Guilfoyle’s time was up. She went out on the campaign trail with Don Jr. and hosted streaming video shows and extolled all things Trump. The mostly male members of Trump’s inner circle thought she was a huge asset. In the words of former campaign aide Sam Nunberg, “Those legs got ratings, and I think those legs can get votes.”
Guilfoyle wasn’t missed at Fox. To the contrary, there were awkward rumblings whenever she came back to Fox HQ with her boyfriend, whom she nicknamed “Junior Mints” for his alleged sweetness. She tagged along on his interviews with Hannity and others, prompting one Fox insider to say, “It’s not a good look. She seems desperate.”
Once unbound from the shackles of truth, Fox’s power came from what it decided to cover—its chosen narratives—and what it decided to ignore. Trump’s immature, erratic, and immoral behavior? His sucking up to Putin? His mingling of presidential business and personal profit? Fox talk shows played dumb and targeted the “deep state” instead.
Conservative media types were like spiders, spinning webs and trying to catch prey. They insisted the real story was an Obama-led plot against Trump to stop him from winning the election. One night Hannity irrationally exclaimed, “This makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore!” Another night he upped the hysteria, insisting this scandal “will make Watergate look like a parking ticket.” The following night he screeched, “This is Watergate times a thousand.” He strung viewers along, invoking mysterious “sources” who were “telling us” that “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” There was always another “iceberg” ahead, always another twist coming, always another Democrat villain to attack after the commercial break.
Hannity and Trump were so aligned that, on one weird night in 2018, Hannity had to deny that he was giving Trump a sneak peek at his monologues after the president tweeted out, twelve minutes before air, “Big show tonight on @SeanHannity! 9:00 P.M. on @FoxNews.” Political reporters fumbled for their remotes and flipped over to Fox en masse. Hannity raved about the “Mueller crime family” and said the Russia investigation was “corrupt” and promoted a guest who said Mueller “surrounded himself with literally a bunch of legal terrorists,” whatever that meant. Some reporters who did not watch Fox regularly were shocked at how unhinged and extreme the content was. But this was just an ordinary night in the pro-Trump alternative universe. Night after night, Hannity said the Mueller probe needed to be stopped immediately, for the good of the country. Trump’s attempts at obstruction flowed directly from his “Executive Time.”
Trump granted himself more “Executive Time” and watched more TV as the years went by. He outfitted his upstairs residence with multiple TVs and DVRs, and lingered there in the morning, out of sight of the potential leakers who worked for him downstairs. He typically watched shows like Fox & Friends on a bit of a delay, which meant he could zap through the commercials with the DVRs. He channel-surfed to Fox Business and Newsmax and the broadcast networks. For all of his professed hatred for CNN and MSNBC, he kept a close eye on those channels too. I knew it for a fact because my Reliable Sources guests occasionally heard from the president after saying supportive things about him on my program. One of the biggest lies he ever told, measured by its distance from the truth, was “I do not watch much television.” He watched so much that he sometimes fell asleep with Fox still on, like the truly hardcore fan that he was.
The DVRs were the critical part of his television setup. He called TiVo “one of the great inventions of all time” and said television was “practically useless without TiVo.” But TiVo, which was invented in 1999, was just the brand name for a generic concept, like people who “Xeroxed” a paper on a different brand of copier. Trump said he had “Super TiVo” in the White House, but he actually had the DirecTV Genie HD DVR, a whole-home system that recorded multiple channels at the same time and let users watch those recordings from any screen in the home. It was genuinely awesome technology for a TV junkie. With the Genie, he could flip through hours of Fox in his residence, hit pause, walk downstairs to the Oval Office, and resume watching right where he left off. When he moved in, contractors also installed a sixty-inch TV above a fireplace in his private West Wing dining room, steps from the Oval. That’s typically where he caught up on cable news during the workday before retreating back upstairs in the evening. Obama only kept a small TV in the dining room, mostly tuned to ESPN, as Trump told visitors when he mocked the size of Obama’s screen and pointed out his replacement unit.
Other TV monitors were scattered about the West Wing, many of them set on one of the “four box” screens that showed four different networks simultaneously. The most popular version was the “four cable boxes,” with Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC, and CNN all represented. Another four-box carried Washington’s broadcast TV stations. A third variation included C-SPAN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. Trump was, as you know by now, most keenly interested in the “four cable boxes.”
He also received packets full of TV news screenshots so he could see who was on cable talking about him, and what the chyrons said, during the rare hours when he wasn’t watching. The packets also included transcripts of TV segments and, according to Vice, “sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”
Time magazine reporters who spent time watching TV with Trump in 2017 said he watched the screen “like a coach going over game tape, studying the opposition, plotting next week’s plays.” Sometimes this meant rewatching his rallies and interviews; other times, it meant watching his Democratic rivals. The DirecTV Genie was the key.
The joke around Fox was that Trump watched more of the network’s programming than management. Now that Hope Hicks was out of the White House and working at Fox Corp, she knew there was some truth to the joke. But she hated the drumbeat of stories about the president being glued to Fox News. She thought it made him look ill-informed and small.
