On March 26, 2020, the people of the United States desperately needed a leader. Instead, they got Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.
The day began with a dreaded round number: 1,000 confirmed deaths from the novel coronavirus. Every six minutes another American died from the disease, and everyone knew the true number was even higher, since many died at home without being tested. By nighttime, the official death toll reached 1,195. The suffering was most pronounced in Trump’s hometown, Queens, New York, at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where sick residents lined up in the cold and prayed for a chance to see a doctor. Elmhurst was already out of beds, and would soon be out of ventilators too. The hallways were jammed with patients who could barely stand or say their own names. The scene was far worse than any of the vague, hopeful pablum issued by the White House would have led you to believe, and that’s why two young doctors risked their jobs to alert the public. Dr. Colleen Smith filmed inside the hospital on her iPhone and sent the video to The New York Times. Her colleague Dr. Ashley Bray told a Times reporter of the “apocalyptic” atmosphere as patient after patient died despite heroic efforts. Bray’s description on page one of the March 26 edition marked a turning point in the public’s understanding of the crisis.
But the president didn’t read the story. Months earlier, he’d proudly claimed that he canceled the White House’s subscriptions to the Times. Whenever the paper published a painfully true critique of the administration, Trump and his media allies at Fox News claimed the Times was “fake” and “failing.” But the beleaguered and shrinking pool of committed journalists at Fox knew that was a lie. They wished sources like Bray and Smith would call them instead of the Times, but they knew the misconduct of their prime time peers made that impossible. The rich-beyond-belief stars like Hannity had downplayed the virus and now looked just as ignorant as the president. Fox correspondents tried in vain to report the news anyway, sharing Bray’s “apocalyptic” quote five times on five different shows. But viewers like Trump had been trained, by Fox, to disbelieve what other news outlets said, and they didn’t want to believe it was that bad.
There was a severe deficit of trust, including at the top. Trump didn’t even trust the news anchors on Fox News. They had a tendency to be “nasty,” he told aides, and some of them belonged on CNN or MSNBC, not on the network he promoted to his tens of millions of followers. To be clear, Trump didn’t jabber about Fox out of the goodness of his own heart. He needed Fox. He depended on propagandists like Hannity to tell him what he wanted to hear. He depended on Fox to keep the walls of his alternative reality intact.
That’s why the president was scheduled to call in to Hannity’s show at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Nine o’clock couldn’t come soon enough for Trump—that day’s daily press briefing on the Covid-19 crisis had been a disaster. He’d gone out before the cameras at 5:30 and told the public to “relax.” He shared his affections for NFL quarterback Tom Brady. And he attacked the “corrupt” news media. “I wish the news could be—could be real,” he said, insulting the journalists spread out before him in the briefing room due to the government’s social distancing guidelines—guidelines that he flagrantly ignored. After thirty-nine misleading minutes, he left the briefing early, ordered dinner, and waited for his turn on Hannity. The power imbalance was something to behold: The president had the joint chiefs and the cabinet and any number of world leaders at his beck and call, but when it came time for an interview on Fox News, he was just another caller who needed to be patched into the control room switchboard. Hannity started the show with his usual sermon about Democrats endangering the country. On this night, he ripped into New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Hannity accused the two Democrats of “politicizing this national emergency” by criticizing Trump and said “both of you need to stop.” Then he politicized the national emergency himself with the help of his caller, Donald from Queens.
“Is he there?” Hannity asked his producers. He heard nothing, and momentarily freaked out. He waited for the control room to tell him what to do.
Then came a Voice of God, just the savior this host needed: “I am, I’m right here. Hi, Sean.”
“Mr. President!” Hannity exclaimed. “Thank you…”
And they were off. Trump began by flattering his facilitator: He claimed that he had postponed a critical phone call with Chinese president Xi Jinping in order to talk with Hannity.
“That shows the power of… that shows you have the number one rated show on television,” Trump said.
The ratings claim was a lie, since Hannity’s show had always been eclipsed by numerous other television shows, from NBC Nightly News to American Idol, Wheel of Fortune to Survivor. But Trump was only talking about cable. He didn’t care nearly as much about broadcast networks. He was a cable guy. His call with Hannity was the highlight of his day.
This interview, if you could even call it that, was a love-in and a lie-fest. But there was a little bit of truth embedded in Trump’s first answer. He really did keep the Chinese president waiting. “I am talking to him at ten-thirty, right after this call,” Trump told Hannity.
Beijing noticed Trump’s televised stunt and kept him waiting for a while after 10:30, according to a White House source. Trump tweeted at 1:19 in the morning, Eastern time, that he “just finished a very good conversation with President Xi.”
