“THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN AMERICA”
During the presidential campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama was upset by Fox News, which by then was in its sixth year of cable dominance. He was being treated deferentially (and, in some quarters, worshipfully) by most of the media, but getting roughed up on Fox, especially by Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. A sit-down was arranged with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes to get Fox’s mind right.
Ailes recalls that the meeting took place in a private room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan (White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to relate the president’s version). Obama arrived with his aide, Robert Gibbs, who seated Ailes directly across from Obama, close enough for Ailes to feel the intention was to intimidate him. He didn’t mind; in fact, he rather appreciated the stagecraft, one political professional to another.
After some pleasantries, Obama got to the point. He was concerned about the way he was being portrayed on Fox. Ailes responded that the news coverage thus far had been fair and balanced, and would continue to be. Obama said that his real issue wasn’t the news; it was Sean Hannity, who had been battering him every night at nine (and on his radio show, which Fox doesn’t own or control). Ailes didn’t deny that Hannity was anti-Obama. He simply told the candidate not to worry about it. “Nobody who watches Sean’s going to vote for you anyway,” he said.
Obama then asked Ailes what his personal concerns might be. It is a politician’s question that means: What can I do for you?
Ailes said he was mainly concerned about Obama’s strength on national security issues. The candidate assured Ailes that he had nothing to worry about.
“Well, why are you going around talking about making cuts in weapons systems?” asked Ailes. “If you’re going to cut, why not at least negotiate them and get something in return?”
Obama said that Ailes had been misinformed; he was not advocating unilateral cuts.
“He said this looking me right in the eyes,” says Ailes. “He never dropped his gaze, which is the usual tell. It was as good a lie as anyone ever told me. I said, ‘Senator, I just watched someone say exactly that on my computer screen before coming over here. Maybe it wasn’t you, but it sure looked like you and sounded like you. I think it was you.’”
At that point, Gibbs stood and announced that the session was over. “I don’t think he liked the meeting very much,” says Ailes.
Relations between Ailes and the Obama administration were bad from the start, although in his first few months in office the White House focused most of its media fire on Rush Limbaugh. But under the surface there was considerable tension, and it came to the surface with the Van Jones affair.
Jones was the environmental activist appointed in 2009 by Obama to the newly created position of Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Jones wasn’t well known, but he seemed to be an attractive, well-qualified Yale lawyer whom Time magazine had named one of its “heroes of the environment.” But Fox, led by Glenn Beck, took a closer look at his background, which included youthful involvement in a radical organization, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) and, more recently, advocacy for convicted murderer—and alleged political prisoner—Mumia Abu-Jamal. Beck also claimed that Jones had signed a petition suggesting that the Bush administration may have been complicit in the attacks on September 11, 2001 (a claim he waffled on and then denied). And Fox reported that Jones had referred to congressional Republicans as “assholes,” for which he apologized. All this was too much turbulence for the White House. Jones was allowed to resign, and spokesman Robert Gibbs remarked coldly that President Obama did not endorse Jones’s statements but “thanked him for his service.”
Roger Ailes and Van Jones had tangled before. In 2007, Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus announced that they were going to cosponsor two debates, one Republican, one Democratic, in the 2008 presidential primaries. This wasn’t unprecedented; Fox had cosponsored a debate with the CBC in 2004, in Detroit. The Nevada Democratic Party had recently agreed to hold a debate on Fox. Grassroots reaction had forced the Nevadans to cancel, though, and there was pressure for the CBC to do the same. The effort was led by a group called ColorOfChange.org, which accused Fox News of racism and called the CBC’s decision to partner with it “shamefully out of step with most black voters.” Van Jones was the cofounder of the group.
After Obama won the nomination, ColorOfChange.org, along with MoveOn.org and other progressive groups, launched a nationwide petition drive aimed at branding Fox a racist network. The petitions, which had 620,000 signatures, were delivered to Fox headquarters.
A lot of people at the White House thought that Obama had let Jones go too easily. “He was very close to Michelle Obama in particular,” says Bob Beckel. “She blamed Fox for getting him fired. After that, a lot of Democrats grew leery of even coming on Fox.”
Not long after the Jones episode, the White House press office set up five-minute interviews for each of the networks with Kenneth Feinberg, the “pay czar.” Fox was excluded. It was the first time anyone could recall that an administration had banned a network from the press pool. The Washington bureau contacted Ailes, who went to work.