The problem was, the stories were accurate.
White House director of social media Dan Scavino was tasked with making sure the MAGAsphere saw Trump’s favorite Fox segments. He tweeted so many videos ripped from Fox’s shows that his Twitter page sometimes resembled an official network account.
Fox is “not just an echo chamber. We see it as a CMS system on steroids,” a former White House aide told me, referring to the content management systems that websites use to publish content. He depicted the network as the ultimate CMS—a content creation engine that past presidents would have killed to have. It’s about “pulling clips and having social influencers blast them out where millions of people will consume them,” he said. “It’s getting friendly news sites to do first- and second-round write-ups. It’s giving the party ammunition for their opposition research books. It’s allowing campaigns the ability to cite something like Breitbart or Daily Caller in TV ads and mailers. And all of that comes from Fox.”
On Monday, October 15, 2018, Fox launched its midterm campaign for the GOP. “Expose the deep state” took a break. The racist and sadly effective “Fearing immigrants” took its place.
“To the southwest border we go,” news anchor Bill Hemmer reported. “Another caravan apparently is heading that way.” Earlier in the day, when the president was watching, Fox & Friends First said the caravan was “exploding,” getting bigger. The news and opinion shows held hands and jointly hyped the threat of traveling migrants who were making their way from Honduras through Guatemala toward Mexico and the U.S.
“Caravans,” providing strength and safety in numbers, had been traveling through Central America for years. Activists sometimes organized these trips specifically to call attention to the plight of migrants. In the run-up to the 2018 midterms, Fox converted this act of protest into something to fear and set it up perfectly for the president, who weighed in on Tuesday and threatened to withdraw all aid money to Honduras. Trump’s warning gave Fox another hook to cover the story every hour. See how that worked? A perfect loop of distorted information and fearmongering.
On Tuesday night Laura Ingraham linked the migrants to the midterms explicitly. While a graphic over her shoulder screamed “BORDER RUSH AND POSSIBLE ELECTORAL CRUSH,” she asserted that Republicans had failed to lock down the border, but a Democrat-led House would be much worse. She warned that her loyal viewers were at risk of being “replaced”—conjuring up the racist Great Replacement theory that imagined that whites were being replaced by people of color in some sort of grand conspiracy. “Of this, my friends, you can be sure,” Ingraham said, “your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”
The election narrative was set. The midterms, in this telling, weren’t a referendum on Trump’s temper tantrums—they were a life-or-death fight for the future of white America. It seemed like the old local TV axiom “if it bleeds, it leads” needed an edit: On Fox, it was more like “if it bleeds, and an immigrant is the suspect, it leads.”
On Wednesday night, Newt Gingrich told Hannity that two words would define the 2018 election: “One is Kavanaugh and the other is caravan.” On Thursday Trump stole Gingrich’s line: “This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order, and common sense.” When Trump invoked the “caravan” at a Montana rally, he said, “You know what I’m talking about,” and the crowd, primed by Fox, did indeed. The banner on Tucker Carlson’s show warned of a “MASSIVE MIGRANT CARAVAN ON THE WAY” at the same time the banner on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show said “REPUBLICANS STOKE FEAR AND RESENTMENT AHEAD OF MIDTERMS.” Fox supplied the raw material. Everyone else just tried to play catch-up.
Reporting was no match for migrant fearmongering. When New York Times reporter Emily Cochrane asked Trump to back up his made-up-out-of-thin-air claims that the “caravan” was full of “hardened criminals,” he responded, “Oh please, please, don’t be a baby.”
Trump continued to spread misinformation that he picked up on Fox & Friends. A crumb of information from Guatemala’s president about his country’s past deportation of immigrants with links to terrorism—shared in an apparent bid to impress the U.S.—was whipped by right-wing websites into a lie about the current “caravan.” This lie was transmitted from the web to Fox & Friends by Pete Hegseth on Monday, October 22. “They caught over a hundred ISIS fighters in Guatemala trying to use this caravan,” he said, falsely. Hegseth infected Trump, who tweeted during the show and said “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the migrants. He didn’t attribute this to Fox, he stated it as fact, and said, “I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergency.”
A lone voice on Fox tried to correct him. It was Shep, of course.
“Fox News knows of no evidence to suggest the president is accurate on that matter,” Shep said at three o’clock. “And the president has offered no evidence to support what he has said.” He came back around to the subject the next day and pointed out that the “caravan” was one thousand miles away from the U.S. border. That’s “a 353-hour walk, says Google. At 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, they are at least 44 days away at minimum.”
But Shep’s fact-checks were trampled by the fearmongering every other hour.
Fox even dispatched reporter Griff Jenkins to Texas, where it looked like he was waiting for the migrants to arrive any minute. Since he had a lot of time to kill, he went hunting for other border-crossers. Fox & Friends showed him hiding in the bushes with his eyes peeled on the Rio Grande. When a small group started to cross in a raft, he shouted questions and the smuggler turned the raft around, a moment Fox celebrated with a banner: “GRIFF FOILS ILLEGALS’ ATTEMPT TO CROSS BORDER.”
