MINORITY REPORT
Black History Month is celebrated by every television network, and Fox News is not an exception. Ailes commissioned a series of human-interest stories for the occasion, and he was here, in the conference room next to his office, to preview it. On hand were half a dozen members of the production team that put it together, all of them black or Hispanic.
The stories they screened were well done and unexceptional—a segment about a black opera singer who has overcome obstacles to achieve stardom, a piece about a polo team from inner-city Philadelphia, the profile of an adventurer/cancer patient who had ventured where no African American adventurer/cancer patient had traveled before. Ailes was especially interested in an interview with David Dinkins at Gracie Mansion, which Dinkins once occupied as New York City’s first (and only) black mayor. These days Dinkins is a professor in the practice of public affairs at Columbia University. “Dave is a friend of mine,” Ailes told the group. “I go up to Columbia every fall and teach his class. I make sure that the kids up there get a balanced education at least once a year.” This was greeted with mild laughter. Ailes punctuates his meetings with stream-of-consciousness banter and throwaway lines. When we first entered the room he introduced me as someone writing a book about him and added, “A report by Zev will be sent to your parents.”
“I was up in Harlem at a church for Martin Luther King Day,” he told the group. “There was this cute eighty-five-year-old lady sitting next to me, and when they sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ she held my hand.” I expected him to say that it had been a moving moment of racial harmony. What he said was, “Overcome, my ass. I think she was trying to hit on me.” There were more titters.
Racial identity politics are not Ailes’s “thing.” He belongs to a generation that was raised in a time and place where forward-thinking people accepted MLK’s famous exhortation to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, as the gold standard for racial aspiration. In Ailes’s America, everyone would share Middle American, middle-class values and blend into a single national culture. He sees the celebration of racial differentness as balkanizing. “Every month is something else,” he said. “I’m waiting for Lithuanian Midget Month. You know what? One of my relatives actually was a Lithuanian midget.” This got a real laugh. Evidently it was the first time he had tried it out. “You are either American or you aren’t,” Ailes told me later. “Being American, living here is the only entitlement you need.”
The next order of business was a report on the Ailes Apprentice Program, which is one of his proudest achievements. Every year, half a dozen minority kids are selected and given yearlong paid internships in an aspect of television news. Ailes says that graduates are guaranteed a job. So far, there are more than thirty former apprentices employed at Fox News in some area of television journalism. Ailes started the program as his version of private-sector affirmative action. “I noticed that the kids who got internships here were mostly white kids with contacts,” he told me.
“Somebody knows somebody here, gets the kid in, and then helps find him a mentor. Minority kids didn’t have any opportunities like that, so I decided I’d be their contact.”
Ailes says that no other network has a similar program. Neither do the other divisions of News Corp. “There are no minorities in our film division, and they’re a bunch of liberals. I don’t wear pins or ribbons but I do give out jobs.”
Sometimes these are dispensed on a whim. A few years ago, Ailes noticed that the cleaning woman in his office was wearing a lot of makeup. He asked if she was going to a social event after work. She admitted that she had been in a makeup room and hadn’t been able to resist giving herself the full treatment.
Ailes was intrigued. She told him she was a single mother from North Africa whose dream from childhood was to be a beautician. He decided a grand gesture was called for, and sent her, at the network’s expense, to a prestigious cosmetology school, and then enrolled her as one of the first Ailes apprentices. Ailes didn’t want me to think that this was mere altruism. There was something in it for him, too. “I had seen her around the office and noticed she was always in a good mood,” he told me. “That’s critical for a makeup artist. They’re the last ones the talent encounters before going on the air. If they are negative people, they can bring down the show.”
Eric Deggans is the head of the media monitoring committee for the National Association of Black Journalists. His job is to chart how black journalists are faring on television news networks, and he is not a fan of Fox. He says he has never heard of the Ailes Apprentice Program.
“He doesn’t know because he doesn’t want to know,” says Ailes. “After all, it can’t be true if I’m the one who’s doing it.”