Ailes had been expecting something like this, and he was prepared. “Roger doesn’t believe in blind rage,” says Woody Fraser. “He believes that if you have to fight, you build for it. When this happened, he was ready.” Ailes contacted the heads of the other networks, reminded them that they were all equal partners in the costs of the pool, and that what happened to Fox could happen to them, too. He also mentioned the possibility that barring Fox could be a government violation of press freedom. The networks got the message; nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of the First Amendment. Fox got its interview with Feinberg.
About this time, the White House spokesman Gibbs began saying that Fox wasn’t a real news organization. At a briefing, ABC correspondent Jake Tapper asked him how Fox differed from the other networks. “You and I should watch sometime around nine o’clock tonight or five this afternoon,” Gibbs replied. Those were the times the Glenn Beck and Hannity shows aired. “I’m not talking about [Fox] opinion programming, or issues you have with certain reports,” said Tapper. “I’m talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?”
“That is our opinion,” Gibbs replied.
The White House was not winning this particular battle. The Democratic base hated Fox, of course; bashing it played well on campus and in the big blue states and cities. But Fox had millions of viewers, and surveys showed that a great many were liberals or moderates. At the height of the crisis, Ailes met with David Axelrod in New York.
The meeting was cordial but it didn’t end the tension. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, went on CNN’s Reliable Sources and revived the “Fox isn’t a news organization” meme. “I think what is fair to say about Fox, and certainly the way we view it, is that it really is more of a wing of the Republican Party,” she told host Howard Kurtz. She added that Fox viewers during the 2008 campaign, which took place on the backdrop of the financial collapse, would have concluded that “the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN.”
Dunn was mistaken. Fox News, like all the other news networks, reported incessantly on the financial meltdown and its consequences. No Fox viewer could have missed it. Fox talk show hosts, especially Beck and Hannity, did focus heavily on Ayers, ACORN, and Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and to an extent that was partisanship (Hannity is a self-declared Republican who refers to the GOP as “we”). But Fox also had a very valid journalistic reason to pursue these stories. The mainstream media (abetted by the Republican candidate) barely reported on Ayers, Wright, and ACORN at all. Unburdened by such inhibitions, Fox had almost daily scoops on the background and associations of the little-known Obama. Fox viewers knew more, not less, than the viewers of other television news (or, for that matter, the readers of the major newspapers).
In the midst of the face-off between Fox and the White House, Roger Ailes made a rare television appearance on ABC’s Sunday show, This Week. Barbara Walters was the substitute host and she wanted a ratings smash, so she brought on Ailes to spar with Arianna Huffington and Paul Krugman. Ailes very seldom appears on TV, and the show competed directly with Fox News’ own interview program, but a friend is a friend. Walters was after fireworks and Ailes provided them. Arianna Huffington rebuked Ailes for allowing Glenn Beck to engage in uncivil and extreme language on his show. Ailes said that Beck had apologized, but that he, Ailes, didn’t want to police language on the air (in fact, he was already figuring out how to get rid of Beck, but he wasn’t about to say so on ABC). Huffington pressed her point.
“It’s not about the word police,” she said. “It’s about something deeper . . . the paranoid style [used by Beck] is dangerous when there is real pain out there.”
Ailes’s candidates never come to a debate unprepared, and neither does he. “I agree with you [about the need for civility],” he said. “I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor— . . .”
“That was never by anybody that we had—” Huffington protested.
“But then it really went nasty, and I thought, Gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out. . . .”
Ailes and Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, got into it over the still-pending health care legislation. Krugman charged that Fox had intentionally obscured the meaning of the bill. Ailes replied that the bill was thousands of pages long. Krugman said that legislation is always long. Ailes pointed out that the Constitution is considerably shorter. Looking back on the exchange, Ailes is dismissive. “All Krugman wants to do is give away money. That’s his answer to everything. He’s a dope but nobody wants to say it because he’s won awards.”
The topic that most interested Walters was the Fox-Obama dustup. “You have had your own back-and-forth with the White House,” she said to Ailes. “They were not very happy with you, banned you for a while. Have you kissed and made up? Is it hunky-dory?”
“Well, they tried to ban us,” Ailes replied. “They wanted to break the pool but the other networks stepped up and protected Fox on it, because it was . . . interference with a contractual relationship and sort of tramping around on the Constitution. . . .”
