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When Roger Ailes left CNBC, he was followed by more than eighty staffers in what is known in the lore of Fox News as “the jailbreak.” These executives, producers, and on-air personalities became the backbone of the new network, and a large number are still there today. To this group, Ailes added close to a thousand staffers recruited from the ranks of television unknowns, underappreciated network personnel, or complete amateurs who had potential. His criterion was always the same. “In television, technology changes,” he says. “The one constant is content. There has to be a show. And that’s what I focused on—talent that could provide a show.”
Ailes says he never did market research or focus groups. “I start with one question: Do I like the person? Of course, I also want to know how smart they are, if they can write and report, but it begins with a personal feeling. I was looking for people who could attract an audience. People who cared about who was watching. Getting ratings is how you get paid.”
Chet Collier came over from CNBC to Fox as Ailes’s chief lieutenant. And Ailes made an important acquisition in John Moody, a Cornell graduate with impeccable print credentials as UPI bureau chief in the former Soviet Union and France, and a decade as a senior Time magazine correspondent in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Back in New York, a political and cultural conservative, Moody felt out of place. “I didn’t enjoy the corridors of Time,” he says. In 1996, public relations executive Howard Rubenstein told him that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes were starting a news network. He was interested but also hesitant about joining a new venture.
“I was forty-three years old with a mortgage, a wife, and a dog,” he says. Still, he went to a breakfast meeting in Ailes’s office. “There was dust everywhere and exposed wires. We sat at a low table and Roger gave me terrible coffee and a bad bagel and we talked. There was a definite intellectual spark.”
Their second meeting took place at a Chinese restaurant. Moody prepared by discussing the new venture with a friendly monsignor, who told him that everything happens for a reason. Ailes came prepared, too. “He took out a story I had written, pointed to something, and asked, ‘What did you mean by this? Are you a liberal?’” Moody countered by mentioning that Ailes had produced Broadway shows with progressive themes. “I reminded him that there’s a line in The Hot l Baltimore where a character says, ‘We don’t know how to dance but we must carry on as if we do.’ Roger was impressed that I had done research on him before our meeting.” Moody was hired as senior vice president for news.
Many of Moody’s journalist friends disapproved. “Some of them thought I was being brought in to make the paint look new,” he says. Others thought that Ailes, who had no real journalistic experience, lacked credentials. He was unmoved by this argument. “You don’t need a license to do journalism,” Moody says.
Moody’s new job made him, in essence, the managing editor of the network, and he was soon accused by liberal critics of collaborating with Ailes and Murdoch in shaping a right-wing version of the news. The instrument of this control was allegedly a daily memo issued by Moody to reporters and producers. Moody saw this as nothing more than standard practice. “Networks all have directors, producers, reporters, and anchors,” he says. “If each one did what he or she thought was best, there would be chaos. That’s why news organizations all work from a plan, a starting point. That’s why they are called organizations.”
The daily memo became controversial after it was revealed in the documentary film Outfoxed, which was produced in 2004 by anti-Fox activist Robert Greenwald. In response, Ailes offered to publish 100 percent of Fox News’ editorial directions and internal memos if competing cable news channels and broadcast network news divisions would do the same. So far, there have been no takers.
With Moody and Collier in place, Ailes went about building a lineup that would be able to compete with CNN and MSNBC. He needed a lead-off man, somebody genial and light enough to match the tone of the other morning shows, but with a sufficient edge to signal that Fox News was different. At CNBC, he had had Steve Doocy, but Doocy had left Ailes to host a morning comedy show on CBS’s New York affiliate. The show wasn’t funny and it was canceled within a month, leaving Doocy looking for work. He called Ailes, who told him that he had just one job left at Fox News—weatherman.
“I only did the weather once, in college,” says Doocy. Ailes was unfazed by this. “Just keep it simple,” he said. “All the squiggles are too complicated anyway. Just show me the high temperature and the low temperature and where it’s raining. You try to sound like a genius, you baffle viewers. Don’t get lost in the weeds.” When Ailes started Fox & Friends, he made Doocy a permanent cohost (his current partners are Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade).
Fox & Friends is an easygoing program that delivers some hard political messages in the morning. Apart from Sean Hannity’s show, it is probably the most blatantly partisan program on Fox. “We are who we are,” Doocy says, as if they were an accidental conglomeration of talent. “You have a couple of kids and a mortgage; everyone winds up a little more conservative. All three of us are to the right, but we balance it with guests.”