News anchors at Fox hated being lumped in with the network’s prime time crusaders. As Bret Baier put it, “I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing what the opinion shows are doing.” Chris Wallace claimed he didn’t watch the shows either. But if that was true, it was borderline irresponsible. Look at Jenkins: He was a correspondent assigned to Baier and Wallace’s DC bureau, but he was playing Border Patrol agent for the amusement of Fox & Friends.
White identity politics were suffused all throughout Fox, whether staffers wanted to recognize it or not. Countless segments preyed on racial anxieties and the perceived loss of status of white Christian America. Fox shows were talking about this well before Trump the candidate was—just think back to Bill O’Reilly and the “War on Christmas.”
“It was exactly these kinds of fears about cultural change, cultural displacement, and immigration that were the key drivers of support for President Trump,” Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. Those fears were sown and stoked by the media machine Murdoch and Ailes created. Jones depicted America as a dining room table and said white Christians used to control who sat at the table and where, like the head of the family. Now, in an increasingly multicultural country, no single demographic group controls the table. Everyone is welcome to take a seat. And that feels “deeply unsettling” to the group that used to be in charge, he said. Thus: “Build a wall.” Polling by Jones’s organization, PRRI, found that only one in three Republicans believed immigrants strengthen American society. The other two out of three said immigrants threaten American values. In the Trump age, Fox increasingly spoke to the latter audience.
Carlson and Ingraham made cultural displacement a theme of their shows. They vocally sympathized with their viewers’ sense of whiteness being under threat. Carlson said that “reckless immigration policies” caused demographic changes—e.g., an influx of Hispanics—that were “bewildering for people.” In a much-derided segment in March 2018, he cited the coal-mining town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where the Hispanic population grew from 2 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2016. “People who grew up in Hazleton return to find out they can’t communicate with the people who now live there, and that’s bewildering for people,” he said. “That’s happening all over the country. No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast.”
The source for Carlson’s commentary, an article in National Geographic magazine, said “few communities have seen the kind of rapid change that Hazleton has.” Writer Michele Norris was drawn to Hazleton for that reason. The headline of her incisive article could have been about Fox: “As America Changes, Some Anxious Whites Feel Left Behind.”
Nostalgia was one of the products Fox sold. “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Ingraham declared in August. “Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”
Ingraham’s words went viral when a researcher from Media Matters flagged them on Twitter and said her anti-immigrant rant was “ripped from white supremacists.” Fox executives hated when the left-wing media watchdogs caused headaches like this. Just as firmly as Media Matters staffers believed Fox was a stain on the country, Fox execs believed Media Matters was a shadowy arm of the DNC that was trying to blow up their network. The group opposed Fox, yes, but it was just pointing out what Ingraham had said. No one could deny that she said it. White supremacist David Duke said Ingraham delivered “one of the most important (truthful) monologues in the history of” the media. The next night Ingraham called Duke a “racist freak” and denounced white nationalism. She insisted her comments weren’t about race or ethnicity, even though she specifically said “massive demographic changes” were disturbing to her and to her viewers. Amid the blowback, she didn’t bring up “demographics” again for a while.
Other hosts on Fox distanced themselves from Ingraham and Carlson. They told me they wished Carlson would drop the “white supremacist shit” because it tarnished the entire network. At one point he trolled his critics by saying the threat of white supremacy was a “hoax. Just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.” There was a big audience for what he was selling and a much smaller audience for Shep Smith’s retort on the air: “White nationalism is without question a very serious problem in America.”
Hannity noticeably did not talk about the browning of America the way the other two prime time hosts did. But I wondered if he realized what he was saying when he proclaimed himself to be a proud “deplorable.” He said it all the time, night after night, reminding viewers of the 2016 comment Hillary Clinton wished she could take back. But if Hannity stopped to think for just a second, he would have realized he was telling on himself. Clinton said there were two baskets of Trump supporters. One was full of people “who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change.” She empathized with them, in contrast with the other basket, which was full of “deplorables” with “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” views. Clearly that distinction was lost on Hannity, and on most of his viewers.
October’s “caravan” was convenient in that it was a coded way to appeal to conservative white anxiety. Fox’s coverage was dehumanizing. Ingraham warned that the migrants might be diseased. Carlson alluded to an “invasion” as early as October 16. “This is an invasion,” Newt Gingrich said. “We have to treat this as an invasion,” Representative Steve Scalise said on Ingraham’s show. “Invasion” was used on Fox News more than sixty times, and another seventy-five times on Fox Business, in October.
Again, Shep tried to push back. On his October 23 broadcast he read a tweet from a viewer who told him, “Sorry, Shep. We are not falling for your fake story. This is an invasion.” Smith tried to tell her that Trump was preying on her fears.
But that same night, Ingraham referred to the migrants as an “invading horde.”