Deggans says that Fox News reflects a “white gaze,” which is undoubtedly true. It is also true for every other mainstream news organization. In 2000, Av Westin noted the problem in Best Practices for Television Journalists: A Handbook for Reporters, Producers, Videographers, News Directors and Other Broadcast Professionals on How to Be Fair to the Public, an authoritative guide published under the auspices of the Freedom Forum. Chapter 3 is titled “Bias,” and it sets forth the situation across the spectrum of TV news. “The conventional wisdom among most assignment editors is that white viewers will tune out if blacks or Latinos are featured. . . . There is no question that a lack of racial sensitivity affects new judgment. It is a problem that goes to the heart of fair and balanced presentation of the news on television.” The situation has changed since then. It has gotten worse, on TV and in print. According to a survey done by the American Society of News Editors, the number of minority journalists declined by 31.5 percent between 2001 and 2010, a finding Kathy Times, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, called “horrifying.”
A Nielsen survey taken in 2010 reveals that blacks made up only 1.3 percent of the Fox audience (compared to 20 percent for both CNN and MSNBC). An overwhelming percentage of African Americans are Democrats and supporters of Barack Obama, and many tend to see Fox as the opposition. They aren’t wrong, either. But in comparison with the industry standard, Ailes’s minority employment record is pretty good. His very first hire at Fox was Lauren Green, now the network’s religion correspondent. Wendell Goler is senior White House and foreign affairs correspondent. Brian Jones is number two at the Fox Business channel. Harris Faulkner, Arthel Neville, and Charles Payne are all anchors or coanchors. There are others, as well, including a number of contributors and paid analysts.
To many African American journalists, simply going to work at Fox News makes a black journalist inauthentic and, in some sense, a collaborator with the enemy. “Fox may have black people on the air, but that doesn’t create diversity,” insists Eric Deggans. Not surprisingly, this attitude irritates black journalists who work there. “I got a lot of passionate how-could-you’s when I started at Fox,” says Arthel Neville. “But I never encountered racism there. Believe it or not, the only incident I had with racial undertones was at CNN, when an executive there said she wouldn’t hire a woman named Lakisha because she’d probably have an attitude. Nothing like that has ever happened to me or anyone else, as far as I know, at Fox News.” Her sole complaint about Ailes is that he hasn’t provided a hairstylist who knows how to deal with her hair. “The service at the network is basically for white women,” she says. “I have to pay a hairdresser to do special chemical treatments.”
The idea that black reporters and commentators at Fox are house Negroes on the Ailes plantation is infuriating to Jehmu Greene. She first met Ailes at Harvard University in 2005, where they were both participants in a panel discussion about the junction of pop culture and politics. Greene was there as the past president of Rock the Vote, the MTV initiative to register young voters (she subsequently served as president of the Women’s Media Center, a nonprofit founded by Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, and as a national director of the Democratic Party’s Project Vote, a group that worked closely with other groups, including ACORN, to build the Obama majority). She recalls the Harvard event, which was moderated by Tom Brokaw, as “very white-centric. I was the only person of color on the panel, and the only woman on the panel. I had come to talk about Rock the Vote, but nobody cared about it or what I had to say about it—except for Roger.” She was surprised by their instant rapport. “I found him very authentic. In that world you don’t meet a lot of authentic people. It felt good that night to know there was one person in the room who recognized my value.”
As he did with Rachel Maddow, Ailes struck up an improbable friendship with Jehmu Greene. The Women’s Media Center was trying to train young feminist activists in getting their message out, and Ailes volunteered to help. “Roger invited me to bring in a cadre of progressive women for a studio training session at Fox,” she says. “Each one left that day with a professional reel. And to be clear, these were women who disagreed with him on 101 percent of the issues.”
Greene had done a lot of talking head stints on MSNBC and CNN, but she was never offered a job. In 2010, Ailes hired her as a full-time analyst. Most important, she says, she is allowed to be herself.
“I’m a Democrat through and through. I have no desire to preach to the choir. At Fox I get a chance to talk to the movable middle.”