Unfortunately it was his forty-minute chat with Hannity that was more consequential to the body politic. Trump’s remarks proved that he still didn’t fundamentally grasp the urgency of the pandemic. He professed doubt about the computer models that had led Cuomo to plead for thirty thousand ventilators. “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said. “I don’t believe you need forty thousand or thirty thousand ventilators.”
Ultimately the state of New York did not need thirty thousand ventilators—because of heroic actions by healthcare workers and drastic steps taken by millions of other New Yorkers. Without massive social distancing, many more ventilators, and chaplains and coffins, would have been needed. But Trump’s default setting was disbelief. It was where he was most comfortable. When Dr. Bray heard about his denialism, she muttered, “What an asshole.”
Some of Hannity’s colleagues tried to stand up to the nonsense. Dr. Nicole Saphier, a radiologist who doubled as a medical commentator for Fox News, went on the air the next day and said, “I know that there’s a shortage of ventilators.” Network management encouraged this kind of thing; they wanted guests to rebut the president’s reckless remarks. They wanted to be able to say that Fox was home to all points of view. But they also knew that Saphier’s comments at one in the afternoon were seen by a fraction of the audience that Hannity had. Prime time had the power. And management had no control over prime time.
The day after his on-air powwow with Hannity, the president called the host with a question: “How’d we do?”
Hannity knew the real meaning of the question was “How did we rate?”
The two men spoke by phone almost every day, but the purpose of this particular call was disgraceful. In the midst of a crippling pandemic, on a day when another 393 Americans would die gasping for air without their loved ones by their side, the president wanted to know about his ratings.
The ratings for Hannity the night before were higher than usual, but it wasn’t primarily due to Trump’s presence, it was due to the pandemic. On the night Trump called in, Tucker Carlson ended his 8 p.m. hour with 5 million viewers, and Hannity started with 5.6 million, which means about one in ten viewers tuned in specifically to see Hannity and the president. The rest would have been watching anyway. Once POTUS was on the phone, viewership ticked up to 5.7 million, and by the time he hung up, it had ticked down to 5.4 million, the same way some Trump rallygoers always left before the end of the show. The truth was, the president was not a huge ratings magnet anymore. Almost no one flipped from CNN or MSNBC to see him speak on Fox. Trump had a base, the base was hooked on Fox, and the base wasn’t growing. But Hannity didn’t say any of that to Trump. He put a positive spin on the numbers. Then Trump had another question: What about the ratings for his daily briefings?
Despite the pair’s purported opposition to the Times, someone had slipped Trump a copy of the publication’s story titled “Trump’s Briefings Are a Ratings Hit. Should Networks Cover Them Live?” He wanted to know if the story was legit. To be clear, most people weren’t watching the briefings because of Trump, they were watching because they were worried about their health. But Hannity didn’t tell Trump that—he told Trump that the briefings were ratings sensations. They were even bigger than his rallies!
And the fact that some newsrooms were having debates about whether to show the briefings? Even better. It was a new episode of Trump Versus the Media. Easy fodder for Hannity, something fun to talk about, a diversion from the vicious virus. Trump went on to tout his ratings (“so high,” “record ratings,” “through the roof”) seven different times during the height of the pandemic. It was grotesque.
And it was partly Hannity’s fault. On March 26, as on so many other days, Hannity did Trump a disservice by feeding his ego. A real friend would have advised him not to say a word about TV ratings during a national emergency. Focus on the federal response. Celebrate the healthcare workers on the front lines. But Trump and Hannity brought out the worst in one another. Trump programmed Hannity’s show and Hannity produced Trump’s presidency. Hannity fed misinformation to Trump and Trump fed it right back to Hannity. In early 2020 this feedback loop had life-and-death consequences. At a political rally in South Carolina on February 28 the president said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it.” He likened the Democrats’ conduct to “the impeachment hoax” and said, “this is their new hoax.”
It was his new favorite word, on the trail and on Twitter: HOAX. He used it almost every day, and so did Hannity. They radicalized each other and their viewers.
Trump mostly employed the word in connection with impeachment and Russia. He used it just once in the context of the pandemic, but it was still outrageous. Amanda Carpenter, the Ted Cruz communications director turned CNN commentator who wrote a book about Trump’s make-you-question-your-reality techniques, known as gaslighting, said she thought the “nonsense about calling it a ‘hoax’ initially but then saying he was only referring to the Democrats’ ‘overreaction’ was really strong gaslighting. He clearly wanted the idea of a ‘hoax’ associated with the virus.” And it wasn’t just Trump, Carpenter said; it was parrots like Hannity too: “They were downplaying the threat and acting like anyone who was worried about it wasn’t sincere and this was all a scam to get Trump. That’s something that stuck and did tremendous damage.”
Indeed, Hannity used the same frame as Trump on March 9, when he bashed Democrats and members of the media for exaggerating the threat of the virus. “They’re scaring the living hell out of people and I see it again as like, ‘Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,’ ” he said.