Shep thought the rhetoric from his right-wing colleagues was shameful. He thought someone—like the CEO of the network—should intervene, but he believed Suzanne Scott was too weak to take action. “They’re not actually managing anything. The place is on cruise control,” a Fox producer told me. “Tucker and Hannity are more managerial than Jay and Suzanne.” Others at Fox blamed the executive vice president for prime time programming, Meade Cooper, and said she didn’t have firm enough control over the content. In my view, the responsibility was shared, so the blame was as well. When I shared this reporting with two of the best TV talent managers I know, they said the job is really quite easy: It’s about saying yes whenever possible and no whenever necessary.
“People need to understand who’s in charge,” he said.
“You have to say no to your stars sometimes,” she said.
“You have to praise them when they do well and you have to say ‘Why the fuck did you just do that?’ when they fuck up,” he said.
“You can’t be afraid of them,” she said.
“That’s right. You can’t be afraid of them,” he said.
Fox management seemed afraid.
Apocalyptic “invasion” rhetoric ricocheted all around the right-wing media world. The calls from spitting-mad listeners to talk radio and the hateful comments on hyperpartisan websites were worse than what was being spouted on Fox—but it was all connected. In Pennsylvania, forty-six-year-old anti-Semite Robert Bowers posted a message on a seedy Twitter alternative called Gab: “I noticed a change in people saying illegals, they now say invaders. I like this.”
Bowers fixated on HIAS, a Jewish refugee agency which gave life-changing help to refugees in America. On October 27 he wrote that HIAS “likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Then he walked inside the Tree of Life synagogue and shot eleven people to death.
There was no official link between the “invasion” talk on Fox and the bloodbath in Pittsburgh. But some people at the network suspected there was. “We know that the rhetoric that we’re hearing now can’t be helpful,” Shep said on the air on October 29.
“No, I don’t think there’s a coincidence,” his guest, criminologist Casey Jordan, told him.
Shep’s voice was low, mournful. He spoke straight to Fox viewers, those who could still stand to watch him: “There is no invasion, no one’s coming to get you, there’s nothing at all to worry about.”
In prime time, Tucker rebutted him: “The migrant caravan is a real thing, despite what they may be telling you on television.” Ingraham interviewed the president, who said “we’re being invaded,” two days after a sicko said the same thing to justify slaughtering innocents.
Trump’s campaign made the imaginary “invasion” its closing message for the midterms, and tried to buy ad time for a racist, anti-immigrant thirty-second spot. CNN refused to run it because the ad was racist. NBC did run it, then stopped amid a backlash from viewers. Fox News pulled the ad too… after it ran about a dozen times. And the network never really covered the controversy on the air—never told its viewers that it had rejected one of Trump’s ads.
In the closing days of the midterm campaign, Barack Obama made a prediction: “Right before the election, they try to scare the heck out of you,” he said. “And then the election comes, and suddenly the problem is magically gone. Everything’s great. ‘I’m sorry, what did we say?’ ” This, Obama said, “is what happened in 2010, this is what happened in 2012, what happened in 2014, just over and over and over again, they’ll just run these same stories and then after the election, suddenly they’re not interested anymore.”
In 2010, it was “death panels.” In 2014, it was Ebola. Obama didn’t have to blast Fox by name—his audience knew who he was talking about. “There’s a certain news station,” he said, “that they just, their business is ramping up these scare tactics, that’s what they do.” But he said the CNNs of the world were also part of the problem: They amplify “lies over and over again, even when they don’t intend to,” by repeating what Republicans were talking about.
Obama had a point. Lots of journalists regretted their excessive “caravan” coverage in late October. But not Carlson and Ingraham—for they were on a mission.
On October 26, 2018, I flew to the Bojangles’ Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, for one of Trump’s final rallies before the midterms. Walking up to the arena in the driving rain, I saw that a projection screen told everyone to sign up for “real news” by following Trump on Twitter and Facebook. I met up with a private security guard assigned to me by CNN for the day. This had become an unfortunate custom for the network’s news crews covering Trump rallies. The other CNN correspondent at the rally had a guard too. The retired cops kept an eye on the crowd and made sure nothing got out of hand.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Fox correspondents did not travel to Trump rallies with private security.
I never felt threatened at the rally, but there were legitimate reasons to be vigilant. Back in July, a man in State College, Pennsylvania, called in to C-SPAN’s open phones show and threatened me and my colleague Don Lemon. “It all started when Trump got elected,” the man said. “Brian Stelter and Don Lemon from CNN called Trump supporters all racists. They don’t even know us. They don’t even know these Americans out here and they are calling us racists because we voted for Trump? Come on, give me a break. They started the war. I see them, I’m going to shoot them, bye.” Then the caller hung up on the host.
None of the man’s rant made any sense. Don Lemon and I started a war? Maybe against hair products, but that’s it.
I never called all Trump supporters racist. So when I heard this phone call on C-SPAN, my first question was, what made this man so angry? I hadn’t even said anything recently about race. It seemed like his attack came out of nowhere. I searched news websites and TV transcripts—and then I found something. Hannity had gone on a tirade the night before about Trump critics in the media. He played a two-year-old clip of me asking if racial anxiety was a factor in Trump’s rise. A two-year-old clip! At the time I was merely asking the question, but since then it has been well established that the answer is yes—racist beliefs and resentment of minorities did drive some support for Trump. That’s not the same as calling all Trump supporters racist, but the timing of this C-SPAN caller’s rant was suspicious to say the least. Hannity blasted me on Thursday night and I got a death threat on Friday morning.