“But now you’re okay?”
“We’re fine. I mean, we were—it was not as bad as it was played, and things are not as great as they should be, but we have a good dialogue. And I saw the president and his wife at the media Christmas party. They were very gracious, very nice, both of them. And we have a dialogue every day with them.”
Ailes didn’t originally want to go to the Christmas party: Getting around is hard for him, and he’s already been to the White House. But it was an opportunity to introduce his son to the president, and so he and Zac went to DC. They stayed at the Jefferson Hotel because it has short corridors, and ate from room service.
At the party, when Ailes reached Obama in the receiving line, the president said, “Here comes the most powerful man in America”—a joking but pointed reference to an article that had recently dubbed the Fox chief with that title. Ailes leaned in to the much taller Obama and said, “Don’t believe that bullshit, Mr. President. I started that rumor myself.”
Ailes was never concerned that the White House would actually close Fox out. And there was value to him, with his own base, in playing up the drama. Meanwhile, at his direction, the Fox bureau in Washington was finding a modus vivendi with the White House. “Even in the darkest times, when White House officials said outrageous things about our news product, we still had communications with the president’s staff,” says Bret Baier, the anchor of Fox News’ 6:00 p.m. Special Report, who replaced Brit Hume. “Sometimes it was surreal. Anita Dunn would be outside telling reporters that Fox News is the media arm of the GOP while we were inside the White House working with people in the administration. We understood at the time that what Dunn and some others were doing was putting on a political show.”
As Ailes predicted he would, Obama caved. He needed the Fox audience. Three days before the health care bill passed Congress, he gave Baier an interview. It was contentious, but it didn’t lead to a new boycott. “Obama understands the power of Fox in an election year,” says Baier. “We still don’t have the kind of access to the president that others have—Chris Wallace and I have each interviewed him once, and O’Reilly has had him on twice. I think he’s been interviewed on NBC something like fifteen times. But we’re not blacklisted anymore.”
By the time Ed Henry joined Fox News in the summer of 2011 as senior White House correspondent, hostilities between Fox and the Obama administration were in a lull. Henry had been the senior White House correspondent at CNN, and he understood the cease-fire would be temporary. The new job would be a combat assignment.
Henry had his doubts about joining Fox. CNN was a sinking ship—everyone there knew it. But he was concerned about being stigmatized as a right-wing propagandist. The concern was assuaged when he met Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer at a Washington dinner and the liberal jurist told him that the news show he watches every night is Special Report because he finds the reporting so straight.
But Henry had another concern. The job offer had come from Michael Clemente. He had never actually met Roger Ailes. “All I really knew about Roger was the caricature of him as a right-wing ogre,” he says. But he trusted Clemente and he decided to take the job.
“After the deal was done, I took the train up to New York to meet Ailes,” he recalls. “There was a sense of mystery around him, which I felt while I was in his waiting room. When I finally walked in, he looked at me and said, ‘This company was doing great and then we hired you, and now it’s all fucked up.’” Then he burst out laughing. Henry got the full Ailes treatment—the profane banter, the cynical asides, and the camaraderie that goes with joining the team. He found himself wishing he had a camera to record it.
Finally Henry asked Ailes why he had been hired.
“I could see that you are a fair reporter,” Ailes said. “You’re earnest, and that comes across. This is a big beat and I need someone credible. The first day you go on the air for us, there’s going to be a bull’s-eye on your ass. You’re going to be a target.”
Ailes was right. At his first White House press briefing, presidential spokesman Jay Carney accused Henry of parroting Republican talking points. “He was testing me,” said Henry, and it gave Henry a chance to test Ailes. “I’ve worked at other places where if you mix it up with a White House spokesman, the network’s first instinct might be to appoint a task force to look into your behavior instead of backing you up.”
Henry’s apprehension grew when he got a message from Michael Clemente telling him to call headquarters. “I thought I might be screwed,” he says. Clemente, speaking as always for Ailes, assured Henry that Fox wouldn’t stand for Carney’s bullying. Henry was charmed. “It wasn’t the usual half-assed ‘Maybe you went too far.’ This was, ‘We stand behind our guy.’”