“We’ve never called the virus a hoax,” Hannity insisted nine days later.
No, technically he did not. What he did was even worse.
Sean Hannity is the most powerful person at Fox in the Trump age. When people asked him who was in charge of the channel, he said, “Me.” And most people at the channel agreed with him.
He worked from home most days, thirty-eight long miles from Manhattan, in a $10.5 million mansion on the North Shore of Long Island. Hannity loved it out there. There was only one way in and one way out of his village, and a police station that kept track of every car that drove by. Billy Joel lived half a mile down the road. Hannity was close to his favorite fishing spots and the airstrip where he kept his private jet. He had a pool and a boat dock in the backyard, and a tennis court nestled in the woods nearby. One of his favorite toys? His helicopter.
Hannity originally wanted to be a radio star. In the early nineties he was a Rush-Limbaugh-in-training—a right-wing radio host who hoped to be a tenth as rich as Rush someday. A Long Island native with a blue-collar New York accent, he learned the medium at UC Santa Barbara, where he landed a weekly show on the campus radio station. If you scour the university’s website now, you’ll find no mention of this famous ex-student, one of the most influential men to ever walk the quad. That’s because he never graduated from Santa Barbara, or any other college. In 1989 his radio show was halted when he made anti-gay remarks and claimed “the media” was covering up the truth about AIDS. When this controversy resurfaced in 2017, he expressed regret for “ignorant” remarks in the past. But at the time he used the episode as a launchpad. Hannity billed himself as “the most talked-about college radio host in America” and scored a hosting gig at a right-wing station in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s where he met his wife, Jill. After two years he moved to a bigger market, Atlanta, where he shouted into a mic about Bill Clinton every day and snagged the ear of the second most important person in his life: Roger Ailes. Fox News was in need of a young Limbaugh. Ailes shipped him up to New York for a tryout. “He saw something that I didn’t even think I knew I had,” Hannity told me in a 2011 interview.
Hannity’s Long Island mansion and his oceanfront Naples, Florida, penthouse are two über-expensive symbols of how Ailes changed his life. Nowadays, Hannity is a living connection to Fox’s past—he’s the only prime time host at Fox News who was there on launch day and is still there nearly twenty-five years later. His tenure and ratings give him tremendous power. He can get almost anything he wants. In a mid-2010s contract negotiation, he won the right to work from home: Fox installed a state-of-the-art studio so that he could helm his nightly TV show from his mansion, the same way he already did his afternoon radio show. Radio kept him tethered to Republican voters—and TV kept him tethered to Trump. He did it all in relative seclusion; by 2019, he rarely ever came into the office. “Sean hosts from Long Island most of the time,” a Fox executive said. But most viewers had no clue. When the great shutdown began in March 2020, it was a good thing to have—Fox scrambled to set up home studios for forty other hosts and guests, and Hannity already had one.
Hannity’s friends told me that he was burnt out for long stretches of the Trump presidency. Being the president’s “shadow” chief of staff, as he was known around the White House, could be a thrill, but it was also a serious burden. He counseled Trump at all hours of the day: One of Hannity’s confidants said the president treated him like Melania, like a wife in a sexless marriage. Arguably he treated Hannity better than he did the First Lady. Hannity’s producers marveled at his influence and access. “It’s a powerful thing to be someone’s consigliere,” one producer said. “I hear Trump talk at rallies, and I hear Sean,” a family friend commented.
Hannity chose this life, so no one felt sorry for him, but the stress took its toll. “Hannity would tell you, off off off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates said. Another colleague concurred: “Hannity has said to me, more than once, ‘he’s crazy.’ ”
But Hannity’s commitment to GOP priorities and commitment to his own business model meant that he could never say so publicly. And if one of his friends went on the record and quoted Hannity questioning Trump’s mental fitness, Hannity would end that friendship.
Early on in the Trump age, Hannity gained weight and vaped incessantly, both of which some members of his inner circle blamed on Trump-related pressure. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Hannity commented to a colleague. He was very sensitive to trolls’ comments about the added pounds, especially from his chest up, since that’s all viewers saw of him most nights, when he was live from his palace. (For the record, I can relate to stress eating.)
Hannity’s calls with POTUS were a never-ending stream of grievance and gossip. Trump was a run-on sentence, so prone to rambling that “I barely get a word in,” Hannity told one of his allies. He sometimes spoke with the president before the show and again afterward, usually in the 10 p.m. hour, when Trump would rate his guests and recommend talking points and themes for the following day. Trump wanted more of Gregg Jarrett, more of Dan Bongino, more of Newt Gingrich—in other words, the toadiest toads.
