TELEVISION NEWS
Over the years, Ailes had always combined his political and corporate consulting with television production. In addition to his stint at TVN, he produced Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, NBC’s precursor to Late Night with David Letterman; made some highly regarded documentaries that were sold to stations around the country; and did consulting work for local stations, including the Washington Post’s affiliates.
In 1991, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show was a phenomenal success, the biggest thing on AM radio. One night Limbaugh was dining at one of his favorite New York restaurants, “21,” when Roger Ailes walked over and introduced himself. “I was in awe of him,” Limbaugh recalls. “I was amazed he even knew who I was. He said that his wife listened to me all day, every day.”
Limbaugh and Ailes hit it off immediately. They had a great deal in common. Both were products of small-town midwestern America, shaped by the conservative values of the Eisenhower era and the sometimes harsh discipline of stern fathers. They had both been indifferent and rebellious students—Limbaugh dropped out of a second-rate college after one year—who made their bones as media showmen. And they were both more than willing to mix it up with the liberal establishment.
Ailes told Limbaugh that they should do a television show together. At first Limbaugh thought it was a bad idea—he had never hosted a television show before—but Ailes convinced him that it would work. “Rush said he didn’t want guests on the show,” Ailes recalls. “He said he didn’t need them, because he didn’t care what anybody else thinks. There were very few people, then or now, who could hold a television audience all alone on the screen or who even had the balls to try. The only model I had was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s program, and I thought Rush could carry it off.”
Ailes couldn’t find a network that would carry the controversial Limbaugh’s one-man show. He decided to resort to syndication, which had worked beautifully for Mike Douglas. He reached out to Woody Fraser, who took the idea to Bob Turner, who was the head of Multimedia Entertainment (and later became a Republican congressman from Manhattan).
Limbaugh’s TV show was taped before an audience and ran five days a week for half an hour. Like the radio show, it consisted of Limbaugh riffing off the news. “Everybody marvels at Jon Stewart’s show,” says Limbaugh. “That’s what my show was. That’s what Roger and I did—find news clips and make fun of people who weren’t used to being laughed at. We combined the comedy with dead serious political and cultural discussion.”
Limbaugh believes that the TV show, which ran four years, provided a template for the Fox News evening format, although he concedes that Ailes probably doesn’t agree. “Our premise of conservatism, unabashed and unafraid, was established once and for all on mainstream television. We showed it could be done,” he says.
Ailes was Limbaugh’s executive producer and he was also his mentor. Limbaugh, who was a decade younger and comparatively new on the national scene, leaned on his producer’s sophistication in the ways of Washington and the New York media. When President George H. W. Bush invited them to the White House for a sleepover, it was Ailes who told him it was all right to call his mom from the Lincoln Bedroom.
The media were, of course, interested in the pajama party at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Limbaugh cleared an invitation from The Today Show with Ailes, who gave him some media advice. “Roger told me that he had detected in me a common fault that newcomers to TV make when being interviewed by mainstream journalists. He said, ‘Rush, they don’t care what you think. Don’t try to persuade them of anything. Don’t try to change their mind. They are not asking you questions to learn anything. So don’t look at this as an opportunity to enlighten them. Whatever they ask, just say whatever you want to say.’”
Ailes sometimes took a more direct approach in protecting his friend and star. They got wind that Time magazine was planning a cover story portraying Limbaugh and Howard Stern as similar figures. Ailes figured this would hurt the show and make it less attractive to potential advertisers. “Roger got in gear and called Time magazine. I sat in his office during the call,” Limbaugh recalls. “He told them that if they persisted in this, we on the TV show would do features on all the reporters working on the story. That we would hire investigators to look into their backgrounds, find out how many DUIs they had, run a story demonstrating the similarities of these reporters to Al Goldstein [the publisher of Screw magazine]. It was a virtuoso performance. I was laughing my ass off. And I think it worked to an extent because when the story came out, it was basically harmless. That’s the thing—when you have Roger Ailes on your side, you do not lose.”
Limbaugh eventually left the show because he didn’t like the meetings and collaboration that go with television, but he and Ailes have remained close friends, an alliance that has helped shape the tone and direction of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Limbaugh—despite the fact that he is boycotting New York State because of what he regards as its confiscatory taxation policy—visits Ailes at his Putnam County mountaintop home from time to time; Ailes is a regular at Limbaugh’s Palm Beach estate for the Spring Fling, a long weekend that brings Limbaugh cronies and political friends together for golf (which Ailes can’t play), drinking (which Ailes no longer does), and conversations about the state of the world and the country. “Politically, Roger and I are brothers,” Limbaugh says. “Trust me when I tell you there is never any strategy session, in the sense that we never coordinate content. There has never been a time where we even discussed mutual programming to achieve an objective. That never happens. It doesn’t really have to. Ideologically and culturally, we are two peas in a pod.”
While he was producing the Limbaugh show, Ailes began exploring a new frontier: cable news. CNN had gone on the air in 1980 to considerable derision: Ted Turner, its founder, was called crazy for imagining that a station based in Atlanta could make money providing around-the-clock news from all over the world to an initially small cable audience.