It bothers Greene that her fellow progressives, white as well as black, regard Ailes as a bigot. “The left has a hard time coping with Roger’s success,” she told me. “They want cartoon characters. I know plenty of progressives who talk a good game on diversity, but it isn’t reflected at all in how they operate. Roger walks the talk. America is very far from being a postracial society. I know that. But Fox News is postracial. This is the first time I’ve worked in an environment where I haven’t felt barriers of race and gender.”
It is easy to dismiss Greene, Neville, Juan Williams, and other black Ailes fans as self-interested. They are, after all, on his payroll. But it is hard to argue that they haven’t been allowed to express themselves on the network. In a Republican candidate debate in South Carolina, Williams took on Newt Gingrich’s statement that blacks should demand “jobs, not food stamps” and his suggestion that black kids bolster their weak work ethic by doing part-time janitorial work, for pay, at school. “Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” asked Williams, who was booed by the mostly white, conservative crowd. This is Fox’s core viewership and there were a lot of complaints, but Ailes loved the way Williams had gone after Gingrich and the publicity it engendered. Here was proof on a national stage that Fox would go after Republicans aggressively; and besides, Ailes was getting sick of Newt’s bombastic campaign.
In April 2012, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts, got busted by her opponent, Scott Brown, for having claimed to be a Native American. Her employer, Harvard, had listed her as a woman of color (in fact, the only woman of color) on the faculty of the law school. The story turned out to be not just bogus but ridiculous. Warren said she had 1/32 Cherokee blood, which, even if true, wouldn’t have qualified her for Cherokee tribal registration. She couldn’t even prove the 1/32nd claim. Worse, she tried by pointing out that her aunt had once said of Warren’s grandfather that he had “high cheekbones, like all Indians do.”
The scandal was an Ailes trifecta. It underscored the ludicrous and self-serving nature of racial preferences based on “blood.” It made Harvard Law School look gullible (while unintentionally emphasizing how few women of color actually teach there). And it could play a role in keeping the former Ted Kennedy seat in the Senate in Republican hands.
Fox took up the story with vigor. In a panel discussion with Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, Jehmu Greene came to Warren’s defense. “You see Scott Brown really questioning her qualifications because he has to appeal to white, working-class voters who feel marginalized because of affirmative action,” said Greene. “This smells real stank to women who do not like being called on their qualifications.” She added that Tucker Carlson, a conservative contributor, was the sort of person this would appeal to—a “bow-tying white boy.” At the end of the segment, Kelly apologized to the audience for a violation of the network’s standards. Conservative cyberspace exploded with demands that Greene be banished for her racist remark. Typical was a column by Mychal Massie in WorldNetDaily. “Think of the level of betrayal Greene exhibited. She has been a Fox News contributor for a long time, and during all of that time, as she smugly sat arguing her leftist point of view, she secretly looked upon Carlson and every other white person with prejudice . . . if Fox News has any integrity, it should immediately and without apology fire Jehmu Greene.”
Ailes didn’t fire Jehmu Greene. On the contrary, he had every reason to be pleased with her. Mediaite, a website headed by former MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams, wrote that “perhaps Fox isn’t as beholden to its decidedly right-leaning audience as many believe . . . the lack of punishment may also show that Fox has no interest in being the ‘PC Police.’” Roger Ailes couldn’t have made these points any better.
• • •
In You Are the Message, Roger Ailes had offered this advice:
A woman who acts like a man in the workplace is as silly as a man who acts like a woman in the workplace. Many women have felt, with some justification, that if they didn’t toughen up and act macho, and be one of the boys, they would never get along. Women: Stay true to your identity. Whatever you do keep in mind that, as in all communications, your tone of voice, the expression in your eyes, the attitudes conveyed by your face and body will determine how others interpret your words. And above all keep your sense of humor and your sense of perspective.