Hannity swore that no one knew the truth about his relationship with Trump and sneered at reporters, such as yours truly, who described his essential role. He certainly didn’t disclose his role in Trumpworld the way a media ethicist would recommend. But once in a while the curtain slipped and his own colleagues pointed out the extraordinary position he held. As the coronavirus crisis deepened in March 2020, Geraldo Rivera said to Hannity on the air, “I want you to tell the president, when you talk to him tonight, that Geraldo said ‘Mr. President, for the good of the nation, stop shaking hands.’ It’s a bad example. We don’t need it.”
Geraldo was right. But Trump didn’t want to hear it. And Hannity didn’t make a point of emphasizing it. Instead, he used his perch to defend Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic and every other failure of the Trump presidency.
Inside Fox, even though staffers rarely saw him, Hannity had a reputation as a nice, generous guy. He paid bonuses to his staff out of his own deep pockets. He ordered meals and care packages to the homes of colleagues who lost loved ones. He even offered to hire a private investigator when an acquaintance died in a mysterious car crash. When the network descended on New Hampshire for primary election coverage, Hannity footed the bill for the open bar. A member of Sean’s production crew, a Democrat, quipped to me, “I want to fucking hate him so bad. But he’s so nice to me.”
I believed him. But I still struggled to square Hannity’s warm and fuzzy reputation with the man I saw on TV and occasionally in person. While deep into the research for this book in December 2019, I ran into Hannity at a holiday party hosted by the TV news tracking website Mediaite. We were upstairs at the Lambs Club, a stately Manhattan restaurant wrapped with red leather banquettes on 44th Street. Hannity greeted me by putting both his hands on my shoulders and exclaiming: “Humpty!” His nickname for me was Humpty Dumpty. I looked him in the eyes and asked if he ever felt bad about the name-calling. “No,” he shot back. He took his hands off my shoulders and moved toward the bar.
It was eight o’clock, and Hannity worked the room like an old pro, dressed down in a Fox-branded hoodie zipped to his chest. He hugged CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and chatted with media reporters and even said hi to Trump antagonist George Conway. This room was the embodiment of the so-called “media mob” he attacked every weeknight—and he looked like he didn’t want to leave it. I marveled at the scene and wondered what Hannity’s viewers would think if they knew he was here. At 8:30 his PR person pushed him toward the door, insisting to me that he had to get to the studio for his nine o’clock show. I later realized that the PR person had lied to me—Hannity had already pretaped his show before coming to the party.
It is strange, and scary, to think back to those pre–social distancing days. Strains of the novel coronavirus were already spreading in China, and U.S. intelligence agencies were already picking up signs of a public health crisis in the making.
At the time I’m writing this, in April 2020, ten blocks from Fox News HQ in midtown Manhattan, I hear sirens wailing in the distance. The hospital in my neighborhood, where my two children were born, has fenced off half the street and installed a triage tent for Covid-19 patients. My wife, Jamie, now hosts her New York City morning show from our guest bedroom. There are dozens of reasons why the United States lagged so far behind other countries in preparations for the pandemic. Some are cultural, some are economic, some are political. But there is no doubt that one of the reasons is the Trump-Fox feedback loop. When the virus was silently spreading across the United States, some of Fox’s biggest stars denied and downplayed the threat posed by the virus; Trump echoed them; and they echoed back. “The thing that’s going to end this is the warmer weather,” Fox jester Greg Gutfeld said on February 24. “Thank God for global warming,” cohost Jesse Watters wisecracked. “It’s going to disappear,” Trump said on February 27. “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
Most Americans knew that Trump was untrustworthy, but the Fox base still trusted him. They also trusted Hannity, who dismissed “coronavirus hysteria,” and Laura Ingraham, who called Democrats the “panDEMic party,” and Watters, who said, “I’m not afraid of the coronavirus and no one else should be that afraid either.” Fox’s longest-tenured medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, told Hannity on March 6, “at worst, at worst, worst case scenario, it could be the flu.”
This was shockingly irresponsible stuff—and Fox executives knew it, because by the beginning of March, they were taking precautions that belied Siegel’s just-the-flu statement. The network canceled a big event for hundreds of advertisers, instituted deep cleanings of the office, and began to put a work-from-home plan in place. Yet Fox’s stars kept sending mixed messages to millions of viewers. This went on and on until March 13, when Fox & Friends cohost Ainsley Earhardt claimed it’s “actually the safest time to fly” and guest Jerry Falwell Jr. said people were “overreacting” to the virus. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott finally asserted herself and hauled the show’s producers into her office. No more denialism, she said. But she was two or three weeks too late, just like Trump was.
As ICU admissions surged and the death toll rose, Fox’s most vociferous critics said the network had blood on its hands. Four out of five Fox viewers were over the age of 55, in the demographic most at risk. Plus, the network was favored by men, with 54 percent male viewership, and Covid-19 was much deadlier among men. The network braced for lawsuits over its coverage.