I didn’t blame Hannity then, and I don’t blame him now. Hannity is unfortunately on the receiving end of threats too. But I’d be a fool not to wonder about the connection. And Hannity would be a fool not to admit that racial anxiety was a factor in Trump’s rise.
Back to the rally. Inside the fenced-in area for the press, I felt like a penguin at the zoo. I sat at a folding table next to Fox correspondent Kevin Corke. Some rallygoers gawked at us, showed off their anti-CNN shirts, and shouted “fake news” insults in my direction. Most, however, just wanted to take selfies.
I saw how these rallies were social gatherings—chances to see friends and share stories with no resemblance to reality. Cesar Sayoc, the man who sent mail bombs to CNN and prominent Democrats, had been arrested earlier in the day, so I listened in as one woman told other Trump fans that the suspect was actually a “liberal.” In fact, Sayoc was a hardcore right-winger and an obsessive fan of Trump and Fox. Sayoc’s lawyers admitted that the bomber planned “his morning workout to coincide with ‘Fox and Friends’ and his evenings to dovetail with Hannity.” During the day he lived on Facebook, where right-wing friend groups used Fox as a source of content. “Many of these groups promoted various conspiracy theories and, more generally, the idea that Trump’s critics were dangerous, unpatriotic, and evil. They deployed provocative language to depict Democrats as murderous, terroristic, and violent. Fox News furthered these arguments,” Sayoc’s lawyers said. “For example, just days before Mr. Sayoc mailed his packages, Sean Hannity said on his program that a large ‘number of Democratic leaders [were] encouraging mob violence against their political opponents.’ ”
Sayoc believed outlandish reports—like the kind that this woman was spreading about him, right in front of me at this rally. She said, “He was anti-Trump on his Facebook.” That was a lie. As for Sayoc’s van, which was plastered with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat memes, the woman proposed a full-blown conspiracy: “They put stickers on his van, like, last night.” She shouted this to anyone who would listen. And several people did.
A few minutes later, a rallygoer approached the fence and asked me, “Is Sean Hannity going to be here?” No, but he did show up on occasion. At Trump’s invitation, Hannity attended another rally a few days later, on the eve of the midterms. The Trump campaign dubbed him a “special guest.” That struck me as odd, so I asked Fox PR what was going on. Bill O’Reilly was never a “special guest” at a George W. Bush event—Ailes would have never allowed that. “Hey,” I texted a Fox News spokeswoman, “can you remind me Fox’s policy re: people like Hannity doing political rallies?”
“Hannity will be hosting his show from that location and interviewing the president,” she responded.
“But the rally literature portrays Hannity as a speaker and sponsor of the rally,” I said.
“He is not sponsoring the rally nor is he campaigning,” she said.
I stifled a laugh. Hannity campaigned for Trump every night. But management told him that he couldn’t give a speech at the rally. The news division would go nuts if he did. And Hannity accepted their terms: “To be clear,” he tweeted, “I will not be on stage campaigning with the president.”
What happened next was inevitable. Hannity received a hero’s welcome at the rally. He and Trump buttered each other up in a televised chat, then Trump took the stage and thanked the special guests who, in his mind, worked for him. He beckoned Hannity to the podium and gave him a man hug. The first words out of Hannity’s mouth were “By the way, all those people in the back are fake news.”
The crowd cheered and the Fox staffers in the press pen cringed. They were just trying to do their jobs, and the network’s biggest star was insulting them. I texted the Fox spokeswoman three face-palm emojis. She didn’t reply.
Trump called Jeanine Pirro to the stage next. Pirro “treats us very, very well,” Trump said, promoting her to “Justice Jeanine,” like she was a member of the Supreme Court. She soaked up the affection.
Offstage, Hannity and Shine high-fived at the brazen display of Hannity’s power. He defied his bosses while all of Trumpworld watched and cheered. Fox journalists were aghast, and that made the moment even more scrumptious for Hannity. “No one can stop us,” he commented to a friend. His excuse to management was that the president asked him to come up on stage. He asked: “Am I supposed to tell the president no?”
Fox was supposed to be showing off its news talent on Election Day, but November 6, 2018, was overshadowed by Hannity and Pirro’s high jinks.
“Fox News still has news in its name,” Bret Baier told Scott and Jay Wallace at a lunch that should have been celebratory but instead turned contentious.
“They embarrassed all of us,” Chris Wallace said.
This meeting had been scheduled long in advance, to get everyone together for Election Day, but the timing was fortuitous; the anchors needed to vent about the rally.
“That can never, ever happen again,” Baier said.
Scott said it wouldn’t. But the newsmen wondered how she would make sure of that.