In many ways, Ailes’s views on gender have remained what they were when he wrote these words in 1989 (and, for that matter, what they were in 1969, and probably 1959). Ailes sometimes still refers to grown women as “girls.” He doesn’t like affirmative action for women any better than he does for ethnic or racial minorities. And, despite his old-fashioned notions of male gallantry, he is capable of shockingly bad manners in describing women who cross him. He infamously referred to Mary Matalin and Jane Wallace, the cohosts of a show on CNBC, as “girls who, if you went into a bar around seven, you wouldn’t pay a lot of attention, but they get to be tens around closing time.” When Paula Zahn left Fox for CNN, Ailes said he could have gotten better ratings with a “dead raccoon,” and a spokesman for Fox compared her new show to putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse. To Ailes, such talk isn’t a sign of disrespect or paternalism. It is a sign of equality. He talks about everybody that way, and if they can’t take a joke (or an insult), well, that’s their problem. Women, like men, are welcome to the club, but they have to be able to take a punch.
It also helps if they are beautiful. Ailes makes no apology for this. “Television is a visual medium,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with having good-looking people on the screen.” Some critics disagree. “When it comes to news readers, there is a look at Fox—blonde and attractive and somewhat interchangeable—that has gradually trickled down to the other networks,” says Mark Danner. Jon Stewart and other comics have made a running joke of the “dumb blondes” of Fox News. “Sure, we have news actresses at Fox, just like the other cables do,” says Brit Hume. “With a twenty-four-hour day, there are gaps to fill in, and they do news cut-ins or weekend jobs.” There is, in fact, a high density of beauty queens and runway models at Fox, but looks can be deceiving. Fox & Friends host Gretchen Carlson is a former Miss America who plays the violin, matriculated at Stanford, and studied at Oxford. Shannon Bream, an anchor of Fox News Headquarters, is an attorney as well as a former Miss Virginia and Miss Florida. Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the cohosts of The Five, modeled underwear for Victoria’s Secret, but she was also a prosecutor in San Francisco and L.A. Arthel Neville came to New York as a model with a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. Martha MacCallum, the coanchor of America’s Newsroom, worked for six years as a business correspondent at NBC and CNBC before joining Fox.
And not all of the beautiful women of Fox are blonde. Lauren Green was the third runner-up in the Miss America pageant in 1989, and is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is also unmarried, a fact that prompted one of the more bizarre on-air exchanges in the history of television news. During an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Fox State Department correspondent James Rosen said, “I close with a gift for you. You met this person once, I believe, but you really ought to know each other because this woman, I think you’ll have an interest in knowing her. She is one of our Fox News anchors in New York. Her name is Lauren Green. She is brilliant, she is beautiful, she is African American, she’s single, and she’s a concert pianist in her spare time.”
“My goodness,” Rice responded with diplomatic understatement. Rosen proceeded to hand her a CD recorded by Green and informed Rice that his colleague was “going to want to hear from you.” The exchange raised so many eyebrows that a mortified Green gave an interview to the Minneapolis Tribune to clarify her status. “I am very straight,” she said. “All Christian men, single and over thirty-five, can apply.”
For all his political incorrectness, Ailes sees himself as a pioneer in the area of employing women. “I was the first to put a female on as host of a prime-time show,” he told me. “That scared the hell out of the other cable networks.” Greta Van Susteren, who now occupies the ten o’clock spot, is nobody’s idea of a dumb blonde.
Megyn Kelly, on the other hand, is both blonde and brainy, and she has made good use of her glamour-girl image. She was discovered by Brit Hume, after his wife gave him a tape of Kelly (then Megyn Kendall) appearing on a local news show. “She looked stupendous and she had a really strong voice,” says Hume. He sent the tape to Roger Ailes, who hired Kelly without even having an open job. She’s a rising star: In addition to hosting her own show, she has appeared on presidential debates, and is scheduled to coanchor election night 2012. She is definitely being groomed for even bigger things.