But Turner was right. Over time the cable audience grew and so did CNN’s reach and reputation. During the 1991 Gulf War, it was the only American station with journalists in Baghdad, and its war coverage became the talk of the media world. Cable appeared to be the wave of the future, and the big networks wanted a piece of the action. NBC was especially keen to explore the new terrain. It already had a struggling business channel, CNBC, which it hoped to expand. NBC president Bob Wright saw that as just the beginning, and he reached out to Roger Ailes to run the channel. Jack Welch, the outspoken, politically conservative head of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, blessed the decision. Both he and Wright had reason to be pleased by the results. When Ailes took over, CNBC’s asset value was $400 million. When he left, two years later, it had more than doubled.
Ailes had been watching cable news from the sidelines, and he had an intuition that it should be personality-driven. He brought in Chet Collier, a Bostonian of the old school and thirteen years Ailes’s senior. He had been Ailes’s boss and mentor and drinking buddy at the Douglas show, and had promoted Ailes to the post of executive producer after Woody Fraser left. “Chet was a Kennedy liberal, but I didn’t give a damn about his politics,” says Ailes. “He was a brilliant television guy. And he could tell me the truth. A lot of times that’s crucial, to have somebody around who isn’t afraid. You need somebody with the kind of relationship that allows him to close the door and, one-on-one, tell the boss, ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’ Collier did that for me. If I did something he thought was wrong, he’d tell me straight out that I was full of shit.”
Neil Cavuto was already at CNBC when Ailes arrived. “I was worried about how badly we were doing after five years on the air,” he says, and the arrival of Roger Ailes, known then for his partisan political activities, didn’t help much.
“Roger wasn’t a GE executive type,” Cavuto says. “Jack Welch went way outside the petri dish when he hired him. But when I met Roger I remember thinking, this guy has elected presidents—maybe he can help us.”
Ailes began with research. He spoke to everyone at the network and grilled them about the most minute details of their jobs. Once he knew what was happening, he began to intervene. “He’d tell the graphics guy if the writing was too small,” Cavuto recalls. “He’d call the sound guy and say that the volume was too low. Editorial meetings were opened up, and everybody, even production assistants or other junior staff, were encouraged to speak up. On the other hand, he made it clear that he was not going to put up with eye-rolling or negativity.”
“When I got to CNBC, I found chaos and a lack of leadership,” Ailes told me. “There were executives there who spent their days playing basketball or at the track. First thing, I told people to get their feet off the goddamn desk and get to work.”
“Roger tested people,” says Cavuto. “He called me in and said, ‘People tell me you are cocky and arrogant and you constantly interrupt—’ At which point I interrupted him and said, ‘You’re right but I’m working on it.’” Ailes laughed and said that he liked Cavuto’s work. They have been together ever since.
He demanded that producers and reporters rethink their approach to business news. At the time, it was considered bad form for journalists to talk about ratings or network profits. “Our thought was, is this story important, not who will watch it,” says Cavuto. Roger forced people to get out of the ivory tower. “Everything is financial in some way,” he said. “You can make a story out of anything.”
Ailes insisted on not insulting the audience. He informed his staff that he didn’t want an antibusiness climate on a business network, or a lot of financial jargon. “Roger is a guy from the middle of Ohio, and he knows how people think,” says Cavuto. Reporters who acted superior to the corporate leaders they interviewed or conveyed the message that capitalism was selfish and crass didn’t find the Ailes’s regime congenial.
But, in general, Ailes was popular with the troops. His television expertise and down-to-earth sensibility were welcomed. He knew everybody’s name, learned their personal stories, and came to be known as a soft touch. He also mocked the fashionably healthy cuisine of the network’s cafeteria, paying the cooks extra to prepare burgers and fries.
Ailes’s style of wisecracking profanity contributed to his common touch. It also sometimes got him in trouble, especially when he let loose in public. He mocked Tom Rogers, who was president of NBC cable operations, as a “publicity seeker.” He went on the Imus in the Morning radio show and speculated that President Clinton’s schedule in New York might include a date with Olympic ice-skating champion Nancy Kerrigan. He made an ugly joke implying that Hillary Clinton might have had something to do with the fate of three administration lawyers—Webster Hubbell, Bernard Nussbaum, and Vince Foster—who were, respectively, under investigation, forced to resign, and dead. “I wouldn’t stand too close to her,” he said. These cracks were way out of character for an NBC suit, which was just the way Ailes wanted it. Complaints to the corporate office were brushed aside; he was making NBC too much money to be disciplined.
• • •
On the Fourth of July, 1994, CNBC launched a second network, America’s Talking, the forerunner of MSNBC. He branded the overall product “First in Business, First in Talk” and hired compelling personalities, including liberals like Chris Matthews (former aide to Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill), Tim Russert (who had been an aide to New York Democratic senator Pat Moynihan), and Geraldo Rivera.
Ailes also hired a host for his morning show. Steve Doocy was an aw-shucks country boy from Clay County, Kansas, who had been working for various network affiliates for a decade. He sent a reel to Chet Collier, who invited him to the cable network’s headquarters in Fort Lee, New Jersey, for a meeting.