A few weeks later, at a press conference, the president himself threw a brushback pitch. Henry asked about assertions by Mitt Romney that Obama was weak on Iran. It was a fair question in an election year, one that invited a rebuttal by Obama. Instead, the president said, “I didn’t know you are the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.” This time, Henry took the jibe in stride. “I’m supposed to ask hard questions. If it were a Republican president, I’m sure Roger would expect me to do the same thing. Eventually New York, L.A., and Washington, DC, will start to catch on to what the rest of the country already knows: There are a lot of strong, honest reporters at Fox.”
In February 2012, Media Matters put out a book of Ailes’s horribles, The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine. The book itself didn’t concern Ailes much, although he saw to it that friendly websites and some Fox commentators reminded America that the coauthor, David Brock, the head of Media Matters, does not exactly have a sterling reputation for honesty, and that the organization, which was founded with the “help and support” of the obviously partisan Hillary Clinton, is a political group that enjoys a charitable tax status. What really annoyed Ailes was that Senator Harry Reid went to the launch party in Washington and praised the book publicly. “We already know that Anita Dunn and Valerie Jarrett were coordinating the Media Matters war on Fox News, and now here’s the majority leader of the Senate joining in. Two branches of government collaborating to shut down a news organization. What about the First Amendment? This is plain unconstitutional.”
Media Matters and its right-wing opposite number, Media Research Center, are not, and don’t pretend to be, objective or even open-minded analysts. They are partisan players, and their role is to find every possible way to discredit the opposition. This can be useful; there are enough mistakes in the media (and in the book-writing business) to keep armies of Washington-based nitpickers gainfully employed.
For Media Matters, Roger Ailes is one of the two Great Satans (Rush Limbaugh is the other). Every mistake or misstatement on Fox, which broadcasts 168 hours a week, is a premeditated lie. Every news story is an exercise in bias. Fox personnel are nothing but stooges in Roger Ailes’s propaganda machine. People who watch Fox News are morons, either by birth or as a result of exposure to the network.
Media Matters is constantly on the lookout for scientific-sounding support for its ideology. It thought it had found some in a study by the University of Maryland, published in 2010, that purported to find that Fox viewers were the most misinformed audience of any network. This was so exciting that David Brock led his book with it, and Media Matters disseminated the findings widely. Eventually it made its way to Jon Stewart. Stewart, in turn, appeared on Chris Wallace’s Sunday morning interview show. The invitation was a tribute to Stewart’s influence as a satirist (and, not incidentally, a refutation of the idea that Fox doesn’t allow its critics on the air). Stewart and Wallace argued back and forth about the merits of the network, and Stewart closed the deal with hard evidence. “Who are the most consistently uninformed viewers?” he asked rhetorically. “Fox News viewers, consistently, every poll.” Wallace didn’t argue. He probably didn’t know what Stewart was talking about. Neither did Stewart. PolitiFact .com, which belongs to the liberal Tampa Bay Times, pointed out what everyone who hadn’t bought the Media Matters hype already knew: The Maryland study did not demonstrate that Fox viewers were less or more informed than anyone else. Stewart, who suffers from an exceptional degree of intellectual honesty, publicly apologized.*
A lot of the Media Matters oeuvre amounts to stating the obvious in terms of the scandalous. Fox reporting on the war in Iraq was more positive than that of other networks! Fox reporting on the Obama health care legislation was more negative! This doesn’t demonstrate that Fox reporting on these and other subjects is more or less correct, merely that it differs from what Media Matters regards as truth as measured by the distance between any story and Democratic Party talking points.
Roger Ailes often boasts that Fox hasn’t had to take down a story in fifteen years. Lately he has amended that: He says he means a major story, like Dan Rather’s career-ending, unsupportable allegations that George W. Bush dodged his Texas Air National Guard duty; CNN’s bogus Tailwind scandal; NBC’s rigged “exploding GM truck” affair, or that network’s subsequent firing of three employees for doctoring a 9-1-1 tape to make it sound like George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin for racist reasons (which may or may not be the case). But Fox has made plenty of mistakes. Shep Smith once announced the death of a pope a full day before the pontiff stopped breathing. On another occasion, Smith got his tongue twisted in an embarrassing way, reporting that while Jennifer Lopez considers herself a neighborhood girl at heart, her actual neighbors are “more likely to give her a curb job than a blow job . . . rather, ‘block party.’” In both cases he apologized; in the latter, Ailes thought it was funny. And during the war in Iraq, Fox hired a bogus lieutenant colonel as a military analyst. Upon closer investigation, his entire army résumé consisted of six weeks of basic training.