Kelly has a history of playing with the “dumb blonde” stereotype. In 2010, she went on the Howard Stern show, where she unflappably bantered along with the ribald host. She also posed for a provocative photo spread and interview with GQ. In the interview, Kelly was asked about false rumors that she and Brit Hume were having an affair. She denied it, but Hume thought it was funny (and flattering). At his retirement dinner he called being linked to Kelly in the press “one of the greatest experiences of my life. It’s not true. But it’s not impossible!” It got a big laugh, especially from Kelly, who was worried that the story might be believed. Ailes, who learned about the GQ pictorial and the Stern appearance after the fact, thought they were too racy for a serious journalist and told her so. Kelly told Ailes that she didn’t feel she had done anything wrong, but she also promised that it wouldn’t happen again. But that’s not to say that both Kelly and Ailes underestimate the appeal of attractive women on television.
Megyn Kelly’s office at Fox looks like a boutique. She has closets full of clothing and a shoe rack displaying twenty-five pairs of hot-looking pumps. “It is a credit to Roger and his makeup and hairdressing team that the women at Fox have such an ‘it’ factor,” she said. “The hairstylists, wardrobe people, and makeup artists here are better than at the other networks. They look to create a ‘professional glam’ and it works.” Kelly is realistic enough to know that what she does—what all successful television journalists do—is a form of show business. “The whole day at Fox is cast by Roger,” she says. “There are beautiful blondes, high school quarterbacks, brainiacs, and the entire spectrum.” She is content to play her part because she sees the results. But she is not a femme fatale on the air. She was a practicing attorney for nine years, and she can be a tough, abrasive questioner. “Megyn doesn’t back down for anyone,” Ailes says. “She can even stand up to O’Reilly.”
• • •
“I’ve been kicked out of every damn church I’ve ever belonged to,” says Roger Ailes. It is a buccaneer’s boast, meant to convey a hard-core irreverence. Ailes is not, by any means, a conventional born-again Christian of the Mike Huckabee variety, let alone Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. He wouldn’t use the word himself, but he is ecumenical. He donates considerable sums each year to a small Protestant church near his home in Garrison, although he is not on its membership rolls. He donates upward of 10 percent of his net income to charities, many of them religious, including an annual fifty grand to the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and another fifty grand to Catholic charities. He told me he’d be glad to give to Muslim charities, too, “if they disarm.”
Beth Ailes is a devout Catholic, and her husband often accompanies her to Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Loretto in Cold Spring; Beth occasionally plays the organ there. Their son is getting a Catholic education. Many of Ailes’s closest associates are Roman Catholics, including legal consigliere Peter Johnson Jr.; his two senior deputies, Michael Clemente and Bill Shine (as well as his former head of news, John Moody); and Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, anchorman Bill Hemmer, Bret Baier, Neil Cavuto, Doug Kennedy, and Megyn Kelly (to name but a few) are also practicing Catholics. For years, Fox had a permanent correspondent in Rome, Greg Burke, reporting on the Vatican (in June, Burke was appointed senior communications adviser to the Holy See). The network also employs Father Jonathan Martin as a full-fledged commentator on religious and church matters. Ailes told me he doesn’t see anything unusual about this, but it is; very few national media organizations have such a concentration of openly devout religious believers of any denomination. Fox has the reputation of being something of a champion of the church. That has been notable in Fox coverage of the priest sex scandals of the past decade. “Roger isn’t an apologist for the church,” says Neil Cavuto, himself a former seminarian. “We cover the news.” Cavuto is right: Fox has covered the story, but less aggressively and with less hostility than many other major news organizations. Chris Cuomo thinks this is due to Ailes. “Maybe he doesn’t light candles, but he also doesn’t let people go on the air and beat up Catholics,” Cuomo says.
In late May of 2012, forty-three Catholic archdioceses and organizations sued the federal government, on freedom-of-religion grounds, over the part of the Obama health plan that would require insurance companies to cover the cost of contraception for the employees of Catholic institutions and charities. A fight between the Catholic hierarchy and the White House is big news, especially in an election year, and Fox covered it that way. The other networks didn’t. On the day the suits were filed, ABC and NBC evening news broadcasts ignored the story altogether. CBS gave it nineteen seconds. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Fox talking heads turned this seeming indifference into an illustration of the way in which the media attempt to minimize the importance of the official Catholic point of view.