“What do we need to know about you?” Collier asked Doocy.
“I like to sit in a baby pool filled with lime-green Jell-O with no pants on,” he replied.
“Roger looked at me, grinned, and said, ‘You’re hired,’” Doocy recalls. Beth Tilson, the programmer in charge of the network (and years later Ailes’s wife), signed off on the line.
The roster of America’s Talking was composed of a seemingly random selection of programs. There was a daily talent show; a medical advice program; a review of new gadgets and technology; a newscast featuring positive stories called Have a Heart; a mental health call-in show, Am I Nuts?; an ongoing investigative series on government waste; and AT In-Depth, two hours of news and chat cohosted by Matthews. Ailes himself did an interview show, Straight Forward, in which he talked to guests, many of whom were showbiz friends like Broadway star Carol Channing or interesting counterculture figures such as Joan Baez. As an interviewer Ailes was cordial and easygoing, with a style resembling that of his old friend Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN. Ailes had piled up a lot of on-air experience in his Today Show appearances with Bob Squier between 1989 and 1992, and he had often been a guest on other shows, but he wasn’t especially interested in performing. He did it for the team. It was hard to lure top guests all the way out to Fort Lee to appear on a new cable channel. “I had a pretty good Rolodex,” he says.
The electronic media landscape of the 1990s was marked by an effort to understand and capture the technological opportunities offered by satellite, cable, and the Internet. Synergy was the order of the day. Time Warner acquired CNN and then merged with AOL, a combination that really worked. Roone Arledge, the head of ABC News, announced that he was getting into the cable news business, although nothing came of it. Meanwhile, NBC struck a deal with Microsoft for a new cable network, MSNBC, that would replace America’s Talking and current affairs talk shows on CNBC. Bob Wright and the other corporate heads at 30 Rock didn’t see a place for Ailes in this new alignment. He was too brash and too partisan for their new partner, Bill Gates. With oceans of Silicon Valley dollars swimming before their eyes, they were free to toss Ailes overboard.
“Roger was disappointed as hell that we sold America’s Talking,” Jack Welch says. “But he had built up a lot of animosity. People were jealous of his accomplishments.”
Wright appointed Andrew Lack, the head of NBC News, to take over the new network. Lack was a charismatic former advertising executive who had turned NBC News around after a scandal. Dateline, a prime-time magazine show, had faked an explosion of a GM truck in what turned out to be a bogus exposé.
It fell to Lack to clean up the debris. He was a big man with a bigger ego, who famously bragged to the New York Times, in 1997, that he was “America’s news leader.” NBC was content to let Ailes stay on at the helm of the new channel, but there was no chance that Roger Ailes was going to report to a man like Andy Lack. Ailes left Fort Lee, but he wasn’t homeless. Rupert Murdoch was waiting for him on the other side of the Hudson.
Murdoch, whose trajectory had taken him from his native Australia to London and then to the United States, already owned a string of broadcast stations, but wanted to go into the cable news business. He had an intuition that a large portion of the public was unhappy with the tone of mainstream TV news and would respond to a more patriotic, socially conservative, and less parochial sort of information. He and Ailes had met only once, briefly, on the Twentieth Century Fox movie lot years before, but they knew each other by reputation. “Roger had great success at CNBC and I heard that he was unhappy there,” Murdoch says. “I asked him to come see me.”
Ailes listened silently as Murdoch laid out his idea. “The question,” Murdoch said, “is whether it can be done.”
Ailes said that it could, but only if it could get on the air within six months, to beat MSNBC (and perhaps also ABC’s new cable venture) to the punch. Ailes would be working from scratch. There were no studios, no equipment, no staff, and no infrastructure. Essentially he would be creating a network from nothing.
“How much will it cost me?” Murdoch asked.
“Nine hundred million to a billion,” Ailes responded. “And you could lose it all.”
“Can you do it?” Murdoch asked.
“Yes,” said Ailes.
“Then go ahead and do it.”
“I thought, either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen,” Murdoch says. Ailes was thinking pretty much the same thing about his new boss. Their negotiation was easy. “It was a fair deal,” says Murdoch. “I’m a softie.” In any case, Ailes wasn’t in it primarily for the money. He was being given an opportunity to stick it to his critics at NBC, and to create something entirely new—a news network shaped in his image. Murdoch was only putting up a billion dollars; Ailes’s reputation was at stake.
When news of the experiment got out, media sophisticates laughed as they had, fifteen years earlier, at Ted Turner. The New York Times was especially skeptical. “With no name and no formal plan for distribution, the promised channel inspired widespread doubts about its long-term survival among competitors and cable industry analysts. . . . The idea, some suggested, was to give Mr. Ailes a toy to play with, though given the current state of Fox News as described by some insiders, it may be less a toy than an imaginary friend.”
But Jack Welch, watching from his suite at General Electric headquarters, knew this was no game. “I told them they would rue the day they let Roger team up with Rupert,” he says. “You put a creative genius together with a guy with the guts and wallet of Rupert Murdoch and you have an unbeatable combination.”