Fox & Friends does sometimes host liberal politicians. But since these politicians get asked tough and sometimes loaded questions, it is debatable whether they add balance or simply serve as targets.
When Doocy asked Howard Dean about reports that he had suffered a panic attack upon learning that as lieutenant governor of Vermont, he would be replacing the deceased incumbent, Dean indignantly denied it. Some exchanges with the opposition have been more congenial. When Tom Daschle was the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, he appeared on the show and did the weather. So did Henry Kissinger, an Ailes friend, to whom Doocy awarded a Fox & Friends “soap-on-a-rope” to go with his Nobel Peace Prize.
Shep Smith, one of the network’s star news anchors, is another Fox original. He studied journalism at the University of Mississippi, failed to graduate, and spent a dozen years kicking around small stations in Florida and at the syndicated TV newsmagazine A Current Affair. He was in Los Angeles when he got a job offer from Ailes. The Fox chief was looking for talent, but he was on a budget. “Will your agent act reasonably?” Ailes asked. Smith assured him that his agent was the soul of reason. It was a good decision for both sides. In 2007, the New York Times reported that Smith was making between $7 million and $8 million—broadcast anchor money. “Roger is fair. You go in to negotiate with him and there are certain things he won’t agree to, and if he says no, it’s no. You don’t come back on that. And he’s big on not letting people usurp power. But the perks—vacation days, cars, assistants—all those things are in the contract.” What Ailes demands in return is that you do your job—and that you don’t lie to him.
Ailes wanted Smith because of his informality. “I came up in the era when the newscaster told you what was happening and what to think about it,” Ailes told me. “Fox changed that some. It’s very important to get the anchors on an even field with the audience. Never let your talent talk down to people.”
A lot of people at Fox think of Smith as a liberal, partly because he tends to wear his heart on his sleeve, especially on issues with a racial component. A good ol’ boy from Holly Springs, Mississippi, who attended private segregated academies, he is, like a lot of Southerners of his generation, sensitive to the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. In his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, he was visibly infuriated by the failures of government, including the Bush administration, to relieve the suffering of the victims. “When I got down there and saw what was happening, I got in touch with Roger and he said, ‘Bring in the cavalry. The government is lying? Get the word out!’ You don’t expect people in the United States to be living in third-world conditions.”
Another crucial time in the cable day is 4:00 p.m., when the markets close. Ailes gave the job to Neil Cavuto, one of the original CNBC jailbreakers.
“I left money on the table when I came to Fox,” Cavuto says. “A lot of us did. This is an easy place to come to these days; we’re like the Yankees in a good season. We pay better than the competition. But back then we didn’t. Many, many of the people who left to go with Roger took pay cuts. Nobody’s sorry.”
Shortly after making the move, Cavuto was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was fearful about breaking the news to his boss. “A lot of television executives would have wanted to get rid of me,” he says.
Ailes asked how the disease might affect Cavuto’s performance.
“It could cause me to lose my train of thought on the air,” Cavuto said.
“Hell, you already do that,” said Ailes.
“And I could lose the use of my legs.”
“So what? If you do, we’ll build you a ramp.”
Cavuto is now in his sixteenth year in the 4:00 p.m. slot, and he is senior vice president of Fox Business Network. “I feel toward Roger like I do toward my own father,” he told me. “He’s somebody I can always count on.”
This is a very widespread sentiment at Fox News, but it comes with a price. In Ailes’s world, loyalty is rewarded, disloyalty punished. It is a point he made early, and emphatically, in the case of another financial journalist, Jim Cramer.
Cramer was a hot commodity when Ailes and Murdoch lured him to Fox News in 1999. A onetime president of the Harvard Crimson, he was a successful hedge fund manager and a well-known writer and commentator who appeared as a talking head on various network shows, including ABC’s Good Morning America and CNBC’s Squawk Box.
Cramer saw right away that Ailes could teach him how to be effective on television. “Life with Roger was an education,” he says. “I learned more about TV from him than anyone else. He invented the lightning round. He taught me that the only guests worth having on a business show are CEOs—take anybody lesser and it lowers your credibility. And he showed me the power of repetition. I once told him that I had said on the air three times how much I liked Apple stock. He laughed and said, ‘Jim, after eighteen times, and only after eighteen times, will some Americans have heard it.’”