Around this conference room table, it was evident to everyone how much Trump had altered Fox. Wallace and Baier wanted to report the way they always had. But Hannity and Pirro wanted to be a part of Trump’s never-ending campaign, and a greater number of viewers sided with them, rejecting old-fashioned rules about independence. Pirro hosted as many private fundraisers for GOP candidates as she could possibly fit into her calendar. (In fact, she got ticked off when management blocked her from accepting $20,000 checks to host state GOP fundraisers.) Hannity hobnobbed with Trump and told him whom to hire. None of this was helping Fox’s reporters; they had no idea what Trump was confiding in Hannity or vice versa, and they groaned when competitors assumed they did. “Other White House crews always come up to us asking questions, like we know everything,” a staffer grumbled to me. Too often, the Fox team stationed at the White House knew less than their rivals. On any given day CNN and NBC had more staffers on the property than Fox did. “That’s why we were behind on stories,” I was told. Sometimes a manager would ask: “We’re supposed to have this special relationship. Why are we behind on this story?” The “special relationship” didn’t apply to the news side.
Rupert’s allies insisted that he genuinely cared about the news operation. For all of his faults, he was a news junkie, the kind of guy with newspaper ink smudges on his thumbs, who liked owning the New York Post even though it lost money, because he could call in tips to Page Six. As the U.S. newspaper industry took a nosedive, he looked at buying all the big chains (Tribune, Gannett, McClatchy) because he wondered if he could swoop in and help them survive. So, he wanted Baier and Wallace on Fox’s air and needed the credibility they proffered. Rupert even stopped by Baier and Martha MacCallum’s Election Day rehearsal. He referred to Baier’s Special Report program as “the news,” occasionally telling Scott about the show, “I saw on the news last night…”
But Scott’s job was to keep the ratings up. Keeping the ratings up meant making sure Hannity and Pirro were made up and miked up at 9 p.m. to fire up the Trump faithful. So her team drafted the meekest possible reprimand—more a light tap than a wrist slap. Rupert and Lachlan OKed it. The statement said, “Fox News does not condone any talent participating in campaign events,” and called the rally “an unfortunate distraction.” It did not even name Hannity or Pirro. But it enabled Scott to tell her irate news anchors that something (weak) had been done.
Hannity was MIA on Fox’s election night broadcast, even though the network had said he would pop up during the prime time coverage. Insiders said he refused to appear, as payback for Scott’s statement.
Every so often Robert Mueller’s prosecutors dropped bombs that exploded the news cycle but barely made a dent at Fox. At the end of November Michael Cohen pleaded guilty about lying to Congress. This is just the “tip of an iceberg,” Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Fox, and “where is the rest of that iceberg? In Bob Mueller’s office.”
Napolitano was like a pesky teacher who refused to grade on a curve while everyone else handed out A’s. He liked Trump personally but liked the rule of law more—and believed every politician should be held to the same high standard. Napolitano was always talking about the seriousness and thoroughness of Mueller’s probe, while most of Fox’s other personalities called it a “hoax” like Trump wanted.
No wonder Trump could barely stand seeing his old pal on TV anymore. The two men fell out of touch. Trump’s last phone call to Napolitano had been back in June, after the legal scholar testified at a congressional hearing on “War Powers and Federal Spending.” Napolitano’s warning against executive branch overreach so surprised Senator Bernie Sanders that he approached afterward and said, “Do you really work for Fox News?” The two men were photographed together, and Napolitano’s phone rang later in the week. “How’s your new pal Bernie?” asked the Queens-born voice on the other end.
Trump trash-talked Napolitano in his calls with Hannity, but it wasn’t like the two Fox motormouths ever crossed paths or cared about each other. They might as well have worked at different networks. Hannity only booked Trump-approved lawyers who toed the anti-Mueller line, not Napolitano. The judge told friends he didn’t care—he was such an early riser, he was getting ready for bed by nine o’clock. But his bookings earlier in the day were drying up too. And that was getting to be a problem.
When the Mueller noose tightened, Fox’s talk shows pressed the fear button and fell back to the imaginary “invasion.” Banners screamed about the “BATTLE FOR THE SOUTHERN BORDER.” It was good television, but it was bad politics for Trump—most Americans weren’t nearly as panicked about the border as Fox led the president to believe. He didn’t even have 50 percent support for further wall construction. But he convinced himself that he had 80 percent support—and told his aides to recite that fake stat—through his constant viewership of TV shows that called out his failure to deliver funding for the wall. This ever-present feedback loop led him to pick fights that were politically damaging.
On December 11, 2018, Trump said he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security.” He sounded tough in front of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi; his fans loved it. Hannity and his guests used the word “fight” fourteen times in under an hour. They cheered for their fighter—until he basically backed down a week later and accepted a Senate-brokered compromise to keep the government open through the holidays. He was “bowing to political reality,” The Washington Post said. But right-wing media wanted no part of reality. Ann Coulter lit into Trump so hard that he unfollowed her on Twitter. Hannity communicated his concern more discreetly. “Our viewers will hate this,” he warned Trump by phone, according to a West Wing source.
On the morning of December 20, every hour of Fox & Friends was outwardly critical of both the House GOP and the president. “This is going to be a problem for Republicans,” guest host Jedediah Bila said. “You see a lot of people around the country saying, ‘Wait, hold on a second; you told us that you weren’t afraid to shut down the government, that’s why we like you. What happened? You just gave in right away.’ ”
Was he a fighter or a folder? Trump was going back and forth every hour, his mood dictated by what Fox put on the air.