A more serious incident took place in the early days of the Afghanistan war. On December 6, 2001, Geraldo Rivera reported on an incident in which “our men” had been killed by friendly fire. Six days later, David Folkenflik reported in the Baltimore Sun that Rivera had not been at the battleground but hundreds of miles away. Rivera explained that he had confused the friendly fire incident with a similar one. Ailes, as usual, stood by his man: Fox issued a terse statement on December 26, acknowledging that its correspondent had made an “honest mistake,” since corrected. The story might have ended there, but Rivera demanded an apology from Folkenflik for questioning his honesty. Rivera grew more irate when the Center for Media and Public Affairs awarded Folkenflik a prize for investigative reporting. Rivera still insists that he was guilty of nothing more than reporting in the midst of the fog of war. Folkenflik, now a media reporter for NPR, not only rejects this explanation but has publicly chided Ailes for failing to issue an on-air retraction.
None of these errors were partisan. But that can’t be said for three on-air incidents that took place during the 2008 primary campaign. In one, E. D. Hill, host of the daytime America’s Pulse, wondered aloud if the greeting candidate Obama shared with his wife was actually “a terrorist fist jab.” Hill apologized the next day on the air. Within a week Fox canceled her show and her contract wasn’t renewed. She wound up as an anchor and host on CNN. Around the same time, Fox reported a story taken from a conservative website that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was circulating rumors that Obama had been educated in Islamic schools in Indonesia. The story was false, and John Moody sent out a curt note to the staff reminding them that merely appearing on a website did not qualify a story as credible. “We violated one of our cardinal policies,” Moody told me. “We went on the air without knowing what we were talking about.”
News analyst Liz Trotta made it a trifecta. Discussing a remark by Hillary Clinton about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, she said, “Now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh, Obama. Well, both if we could.” She apologized the next day for what she called a “lame attempt at humor,” adding that it was a “very colorful political season, and many of us are making mistakes and saying things that we wish that we hadn’t said.” True, but the mistakes were all insinuations that Obama was connected to terrorism, Islamic radicalism, or Al Qaeda.
There were other misfires. In 2009, Sean Hannity showed footage of a crowd at a Michele Bachmann rally against Obamacare; it turned out to be video from a much larger rally held two months earlier. Hannity apologized the next day after he was busted by Jon Stewart. A week later, Gregg Jarrett reported huge crowds at a Sarah Palin book signing, with what turned out to be video from a 2008 campaign rally. Fox again apologized for the mistake the next day.
In March 2010, Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia state director of rural development for the federal Department of Agriculture, gave a speech at a chapter of the NAACP. In it she told the story of a white farmer who had appealed to her office for help to save some land. Her first reaction, she told her audience, was unsympathetic. She recalled the persecution of her family in the Jim Crow South and felt gratified that the shoe was now on the other foot.
The speech was recorded. Andrew Breitbart got a copy of it and shopped it around. Various websites, including Fox News, picked it up, and the story caused a furor. Sherrod was contacted by her bosses in Washington and forced to resign. The head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, denounced her. Bill O’Reilly took up the case as a clear example of racial discrimination by an Obama administration official.
But, it turned out, the story Sherrod had told her audience came with a happy ending. She overcame her own prejudice, helped the white farmer, and learned a valuable lesson about fairness and tolerance. That part got left out of the video. The NAACP backtracked, exonerating Sherrod and condemning the deception. President Obama personally called Sherrod and let her know he was sorry for the way the Department of Agriculture had responded. And, on The Factor, Bill O’Reilly made his own mea culpa. “I owe Ms. Sherrod an apology for not doing my homework, for not putting her remarks into the proper context,” he said.
“The Shirley Sherrod thing was a mistake,” says Michael Clemente. “We went to air with it too early and it wasn’t checked properly. My job is to make sure that something like that never happens again.”
• • •
In the fall of 2011, Roger Ailes told journalist Howard Kurtz that he was turning down the partisan heat at the network. Ailes didn’t say so, but he had already decided that, in the interest of a more moderate tone, he would have to get rid of Glenn Beck.