Another lesson was on the importance of longevity. “We were at a broadcast dinner and Ailes said, ‘I’m going to introduce you to the most influential TV personalities in the room.’ He took me over to meet Gene Rayburn, the game show host who had been on the air forever. ‘People like him, they want him in their homes,’ Roger said. He knew politics but these old show-business people, like Rayburn and Bob Hope and Judy Garland, were his real heroes.”
A few years earlier, in 1996, Cramer and some partners started TheStreet.com, an early venture into financial cyber-journalism. Cramer joined Fox (and worked without monetary compensation) in order to leverage the exposure he would get for his website. Ailes thought having Cramer would draw viewers to the new channel. It was a classic nineties example of the theory and practice of synergy.
“I told Roger when he hired me that I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’ve given the party a lot of money over the years. Roger was joyous. ‘Give more,’ he said. ‘I’ve got myself a real liberal.’ I always expected there would be a catch, but there wasn’t one.”
Cramer’s problem with Ailes wasn’t political, it was personal. Cramer is hypercompetitive, but he couldn’t match his boss’s even fiercer dedication to winning, or the burdens it placed on him.
“Roger believes that you need to win every hour in order to win the next hour. Ratings at nine depend on ratings at eight. And that’s a team effort. Let’s say you had a special coming up in the morning. The night before, you had to go on the prime-time shows in the last two minutes and hype it. You’d be on at 7:58, 8:58, 9:58, talk about what each host wanted to discuss and then at the end they say, ‘So Jim, I hear you’ve got a show coming up tomorrow on greedy bankers. Give us an advance peek.’ I’d say a few words about it and the host would go, ‘Wow! Tune in tomorrow for that,’ like they were enthralled. It wasn’t a true shill exactly, but it’s a way to build numbers.”
Many years before, Marjorie Ailes had gone to Roger’s boss at the Douglas show to complain about the hours. Now it was Karen Cramer’s turn to get indignant. “She was just pissed off at how much time I spent away from home. The pressure built up and I talked to Roger, but his attitude was, ‘This is the job, do it or not.’”
Cramer was under pressure from his investors to appear less on TV. They wanted him to give their money his full attention. His associates at TheStreet.com had different ideas about how he should spend his time. The cross-promotion they had envisioned at Fox wasn’t working well. Kevin English, the site’s CEO, convinced Cramer to hold a secret meeting with executives at CBS’s financial show, Market Watch. Ailes, who is exceptionally well informed about matters that concern him, found out about it and called Cramer in. Cramer describes the experience in his autobiography, Confessions of a Street Addict. “[It was] one of those meetings where he would stare at you with those tungsten eyes of his, the same eyes that had stared down everyone from Nixon to Manson. I knew he knew.” Ailes coldly reminded Cramer that they had a contract, and Cramer dropped the CBS initiative. But there was bad blood. A couple of months later, he was caught backstage on a hot microphone bad-mouthing Ailes. He apologized, but he knew he had crossed a red line. Soon after, he blew off a scheduled taping session. The final straw was mentioning his own stock as a buy on his show. By now, Cramer’s marriage was falling apart, and he was being medicated for anxiety, but Ailes was unsympathetic. “Roger just said that we have a contract, and that’s it. He fired me. We had worked together for two years but the truth is, he was right to fire me. And, despite everything, I still like him. He delivered on what he promised. I just wish, in retrospect, that I had, too.”
The story of Cramer became a cautionary tale at the new network. Certain things were fine. You didn’t have to be a Republican or a conservative. You could get away with coupling your commercial interests with your work as a commentator. You were welcome to be as eccentric as you liked. What you couldn’t do was flout the rules, which Ailes set out in the employees’ handbook and gave (and still gives) to new employees.
Cramer was a star, and a friend. But he hadn’t been willing to work hard enough for the good of the team. He didn’t keep his word. He had been publicly negative about his job and disrespectful to his boss. And so he was out. Ailes made an example of Jim Cramer; he wanted everyone to know that his handbook was not a set of lofty aspirations, but a guide to survival in Roger World.
Anchorman Mike Schneider didn’t get it. He was a prototypical Fox hire, an experienced and competent newsman who had been at all three major networks but never quite reached the top. Ailes gave him a chance as host of a prime-time news show. It was a potential star-making job, but Schneider blew it.