“Fix this,” he told aides, pointing at a Fox segment paused on his DVR.
Bill Shine worked the phones, reassuring surrogates that Trump was still committed to wall funding no matter what. In the afternoon, Trump took matters into his own hands, sending word to Rush Limbaugh that he was not going to accept the compromise. Limbaugh read the message on air: “You tell Rush that if there’s no money in this, it’s getting vetoed.”
No new wall funding equaled no funding for the government. The Trump Show built suspense to a dreadful season finale on December 21, the darkest day of the year, when time and money ran out and the third partial shutdown of the year took effect at midnight. It was not an exaggeration to say that right-wing media—and its obsessions with “caravans” and “invasions”—shut down the government. The result: Government employees went without paychecks right before Christmas. The shutdown was a self-inflicted wound, one that embarrassed Trump when he eventually surrendered. But at this moment, Fox’s millionaire hosts—who’d have no trouble paying for Christmas presents—were pleased. Jeanine Pirro gave Trump a pep talk through the TV. “Mr. President,” she said, “I understand the pressure that you are under from every side, but the wall at our southern border is a promise that you made, ran on, got elected on, and must keep.”
“I am pleading with you,” she said, to “get it done.” Meaning, keep the government closed until Democrats caved and ponied up money. “This is your moment,” she snarled, “JUST DO IT.”
Trump was watching, of course. He was all alone at the White House while his family was in Florida.
On New Year’s Eve, Trump crawled back inside the television by calling into the Fox News countdown show and chatting with Pete Hegseth. Even there, Hegseth pressured him to hold steady: “Are you willing to continue the shutdown if that money does not come?”
“We are,” Trump said. “We have no choice.”
Trump was feeling the pressure from Fox.
So the shutdown continued into the new year.
On January 10, 2019, day nineteen of the government shutdown, Pete Hegseth asked a MAGA hat–wearing, toast-eating woman in Texas, “Would you describe it as a crisis?”
“It is a crisis,” she said, because “we” in Corpus Christi “have so many problems with illegals.”
When Hegseth tossed back to the studio, Doocy said the president’s supporters “do not, as we just heard, want him to cave.”
Trump heard him and tweeted straight to Doocy: “I won’t!”
He did cave a few days later. A few of his Fox fans admitted they were disappointed: Lou Dobbs went on the air with his strangely hypnotic voice and said Pelosi “has just whipped the president of the United States.” But others gave him a very long rope. Hannity, playing the inside game as he always did, dutifully spread Trump’s spin that the government was merely reopening temporarily. Don’t worry, he reassured viewers, Trump will win in the end. His fallback message was always to say “stay tuned.”
Right-wing TV stars couldn’t inspire government shutdowns and influence foreign policy without inspiring a resistance. I came to view Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters as the canary in the coal mine. Peters proudly worked at Fox News for ten years. He was a believer in Fox’s conservative mission and he was vicious toward Obama… but he wasn’t impressed by Trump either, so he didn’t fit in anymore. On March 20, 2018, he wrote a scathing memo to colleagues calling Fox a “propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.” He said he was ashamed to work there, and he quit, dynamiting the bridge on his way out.
“What Fox is doing is causing real harm to our country right now,” Peters told me. He described his former colleagues as “prostitutes” and said the president was “a danger to the republic.”
These were the words of a man who felt he’d lost his party and his network. “Fox isn’t immoral, it’s amoral,” he concluded. The network’s merger with Trump “was opportunistic. Trump was just a gift to Fox and Fox in turn is a gift to Trump.”
Peters even condemned Fox’s core fans, calling them “couch potato anarchists” who wanted to “tear things down. They want vengeance.” I’d never heard a former Fox employee talk in public about the network this way. But I had heard it in private—even from executives at 21st Century Fox. Some of them reached their own breaking points.
Joseph Azam had joined Fox’s sister company News Corp in the fall of 2015. He was a senior vice president overseeing compliance. He was proud to represent brands like The Wall Street Journal, but his exposure to Fox News—just by being in the same building and working for the Murdoch family—troubled him greatly.
Around the time of the 2016 election, “it became very profitable to kind of fall in line with the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and I was affected by that,” he said.
Azam, an Afghan-American immigrant, was so disgusted by one of Tucker Carlson’s anti-immigration commentaries, on June 29, 2017, that he responded to Tucker’s question on Twitter asking “Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here?” Azam replied: “If you come upstairs to where all the executives who run your company sit and find me I can tell you, Tucker.” Azam didn’t have a big Twitter following, but I did, so when I retweeted him, tens of thousands of people saw his message. Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, Azam’s boss, the general counsel of News Corp, David Pitofsky, hauled him in for a talk.
“You’re getting close to the line,” Pitofsky said, telling Azam not to assail the Murdoch empire’s biggest stars.
Azam took down the tweet, but the episode contributed to his decision to leave. He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Carlson before joining the company, but now he keyed into what the guy was all about. He believed Carlson was a “bona fide white supremacist.” He resigned from the company in December 2017.