Beck came to Fox from CNN in 2009, and turned five o’clock—a perennially weak hour on the Fox schedule—into a bonanza. Beck contained multitudes—nerdy professor, slapstick comic, born-again preacher, shock jock, weepy recovering addict, man of destiny—and they all fought for airtime with chaotic results. Some of his colleagues at Fox considered him insane. But it was hard to argue with success. Beck was the biggest thing on the air at five o’clock, and five leads into the six o’clock news and then into prime time. For a while, he was worth the aggravation.
Beck had a way of settling on odd subjects, such as the villainy of Woodrow Wilson, and riding them for days. He compared victims of a mass murder at a camp near Oslo, run by the Workers’ Youth League, to the Hitler Youth. He did a three-part series on George Soros, who, as a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy in occupied Hungary, had helped a Nazi seize Jewish property to protect his own life. Beck’s source was Mr. Soros himself, who told the story in a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft, adding that he felt no guilt about it and that if he hadn’t done it, someone else would. The ADL’s Abe Foxman issued a statement denouncing Beck’s description as inappropriate and offensive. “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say—inaccurately—that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific.” There was jubilation on the left—not usually a Foxman fan club—for this condemnation, but Beck responded by displaying a letter he had only recently received from Foxman thanking him for being “a friend of the Jewish people and a friend of Israel.” Foxman subsequently explained that Beck was no anti-Semite, he was simply not aware of the nuances and sensitivities at play.
The following Holocaust Remembrance Day, a group of four hundred rabbis published an open letter in the Wall Street Journal asking its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, to sanction Ailes and Beck for the use of the word “Nazi” and other Holocaust imagery. Ailes dismissed them as a bunch of political rabbis—a not unreasonable characterization of the organizers of the letter, the left-wing Jewish Funds for Justice.
“Roger’s politics are less crazy than everybody thinks they are,” says Rick Kaplan. “When something goes off, he deals with it. That’s why he replaced the five o’clock show.”
The final straw was the mass rally Beck staged at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Beck was already despised by many blacks for speculating that Obama hated white people. Convening a mass gathering at the site of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and featuring King’s niece, the Reverend Alveda King, delivering a conservative “I have a dream” message of her own—was infuriating to many viewers. Ailes didn’t like it much, either. When Al Sharpton called him to complain, Sharpton was surprised to hear Ailes say he would “take care” of it.
Ailes’s method was patience and diplomacy. “To be fair, Glenn showed signs of wanting to leave,” he said. “He felt restricted here. Sometimes he seemed too busy to concentrate on the show. And his emulating Martin Luther King was over the top.”
Not only that: An advertising boycott organized by Color OfChange.org hurt revenues, and Beck’s ratings declined after his march on Washington. Ailes spent months making him see that it would be in their mutual interest for him to leave Fox. “I could have done it in a harder way, but I didn’t want to give MoveOn and Media Matters the satisfaction,” he told me.
In April 2011, Beck announced he would be leaving Fox to start an Internet channel, Glenn Beck TV. As a face-saving move, it was announced that he would be cooperating with Fox to produce television and digital properties, although none have yet been undertaken. Ailes replaced the Glenn Beck show with The Five, whose ratings surprised everyone by approximating Beck’s, and left the five o’clock hour firmly in the hands of Fox News. At the same time, Ailes could plausibly say that he had moved Fox safely away from the fringe. As for Beck, Forbes magazine reported that in 2011, he earned $80 million—more than any other political celebrity and much more than he had earned at Fox. Ailes was right again: Everybody came out ahead.
* At the end of September 2012, Pew, a disinterested and respected organization, published its own survey of audience general knowledge based on four relatively easy questions about current events. MSNBC led the cable networks with 21 percent of viewers who scored four out of four. Fox and CNN finished in a virtual tie—CNN, 17 percent, and Fox, 16 percent. Both beat the audience of network news (15 percent).
Among viewers who scored three or more correct answers, Fox trailed MSNBC by 6 percent but led CNN by 4 percent and network news by 3 percent.
As for specific shows, Stewart’s Daily viewers outpaced O’Reilly’s Factor audience in perfect scores (32 percent to 26 percent); the two shows had similar numbers for at least three correct answers (61 percent to 59 percent); but twice as many Stewart viewers got zero correct (10 percent to 5 percent for O’Reilly).
Surveys like this are fun, but what they measure is unclear. After all, most people have more than one source of general political information.