In 1997, Fox TV broadcast the Super Bowl, including a halftime show by the Blues Brothers. This was a very big deal for the Murdoch-owned network, and as a cross-promotion for the fledgling Fox News, Ailes decided on a gimmick. At the end of the first half, Fox News anchor Catherine Crier broke in with a special news flash—the Blues Brothers had escaped from jail and were seen heading for the game. It got some media attention, which was Ailes’s goal, but it offended Schneider’s sense of propriety. He blasted the stunt in public. Ailes called him in and read him the riot act. “How dare you criticize your colleagues?” he said. “If I were in a foxhole with you, I’d shoot you first.” Schneider’s prime-time career was over, and Fox declined to renew his contract. After leaving the network, he ran for Congress in New Jersey as a reform Democrat, and lost.
The last case of blatant insubordination was the Paula Zahn affair. Zahn was a talented and glamorous CBS personality who came to Fox in 1999, anchored the nightly news, and then got her own show, The Edge, making her one of the first female prime-time hosts in cable news history. Less than two years later, Ailes discovered that although she was still under contract, she had been negotiating with CNN. This wasn’t illegal, but it violated Ailes’s sense of loyalty. The network sued Zahn, and while the case was thrown out, it made the point to all other employees that those who cross Roger Ailes won’t be allowed to go quietly. Zahn went to CNN and then on to PBS, where she hosts cultural programs. Ailes eventually retaliated against CNN by poaching veteran journalist Greta Van Susteren and giving her a prime-time show of her own.
• • •
“In fifteen years, CNN and MSNBC have made sixty-three changes to their prime-time lineups,” says Roger Ailes. “We’ve made five.” Three anchors—Crier, Zahn, and Schneider—were replaced early on. In 2009, Alan Colmes was dropped from Hannity & Colmes (although he remains at Fox as a commentator). And famously, Ailes moved Bill O’Reilly from six o’clock to eight, setting off the most successful career in the history of cable news.
O’Reilly’s office is on the seventeenth floor of the News Corp building. I was scheduled to meet him at five o’clock, but I arrived a few minutes early and ducked into the men’s room. There I found O’Reilly staring at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth.
He looked at me backward and said, “Hi, Zev.”
“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.
“It’s my job to know everything,” he said, and invited me to continue the meeting in his office down the hall.
You don’t just wander around Fox News randomly interviewing personnel. In every meeting there is someone, usually a member of the public relations staff, sitting in unobtrusively. O’Reilly had his own witness, Dave Tabacoff, the executive producer of his show, The O’Reilly Factor, who came over to Fox from ABC News. O’Reilly also placed a tape recorder prominently on his desk. The congenial mood of our bathroom encounter was replaced by a confrontational aura. Bill O’Reilly is not a trusting man.
But he trusts his boss. “There are very few honest television executives,” he told me. “You can count them on the fingers of one hand.” He raised a giant paw to demonstrate how few that actually is.
“When I was at CBS News, I covered the Falklands War,” he said. “I was in Buenos Aires for the [Argentinian] surrender. When I got back to my hotel, my story was bigfooted by a CBS correspondent [he didn’t say who, but he was referring to Bob Schieffer], a guy who had been afraid to go outside. He took my video, put his stand-up on it, and sent it.”
O’Reilly was incensed. “I flew up to New York and said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Their attitude was, ‘Shut up, you’re lucky to be at CBS.’ So I left, and I was branded as a guy who isn’t a team player. When ABC hired me I told Roone Arledge, ‘Just don’t bigfoot me,’ and he didn’t. But what happened at CBS was something that Roger Ailes would never allow. Ever.”
O’Reilly knew Ailes from CNBC, where he sometimes sat in for Ailes on Straight Forward. On one such occasion he did an unusually tough interview of the New York Mets star Keith Hernandez, who had been caught using cocaine. “Why destroy your career?” he demanded.
“Afterward Roger told me that if he let me keep substituting for him, he wouldn’t be able to book any guests,” said O’Reilly with a grin.
O’Reilly bounced around ABC News and then, in 1989, joined the staff of Inside Edition, becoming an anchor shortly after arriving. He was there for six years, won awards for his work, and left the show to enroll at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he earned a master’s degree in public administration. One of his teachers was former network newsman Marvin Kalb.
“Bill was an excellent student,” Kalb says. “But I always had a feeling that no matter what I said or what he read, nothing changed his mind.”
At Harvard, O’Reilly began plotting a return to television. Roger Ailes was just getting set up at Fox, and O’Reilly got in touch. “I told Roger that I had a written outline of a show I wanted to do,” he says. “Roger told me, ‘I don’t need an outline. I know what you can do.’” Ailes was not impressed by O’Reilly’s stint at Harvard, which he dismissively calls a “seven-week degree”; what he saw was O’Reilly’s talent.