No one will ever be able to say, with absolute certainty, how many Fox News devotees died from the virus. And it is impossible to know how much an individual’s choices are influenced by the TV hosts they trust. But it is readily apparent that Fox failed its viewers at key moments during the pandemic. Just as doctors are taught to do no harm, journalists are trained to “minimize harm,” in the words of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical code. Some Fox staffers privately admitted that the don’t-worry tone of the talking heads was harmful.
Plus, Fox’s coverage had spillover effects because of the network’s influence in the Trump White House and throughout the federal government. It is impossible to know how many Americans who died as a result of Covid-19 would have survived if the government had acted more swiftly in February and March. But it is obvious that Fox’s fingerprints were all over the government’s response.
For the past five years, I’ve had a front row seat to the Trumpification of Fox and the Foxification of America. Never has it been more important than right now, in 2020, when the president received fucked-up medical advice and misinformation from unqualified talking heads on Fox and shared even worse advice with millions of viewers. I didn’t think he could sink any lower—until he mused about injecting disinfectants into the body, and health officials across the country had to warn people not to listen to him.
Like so many Americans, I’m shocked and angry. So what you’ll get in these pages is not the Stelter in a navy blue blazer that you see on CNN. I’m writing this book as a citizen; as an advocate for factual journalism; and as a new dad who thinks about what kind of world my children are going to inherit. This story is about a rot at the core of our politics. It’s about an ongoing attack on the very idea of a free and fair press. It’s about the difference between news and propaganda. It’s about the difference between state media and the fourth estate. So excuse me if I swear a little—but I am alarmed, and you should be too.
Before going any further, let me share where I’m coming from. I’m obsessed with news. Always have been. In 1995, when I turned ten, I logged on to the World Wide Web using dial-up AOL and a computer set up by my grandpa. My first stabs at journalism were homemade websites about Goosebumps books and Nintendo video games. From my basement in Maryland, I would tie up the home phone line calling companies for video game gossip. I would send instant messages to people with the last name Stine trying to meet family members of author R. L. Stine. I eventually found R. L. and his son Matt. They were two of my first “sources.”
My dad, Mark, was an appliance repairman. He drove an hour south to Washington every day and replaced stoves and dishwashers in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. In 2001, after ample lobbying on my part, he took me to George W. Bush’s inauguration. I treasure the memory because his heart gave out a week later while coaching my youngest brother’s basketball team. He slipped into a coma and died. My mom somehow got me and my brothers through it. And she supported my journalism fixation in every way she could, even when I ran up expensive phone bills with all-night dial-up modem calls.
Through high school, through college, my drug of choice was news. I slept on the couch with the TV on when Iraq was bombed. I sat in the studio audience for Crossfire. And I created a website dedicated to cable news. I launched the blog on New Year’s Day 2004, cloaked in the name CableNewser because I figured nobody would take me seriously if they knew I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman at Towson University in Maryland! The blog took off. Fox’s PR people saw it as an opportunity—they started to send me overnight ratings data showing how Fox was trouncing CNN and MSNBC. I called this data The Scoreboard. I launched the blog for fun, not profit, but I did make a few quick bucks using a donation system that was in vogue at the time. The most generous donation came from Tucker Carlson, who sent $100. I can’t remember if I thanked him. So: thank you, Tucker.
Within six months I had revealed my real name, renamed the blog TVNewser, and visited the cable networks in person, making connections that have helped me to this day. I became friendly with Sean Hannity, for example, and learned some important lessons about broadcasting from him. When I left my blogging days behind and joined The New York Times in 2007, he sent me a congrats note: “Your hard work and dedication has really paid off, and you should be very proud. Also the fact that you did all of this while going to school makes this even more incredible.” There were other notes like that too, but we labeled some of our emails “off the record,” so I can’t share them.
Other cable news stars reached out too. In 2006 Carlson booked me on his MSNBC talk show and dubbed me “the most powerful person in television news.” That was never true about me, but it might be true about Tucker now, at least in right-wing TV. He sometimes even beats Hannity in the ratings. The guy hosts for one hour a day and makes about $10 million a year.
Back while I was blogging for beer money in the mid-2000s, cable news became an incredibly profitable business. Fox locked down the conservative audience and provided cover for Bush while MSNBC began to find its liberal voice. I continued to chronicle this at the Times, and then I lived it at CNN starting in 2013. When I joined the network to anchor the Sunday morning program Reliable Sources, I immediately realized how little I actually knew about TV. One month in, I bumped into Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes at a party and told him I was struggling with the teleprompter. He told me to stop squinting and “move the fucking camera closer!”
“You don’t work for the equipment,” he said, “the equipment works for you. You’re talent now.”