Some people who worked on the Fox News floors of News Corp HQ shared Azam’s views. There was a bona fide resistance in the ranks. Correspondents and producers told me that they wished management would rein Carlson in. They cited examples like his December 2018 comment that mass immigration “makes our country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” Liberal activist groups raised hell about that one, and advertisers bailed, but Lachlan Murdoch texted Tucker to buck him up.
The alliance between these two men said everything about the state of Fox News two years into Trump’s term. There were a couple of factors at play: Lachlan shared his father’s contempt for being bullied by the “liberal media.” He didn’t want to appear to give in to left-wing ad boycotts. Also, he thought Carlson’s overarching message about immigration was worth protecting. He was rather fond of Carlson—both men fancied themselves contrarians and enjoyed philosophical conversations. They were only two years apart in age. They dined together when they happened to be in the same city.
At Lachlan’s direction, Fox PR trotted out its usual statement: “We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts.” Emboldened, Carlson doubled down: He defended his “dirtier” comments by contending that mass immigration has an environmental impact on the desert. He aired images of trash at the border and said that “thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife.” Cherry-picking? This was trash-picking. But it worked for his viewers.
Holding steady was the Fox game plan as more and more offensive things happened on the air. For Lachlan it was about both business and politics. His team called the boycott efforts “economic harassment” designed to put Fox News out of business. “We don’t hang talent out to dry,” an exec told me, “because once you cave to these lunatics, you won’t have any shows left.” The rank-and-file Fox staffers who said they loathed Carlson were just “social justice warriors,” this person said, using the pejorative term for progressives that was in vogue among conservatives.
This is what people misunderstood about Lachlan: His politics aligned pretty closely with the retrograde programming on his network. Michael Wolff used to write about Rupert’s “liberal sons” like they were equally enlightened, but that was just a reflection of what Ailes believed. There were actually huge differences between Lachlan and James’s world views.
Lachlan was always more conservative-leaning than James, “in part to ingratiate himself with his dad, in part to separate himself from his brother,” a Murdoch confidant said. Lachlan’s conservative instincts were buttressed by the people he surrounded himself with—like Hope Hicks, and the Bush White House veteran Viet Dinh, best known for drafting the post-9/11 Patriot Act, who was Fox Corp’s powerful head of legal and policy.
When I interviewed Azam about his decision to leave that world, to resign from Murdoch’s empire, he was careful to draw a distinction between fact-based conservative media and ferocious fact-free attacks.
Stories and columns from a conservative perspective were needed, he said, but smears were not. He saw “dehumanization” taking place on some of Fox’s opinion shows and an absolute lack of decency. The resistance types who remained at the company agreed with him in spirit, but most didn’t have the courage or the financial independence to say it or act on it. So they leaked instead.
A Fox News executive, who had defended the brand fiercely for a decade, looked at the prime time lineup and said, “I don’t recognize the place at all anymore.”
“Right-leaning is fine,” a news anchor remarked to me. “But we’re not leaning, we’ve fallen over.”
“Without Roger here, this place is losing its compass,” another anchor said.
The Ailes compass was crooked, but at least it existed. Ailes had had such a vise grip on the pre-Trump Fox that “what would Roger do?” was still a subject of debate two years after his death. Some thought Ailes would have maintained some distance from Trump; others thought he would have bent to Trump’s will for the sake of business. The ghost of Ailes still hovered over the channel’s content—it was gut-level politics, black and white, good and evil. The channel was more “anti-Democrat” than “pro-Trump,” which was convenient whenever Trump hit a rough patch.
“When you’re with Tucker and Sean and Laura one-on-one, they won’t defend Trump, they’ll tell you how bad Democrats are,” a former commentator said, which mirrored my own experiences with Fox talent. On Fox, “evil” Democrats were the default justification for any awfulness on the GOP side. “If,” the former commentator postulated, “the liberals are evil and they’re ruining America and they’re turning your children gay and they’re persecuting Christians, then aren’t you justified in the way you’re behaving?” It was an endless game of trumped-up whataboutism—a technique some scholars attribute to Soviet-era propagandists—that exhausted everyone except the players. The Russian political activist and Putin foe Garry Kasparov once described it this way: “If you’re a thief, accuse your enemies of thievery. If corrupt, accuse your rivals of corruption. If a coward, accuse others of cowardice. Evidence is irrelevant; the goal is to dilute the truth and the case against you with ‘everyone does it.’ ”
Propaganda, in other words.
By 2019, Fox News was many things—a vitriolic virtual community, a beleaguered news operation, a thriving right-wing website—but more than anything else it was a propaganda machine the likes of which the United States had never seen before. The pollution from this machine showed up in poll after poll. When NBC and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal asked if the president had been “honest and truthful” about the Russia probe, only 1 percent of regular CNN viewers said yes. Among regular Fox viewers, 84 percent said yes, he’d been truthful. His lies were so voluminous and so well documented that only one thing could explain this gap: The omnipresence of TV hosts like Hannity.
The propaganda worked.