The show, originally called The O’Reilly Report, debuted at 6:00 p.m. Fox was available in about fifteen million homes at the time. “That’s not even being on the air,” says O’Reilly. But as the network’s viewership expanded, Ailes decided to move O’Reilly’s show to 8:00 p.m., where it took off. “In retrospect, it gave me a year to hone the concept,” says O’Reilly. “And moving it to eight was smart. It meant that more young viewers could watch. A lot of television executives wouldn’t have seen that. They don’t even know the difference between six o’clock and eight.”
The Factor has been the most watched prime-time show for more than ten years. Most nights O’Reilly’s audience is larger than those of the shows on MSNBC, CNN, and CNBC combined. “I write the scripts myself, early in the day,” he says. “I send them to Roger so he can see who I am interviewing and how I am framing subjects. But I have one hundred percent autonomy, and the system works perfectly.”
O’Reilly and Ailes have had relatively few arguments over the years, but Ailes has made it clear to him that he runs the network and makes the final decisions.
O’Reilly’s abrasive personality and amazing ratings have made him a target. He harbors a special animosity toward Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBCUniversal, whom he calls, with typical understatement, “the lowest form of humanity.”
“Zucker decided to use MSNBC as a weapon to attack people and hired guttersnipes to do it. There were no boundaries; they launched personal attacks every night. How can you respect a news executive who allows that to happen?” At O’Reilly’s behest, Ailes called Zucker and asked him to call off the anti-O’Reilly campaign, which was being led by Keith Olbermann. “Roger told him that he was putting people in jeopardy.” When Zucker failed to respond, O’Reilly asked for, and got, protection. “You have a right to defend yourself,” he says. “Roger gives me security. We’re taking names. It’s vicious, not something you just ignore.”
There is widespread criticism of his relentless promotion of his bestselling books and public appearances. “He says he gives a lot of the money to charity and maybe he does,” a senior executive at the network told me. “But he does it for free on Murdoch’s air, so maybe Murdoch deserves some of the credit.”
O’Reilly is not a candidate for colleague of the year at Fox. O’Reilly and Sean Hannity don’t speak, and he doesn’t “hand off” his program to Hannity at 9:00 p.m. with an introductory phrase, as is customary. He attributes this to technical difficulties, although it is a problem other anchors seem to have solved. Hannity, for his part, praises O’Reilly’s talent and contribution to Fox, but concedes that he and his fellow Fox star don’t talk to each other—quite a feat considering that the two men work on the same floor, within a hundred feet of each other’s offices.
Hannity is a star in his own right, the Scottie Pippen to O’Reilly’s Michael Jordan. His show is the second-most-watched prime-time cable news program; it, too, often beats the combined opposition. Like O’Reilly, Hannity grew up in an Irish Catholic family on Long Island and, as has become de rigueur at Ailes’s network, he flaunts his working-class credentials. As a kid he scrubbed pots and pans in a restaurant kitchen, worked on construction projects, and did poorly at the preparatory seminary he attended.
O’Reilly developed his TV chops over a long career. Hannity is an Ailes creation. He was an AM talk show host in Atlanta when he applied for a job at Fox. What he brought to the table were boyish good looks, a nice clear tenor voice, a simple conservative perspective, and an important friendship with Newt Gingrich, the Georgia congressman who led the 1994 GOP congressional sweep. By the time Fox went on the air, Gingrich was the Speaker of the House and the country’s most influential Republican. Roger Ailes is a man who places a high premium on access, and Hannity’s closeness to Newt was an important link.
Hannity was not a complete TV virgin. In Atlanta he had done guest spots for CNN and occasionally he did a talking head gig at CNBC. But the medium felt new to him, and uncomfortable. “The first time I was on television I had a panic attack,” he says.
When Ailes started Fox, Hannity’s lawyer, David Limbaugh, Rush’s brother, called and suggested a tryout for his client. Ailes saw potential and hired Hannity to do a debate show with a liberal cohost. They tried out a few before settling on Alan Colmes.
Hannity’s early performances were shaky and awkward. “Looking at them now makes me cringe,” he says. He didn’t even know how to read a teleprompter; he learned by watching and copying Brian Williams. But his most important tutor was Ailes. He showed Hannity how to ask short questions instead of delivering speeches. He instructed him to be better informed, “report instead of just talk.” And, most important, he imparted the practical lesson of You Are the Message.