“Talent” is a discomfiting term for anchors who just want to report the news, but it’s de rigueur in the TV business. I quickly learned the other lingo: A video clip is a “soundbite,” or “SOT,” short for “sound on tape.” A live interview segment is a “hit.” A great guest is a “good talker.” A waiting area for the guest is a “green room.” A “good talker” waits in the “green room” to “do a hit,” unless they get canceled, or “killed.” Sometimes, when I can tell my segment is going to be bumped due to breaking news, I’ll ask, “Am I dead yet?”
Aside from having to wear makeup and having to deal with death threats (more on that later), I love TV. At CNN, I cover the wide world of media, including Fox, just like I did at TVNewser and the Times, which means that I keep in touch with scores of sources. And that’s ultimately why I’m here writing this book. I felt compelled to write it because of what I heard from inside Fox—from anchors and producers and reporters who were appalled by Trump’s gradual takeover of the network. They said management encouraged pro-Trump propaganda and discouraged real reporting, and they said many staffers went right along with it.
“They are lying about things we’re seeing with our own eyes,” one well-known Fox commentator said, embarrassed about their colleagues’ conduct.
“We surrendered to Trump,” one anchor said to me with remorse in his voice. “We just surrendered.”
“What does Trump have on Fox?” another anchor asked, convinced there was a conspiracy in play. Dirty pictures of Rupert Murdoch?
In the course of my reporting over the last three years, I didn’t find any dirty pictures. But I did find a lot of people who felt dirty. Some were desperate to talk. Others were terrified. Ailes made people paranoid and punished those he suspected of leaking. That same fear of retribution was still very real even in the post-Ailes years. Employees suspected their work phones were tapped and assumed their emails were monitored by management. I cannot overstate the level of paranoia among Fox employees.
And yet many people—from anchors to assistants—still spoke with me because they wanted the truth to come out. One day I schmoozed with Lachlan Murdoch at a cocktail party; the next day I heard from a production assistant who said she couldn’t “take it anymore.” In the course of reporting this book I spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, plus 180 former staffers and others with direct ties to the network. Their frustration was palpable. Staffers described a TV network that had gone off the rails. Some even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks from, had become dangerous to democracy.
See, anyone who views Fox News as a mere cable channel, no different than AMC or TBS, is missing what it really is. Fox is an addictive substance. For its biggest fans, Fox is an identity. Almost a way of life. Hardcore viewers rarely change the channel or seek out a balanced media diet. They compare the network to a church, to a senior center, to a city hall. They flock to it for reinforcement, for inspiration, for comfort food. “To some, Fox is family,” sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote in her study of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana. She found that the channel “stands next to industry, state government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political culture all its own.” That’s a lot of responsibility, and in the Trump era the producers regularly failed to live up to it.
Anchors and commentators felt excruciating pressure to please the Fox base—and avoid their wrath. There’s no pleasant way to say this: Many of the viewers radicalized over time. A 2019 PRRI survey found significant differences between “Fox News Republicans” and other Republicans who said Fox was not their primary news source. “Fox News Republicans” were much more closely wedded to Trump, with 55 percent saying there was nothing Trump could do to lose their approval. This was “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” level of support. Of the Republicans who relied on other sources of information, only 29 percent made such an extreme statement.
Fox News was always on one level a political project, but the staffers who confided in me were disturbed by how thoroughly Fox and the GOP were merged by Trump, Hannity, and a handful of other power players. Many of the staffers said America deserved a much more responsible version of a conservative news network. They said Fox should have a traditional standards and practices department and a commitment to fact-checking and a leadership team that accounted for its mistakes. I agreed with them. But would anyone have watched that network?
Most of the sources for this book only spoke on condition of anonymity. I don’t take confidential sourcing lightly, but it was necessary in these situations, because people wouldn’t speak at all otherwise. I laughed several times when I heard folks on Fox bemoaning the use of anonymous sources, knowing those very same people were confidential informants for me. That’s how this hypocritical business works.
Now let me tell you what I learned.
Credit and blame for Fox News begins at the very top, with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.
Rupert, or KRM as he’s known around the company (his given first name is Keith), is the octogenarian patriarch. Lachlan is the favorite son and CEO of Fox Corp, which has a market cap of $15 billion. The sprawling Fox News operation is like their ATM. The network is on a path to $2 billion in profits, according to sources I interviewed.
And let me tell you something: You probably chip in for Fox News, even if you despise it. Fox’s foundation is a fantastic combination of advertising revenue and subscriber fees. Almost every cable and satellite subscriber in the country pays two bucks each month for Fox News and Fox Business. No cable operator has ever seriously flirted with dropping Fox to save money because, among other reasons, they believe the right-wing backlash would cripple their business. Before the pandemic struck, Rupert banked $29 million from Fox annually. Lachlan made $23 million. Father and son ran broadcast and local TV divisions and invested in new streaming ventures, but their paychecks largely came from Fox News. The news channel’s success kept the private planes fueled up. It kept the hedges trimmed at Lachlan’s newly acquired $150 million Bel-Air mansion.