• • •
Geraldo Rivera is Roger Ailes’s favorite Latino journalist. He broke into the news business as a mouthpiece for a group every bit as radical and separatist as the New Black Panthers. In the late sixties, the Young Lords, a Chicago Puerto Rican street gang, transformed itself into a militant nationalist organization modeled on the (original) Black Panthers. A small delegation of New Yorkers traveled to Chicago and got permission from the Young Lords to open their own New York branch. In 1969, they made headlines with a series of public demonstrations, such as setting mountains of uncollected garbage on fire on Third Avenue and “liberating” property and redistributing it to the poor. At a time when the country was suffering from collective jitters caused by political assassinations and urban rioting, the general public found the Young Lords frightening, which was the point. The situation exploded when the group seized a Manhattan church and held it for eleven days. The publicity was enormous. Eventually 105 Young Lords were arrested. Their lawyer and advocate was a charismatic young Puerto Rican Jewish attorney, Geraldo Rivera.
Rivera was a natural media star, and he soon got job offers from clueless TV news directors desperate to find out what was going on inside a previously unknown community. He was hired by ABC, which billed him as “the first Latino reporting for a national network.” But Rivera was more than a token. He did important exposés of life in the city, covered international conflicts with bravery and flair, and wound up as the senior producer and star correspondent of ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine.
Geraldo, who fashions himself “a barroom brawler, a guy who pushes back,” made a lot of enemies at ABC with his flamboyant, ego-driven style of reporting. When Rivera publicly criticized Roone Arledge for spiking Sylvia Chase’s story on the romantic relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Arledge fired him. He spent the next few years doing syndicated tabloid television shows, some of which made him a laughingstock. He did a talk show in which a skinhead punched him in the nose. His after-dark exploits made him a staple of New York gossip columns. He was making money, but for a serious journalist, which is how he saw himself, it was humiliating. He wanted professional rehabilitation, and in 1994, when Roger Ailes hired him at CNBC, he got it.
“Roger is my blood brother,” Rivera told me. In 1996, when Ailes led his jailbreak from CNBC to Fox, Rivera didn’t join. He couldn’t afford to; he had a $30 million contract. But after 9/11, when NBC declined to send him to the Middle East as a war correspondent, he turned to Ailes. “If you get out of your contract, come on over,” Ailes told him. Rivera signed with Fox for about half of what he had been making and wound up where he wanted to be, a war correspondent in the middle of the fighting (and the center of the television screen).
Rivera is rich and famous and patriotic. But on social issues, he is an outspoken advocate for positions Ailes opposes. During the Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2011, Rivera did three live broadcasts that were clearly and proudly sympathetic to the demonstrators. And he is an outspoken supporter of amnesty for illegal aliens. Ailes kids him about this: “What are you, running for king of Mexico?” he asked after Rivera’s book on immigration came out—but Rivera says he has never been told what stories to do or how to report them.
Despite their political differences, Ailes and Geraldo are close friends, and on Latino issues, he is a sounding board. During the Republican primary campaign, Rick Santorum traveled to San Juan to stump for Puerto Rican votes, claiming he had a good chance to win. The subject came up at an editorial meeting. Fox had political reporters covering the election, but Ailes wanted an expert opinion.
“What does Geraldo say?” he asked Bill Shine.
“Geraldo thinks Santorum is wrong,” Shine said.
“Yeah, me too,” said Ailes, dismissing Santorum’s Puerto Rican strategy. And that was that.
There are other journalists at Fox News who come from Hispanic backgrounds. Juan Williams was born in Panama. Kimberly Guilfoyle of The Five is the daughter of an Irish father and a Puerto Rican mother. Correspondent Julie Banderas’s mother is Colombian. They all allude to their ethnic backgrounds from time to time, but they are American journalists who happen to have some Hispanic connection. In a country in which Latinos and their children are now the largest single ethnic group (or collection of Spanish-speaking subgroups), every media organization wants to reach and cultivate that market.