“One morning during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Roger called me in and said, ‘Every time we’re together you smile, but last night on the air you didn’t show me that side of your personality. You seemed angry, and you’re not an angry guy. Lighten up.’ He said it in a fatherly way, and it stuck,” he recalls. “It was the best professional advice I ever got. Roger Ailes changed my life.”
Hannity’s television persona is, indeed, far less abrasive than O’Reilly’s. It is also much more predictable. O’Reilly is a social conservative, but he can be a populist on economic issues and tends to be open-minded on foreign affairs. Hannity only departs from Republican orthodoxy when he criticizes it from the right. When critics accuse Fox News of being a megaphone for Republican talking points, they are primarily pointing (whether they know it or not) to Hannity.
With the morning nailed down, market closing time settled, and prime time dominated by a one-two punch, Ailes had one more key casting issue. He wanted a serious Washington-centered news hour that could hold its own against the networks and the cable competition, led by someone with unquestioned mainstream media credentials, an outstanding professional reputation, and a conservative outlook. There weren’t many of those, but Ailes only needed one, and he found his man at ABC News.
Brit Hume did not boast a blue-collar pedigree. As a boy he attended St. Albans prep school in Washington, DC, where his classmates included Albert Gore Jr. Hume matriculated at the University of Virginia and then followed what was, back then, the usual route to journalist stardom: a stint at a wire service and at a daily newspaper, the Baltimore Evening Sun. He worked as an investigative reporter for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and went on to ABC News, where he covered Congress and the White House. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, he sometimes clashed with left-leaning anchor Peter Jennings, but their relationship was mostly amicable. Hume is not the sort of man whose integrity is easily questioned. Bill Clinton, with whom he had an occasionally contentious relationship, hailed him when he left the White House press corps in 1996 for doing an “extraordinary, professional job under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.”
Hume and Ailes first met during the 1988 presidential campaign, which Hume was covering for ABC. “Roger wasn’t a schmoozer, but he wasn’t afraid of reporters, either. He came at things as a straightforward political pro.” Nothing like a friendship developed, but they knew and respected each other.
In 1996, Hume’s ABC contract was up for renewal. He wanted to stay, but not as the White House correspondent. He flew up to New York and met for lunch with ABC News president Roone Arledge. It didn’t go well. “Roone was in a distracted mood. He spent much of the lunchtime dumping on Rupert Murdoch,” Hume recalls. Presumably Arledge raised the topic because Hume’s wife, Kim, had left ABC News to start as Fox’s Washington bureau chief. Arledge told Hume he was welcome to stay at ABC, but he wouldn’t get what he wanted—a more senior job as an analyst or anchor.
Hume left the lunch and considered his options. He admired CNN for its commitment to twenty-four-hour news, but he considered it an amateurish operation. He was more drawn to Fox, which was still in the planning stage. “I saw what Roger had done at CNBC, turning it into a great franchise. And I knew Rupert Murdoch a little bit. When he hired Roger I remember thinking, ‘I hope I hear from these guys.’”
He did. Ailes came to Washington, DC, in March 1996 and offered Hume the position of managing editor of the Washington bureau and a gig as anchor of the six o’clock news program, the Fox News “broadcast of record.” He would be up against Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather, the network Big Three. Hume was, he recalls, “thrilled.”
Hume’s first years at Fox were spent building a competitive newsroom staff in a journalistic environment that saw Fox as shaky at best and probably disreputable. It was a hard lift, but he had faith in Ailes. “That first year, Roger concentrated mostly on just getting up and running. He didn’t seem upset at all by the low ratings; he was willing to give it time. After that first year, he acted like, “All right, now that I have time to raise the ratings, I will. And he did.”
When the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the six o’clock show was still in the planning stages. Kim Hume recalled the way ABC’s Nightline had started out as a series of “Special Reports” on the hostage crisis in Iran. She suggested using that name and launching immediately. Hume called Ailes in New York, and was startled when he said, “Sure. Let’s start tonight.” It was, Hume says, “an amazing risk,” and it paid off. Fox Special Report built its eventual long-term success on its aggressive coverage of the scandal. Would Fox have been so eager to launch this type of news show had the president been a Republican? Hume says he isn’t sure. Ailes, for his part, was delighted to have his six o’clock problem solved. After that first show, he called Hume and said, “ABC, eat your heart out.”
Fox News was now up and running. Ailes had his team. Now he was ready to take on the world.