Some of Trump’s most powerful confidants, or as I call them, wingmen, made even more than the execs. Hannity cleared $30 million a year from Fox—on top of the money he made for his daily radio show. Bret Baier made $12 million a year. Laura Ingraham, who hasn’t been there as long, netted closer to $10 million. Some of Fox’s most popular talking heads made more than half a million each. They were called contributors and they were paid to be reliable (to say yes when bookers call) and monogamous (to say no to every other network). Many hosts and contributors leveraged their Fox platforms for book contracts and speaking tours that could pay millions.
With an endless stream of cash came endless ways to keep the wingmen happy. Judge Andrew Napolitano got a wood-paneled office with custom-built bookshelves for all of his constitutional law tomes. Sarah Huckabee Sanders got a home studio in Little Rock. Carlson got to host from wherever he pleased—like the middle of a forest in Maine, where he has a summer home on an island in the middle of Bryant Pond, ninety minutes north of Portland. He took a boat from “Carlson Island” to the mainland to host Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he decried so-called “elites” who wall themselves off from the rest of the world. Instead of a wall, he has a moat.
The money also came with constraints. Fox staffers lived in constant fear of alienating the audience. Producers knew that the “base” couldn’t stand to see bad Trump news in the banner and couldn’t bear to hear too many liberals speak for too long. That may be the single most important thing to understand about Fox: Everyone there is profoundly afraid of losing the audience and the resulting piles of cash.
“They’re making too much money to change,” said one veteran producer who resigned in disgust.
“Fox News is not a ‘news network.’ Don’t think of it as a network at all,” said a veteran host. “It’s a profit machine.”
Sometimes money was a silencer. During the impeachment inquiry, Napolitano said Trump had confessed to criminal behavior and should be impeached. This was the “wrong” opinion at Fox, and he was punished by not being booked on shows. Napolitano complained and the execs blew him off. “He should go home and count his money,” one manager said to me snidely. Shut up, and take your check.
Sometimes the money was a balm. In 2013 Ailes agreed to pay Shep Smith around $15 million a year in part to appease Smith because he was demoted to make room for Megyn Kelly. “They bought people off, it’s as simple as that,” the head of a rival network said.
But money didn’t solve every problem. After Ailes was ousted and Trump was elected, Lachlan Murdoch was willing to pay upward of $25 million each year for four years to keep Kelly. She left money on the table—about $30 million—by fleeing to NBC for a three-year, $23 million-a-year deal. And when Shep hit his breaking point, he walked away from his contract with a year and a half still to go, apparently giving up more than $15 million. Both anchors challenged the prevailing Fox belief that money cures all.
One member of the Murdoch family also hit a breaking point. Lachlan’s brother, James, just fifteen months apart in age, was a world apart in his political views. In the Trump age, his disgust with Fox News was a big factor in his departure from the family business. Trump split up families—even billionaire families.
It’s worth stating the obvious here: Trump’s entanglement with Fox has no historical precedent. Never before has a TV network effectively produced the president’s intelligence briefing and staffed the federal bureaucracy. Never before has a president promoted a single TV channel, asked the hosts for advice behind closed doors, and demanded for them to be fired when they step out of line. This story has all the makings of a farcical drama: a dysfunctional White House, a delusional president, and a drama-filled network misinforming him from morning through night.
“It’s hard to think of a similarly close relationship between a president and a single outlet,” historian Jon Meacham told me in the first weeks of the Trump presidency. “Politicians have always had favored reporters to whom they leaked, but I really think you would have to go all the way back to the overtly partisan press of the nineteenth century to find a parallel.”
Fox News wasn’t always like this. For twenty years, the network was conservative without being conspiratorial, at least most of the time. It was patriotic without being propagandistic. Now, though, at the time I’m writing this, three-plus years into the Trump presidency, Fox is a chest-thumping house ad for the MAGA agenda. Trump props up the network and the network props up Trump. Anchors and guests who point out Trump’s lies get marginalized. Commentators who cover up his failings and foibles get promoted.
While the network gives the Trump administration a huge boost, it also creates tension within the White House. Trump’s obsession with the opinion shows causes chaos when he latches on to impossible and downright illegal policy ideas. Aides begrudge the fact that Hannity often has more power than they do. But they watch too, because they need to know what the boss is hearing and what mood he’s going to be in. They try to get certain officials booked on certain shows with the knowledge that Trump can be easily manipulated by what he sees on the air.