Ailes’s primary tool for this is Fox News Latino, a website headed by Frankie Cortes, a young graduate of the apprentice program. Cortes is clearly being groomed for an important role in what will certainly be a bigger target area in the future. Ailes recently sent him on an Anti-Defamation League junket to Israel. A report on that journey was the first item of business at a lunch meeting Ailes chaired with the senior staff of the website. Cortes said that he had been impressed by the country, found the schedule hectic, and very much enjoyed the food (which, I can personally attest, is a step up from the fare at Ailes’s working lunches; this day the menu was a choice of ham and processed cheese or tuna fish sandwich and potato chips). Ailes asked if ADL chief Abe Foxman had been on the trip. Cortes said he hadn’t been.
“Israel’s in a tight spot right now, and this network stands behind it all the way,” Ailes said. This didn’t come as a surprise to anyone at the meeting. There are two framed photographs in Ailes’s office: One is of General George Patton; the other shows him warmly shaking hands with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hispanics, as a community, are still making up their minds about the Middle East, and it is important to Ailes to help them reach the “right” conclusions.
Ailes asked for a report on the site, which was founded in 2010.
“It’s really taking off,” said Cortes. “We’re getting three million unique hits.”
“Do you deal with the illegal immigration story or are you ignoring it?” asked Ailes. It was a management technique I saw him use repeatedly. There was no chance at all that Roger Ailes didn’t know exactly how the website was reporting on the hottest issue of the day.
“We are, certainly,” said Cortes.
“Where are people on this?” Ailes asked.
“We’ve got a poll that shows 70 percent of Latino voters are for Obama.”
“What else does the poll show?” asked Ailes.
Cortes said that it revealed a high degree of optimism, especially when respondents were asked about their children’s futures.
“That’s because they haven’t read the Obama health care plan yet,” Ailes said. “You know, if I had to go to the army, I’d want to be with Latinos. They have a lot of medals.” I was expecting him to order up a story on Hispanic military heroism, but his mind was on politics. “The main reason the Republican Party doesn’t get the Latino vote is because it doesn’t know how to talk to them,” Ailes said. “Literally, we have to speak their language.” This year, a new Spanish-language channel, MundoFox, began broadcasting two daily newscasts in Spanish (one for the East Coast, one for the West), anchored by Rolando Nichols of KWHY-TV, a Fox affiliate in Los Angeles.
Ailes has a heterodox position on illegal immigration, at least for a Republican in an election year. “Every country has to be able to enforce its borders. Otherwise there is no sovereignty. If I was president I’d do what’s necessary, including putting Navy SEALs on the border with orders to shoot to kill drug dealers who are trying to infiltrate the country,” he told me several months after this meeting. “Immigrants who have committed crimes should be rounded up and punished. But, at the same time, a lot of conservative views on immigration are reactionary. Immigrants from Mexico are cultural conservatives and we should be encouraging them to come legally. Texas and the other border states could be modern Ellis Islands. Let ’em sign the register, make them hum a few bars of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and then welcome them to America.”
Ailes is also happy to contemplate a deal that would allow those here illegally to remain. “Any parent would do it for his kids,” he says. “Expulsion isn’t a solution. I’m not big on searching out people who are here without visas or papers. Maybe make them do community service, or pay a fine of some kind they can work off when they get on their feet. But punishment? That’s like punishing a seventeen-year-old girl for having an abortion. It makes no sense.”
For now, Ailes settled for marching orders. “Don’t go soft on the Republicans. They have to learn how to talk to Latinos. Is [Senator Marco] Rubio popular?” There was a brief discussion of the question among the Hispanic journalists. The consensus was, yes and no.
“I like Rubio,” Ailes said. “But I don’t know about as a vice presidential candidate. He’s a nice guy, and that role requires kicking the crap out of your opponents. The first question they [the candidate’s vetting team] will ask him is, ‘Can you go after Obama?’ And I’m not sure he can.” He paused, thinking about vice presidents he had known.
“I have a soft spot for Joe Biden,” he said. “I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray.” He consulted his watch, popped a last potato chip into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and said, “This country will fail if we don’t solve the immigrant problem. America is a culture. We have to make sure everyone feels at home here. You are all trusted lieutenants. Just remember, we are running a business here.”