Hannity is just one member of this crazy cable news cabinet. While he deserved credit for getting longtime Fox News commentator John Bolton hired as national security advisor, Carlson got the credit when Bolton eventually fell out of favor with Trump. The sacking of Jeff Sessions? Jeanine Pirro was in Trump’s ear for that one. The resignation of Kirstjen Nielsen? Lou Dobbs was central in it. Pat Cipollone leading the president’s legal team? Laura Ingraham was instrumental.
But the average news consumer still does not understand just how wedded Fox and Trump are. The average voter doesn’t know just how many of Trump’s actions and inactions are dictated by the network. Frankly the average political journalist doesn’t watch Fox often enough to really get it either. I frequently read stories by White House correspondents that describe unvetted White House hires and unhinged policy decisions and unglued tweets but leave out the cause: Fox’s influence.
The only outlet that dedicates itself to keeping track is Media Matters for America, a progressive group founded by David Brock to monitor and confront conservative media. In 2019 the group’s senior fellow Matt Gertz counted every single time Trump tweeted in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program and found at least 657 instances in a single year. Fox hated Media Matters, but Gertz’s data checked out. He said he kept count because so much of “what they are saying is impacting the President of the United States and, through him, our daily lives.”
Trump’s TV-watching time was coded in his internal schedules as “Executive Time.” He watched, he tweeted, he called Hannity, and he watched some more. The decisions that most seriously damaged his presidency could arguably be traced to his TV habits. For example, Gertz said, “Trump’s hatred for Ukraine seems to have originated with Sean Hannity’s show telling him that Clinton had colluded with that country in 2016.” The end result: impeachment.
Fox’s influence was constant. When he threatened North Korea and said he had a bigger “button” than Kim Jong Un, it was because of a Fox segment about Kim’s “nuclear button.” When he told Iran to “never threaten the United States again!” it was because of a Fox segment about Iran’s saber-rattling.
Trump granted pardons because of Fox. He attacked Google because of Fox. He raged against migrant “caravans” because of Fox. He accused public servants of treason because of Fox. And he got the facts wrong again and again because of mistakes and misreporting by the network. When Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash, Trump sent condolences but got the death toll wrong, because of Fox.
And then there was the coronavirus.
“Hazardous to our viewers.” “Dangerous.” “Unforgivable.”
Those are some of the words Fox News staffers used to describe the network’s early coverage of the pandemic in the United States.
When Covid-19 began to attack the lungs of patients in Wuhan, China, a clock started ticking in the United States. The virus was coming; it was only a matter of time. In the words of epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant, “the warnings were everywhere.” But Trump failed to muster a forceful federal government response. He was too preoccupied by the impeachment trial that he and Hannity both called a “hoax.” Then they both used the same word when Democrats raised alarms about the virus.
“Hoax is a potent word, in being an angry and mean one,” linguist John McWhorter told me. “It’s the quintessence of Trumpian self-expression.”
Before running for president, Trump used the word to dismiss global warming. It is “a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted in 2013. He continued to shout about “global warming hoaxsters” in 2014, then dropped it for a while. “Fake news” became his mantra after the 2016 election. When its effects started to wear off, he shifted to hoax.
“Hoax” carries something that “fake” doesn’t, McWhorter said: “Hoax carries an air of accusation, of transgression. The hoaxer is being accused of deliberately hoodwinking the public, of being a Barnum. FAKE is more flexible—the news could end up ‘fake’ on the basis of assorted factors, such as blinkered ideology, mission creep, there being multiple perspectives, etc. But to say HOAX clears away all of that nuance and just calls people out as malevolent.”
It was a logical leap for a pathological president who indulged illogical conspiracy theories and led a war on truth.
And my reporting indicates that he was lulled into complacency by Fox’s downplaying of the disease.
Trump initially didn’t want, or couldn’t afford, to believe the horrors that doctors like Dr. Smith and Dr. Bray described at Elmhurst. True to form, he finally came to grips with the deadly reality when he saw it on TV. “I’ve been watching them bring in trailer trucks—freezer trucks, they’re freezer trucks, because they can’t handle the bodies, there are so many of them,” he said on March 29. “This is essentially in my community, in Queens, Queens, New York.”
As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show. “You can see it on Twitter,” she said. “People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they’re not seeing—in the ones that I’m seeing—they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They’re not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what’s going inside the hospital.”
Bray’s reaction: She wished her hospital was empty. “This is worse than war,” she said.
In Geneva, the head of the World Health Organization said countries like the U.S. were in the eye of the Covid-19 storm. In Washington, Dr. Anthony Fauci went on TV and warned Americans to brace for 100,000-plus deaths from the coronavirus. He said millions could be infected. But the president had something else on his mind. He tweeted that his ratings were “so high.”
This was the Fox News presidency in action. Here’s how it happened.