GOING TO CAROLINA
On a cloudless Thursday morning in mid-April, I met Roger Ailes, accompanied by his spokesman, Brian Lewis, and his security guard, Jimmy Gildea—the retired NYPD detective—at the airport in Teterboro, New Jersey. We were bound for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Ailes was scheduled to address a crowd of journalism students. Ailes rarely makes public appearances. This one had been arranged long in advance, as a favor to a former colleague of one of Ailes’s aides, but it was taking place when Ailes was in the center of two controversies.
Two days earlier, the gossip website Gawker had broken the news that there was a mole at Fox, documenting the claim by posting some innocuous off-camera banter between Sean Hannity and Mitt Romney. The mole wrote that he had been working at Fox for years but despised the place and now intended to tell all. The media jumped on the story; Fox News is regarded as one of the most leak-proof institutions in America. Finally the secretive Ailes was going to get his (presumably filthy) laundry aired in public.
Ailes knew better. “I’m the mole,” he joked to a New York Times reporter at a party the night before the Carolina trip. By then, Ailes was aware that the mole had been found—Joseph Muto. He was caught on a hunch. The previous year, Beth Ailes had allowed the editor of the Putnam County News and Recorder, Joseph Lindsley, to resign after suspecting him of undercutting her with the staff and leaking information to hostile websites. Bad blood ensued; Lindsley, who came to the paper from the Weekly Standard at the recommendation of editor in chief (and Fox commentator) Bill Kristol, claimed he had been followed in Garrison by a Fox security man in a black Lincoln Navigator. Ailes said that it was a figment of his imagination. Lindsley had attended Notre Dame. Some suggested checking the Fox staff for other alumnae of the Fighting Irish. Perhaps it was a coincidence but one turned up: Muto, an associate producer of The Factor. Muto’s electronic fingerprints were found on the video that had been posted on Gawker. He was so caught that he didn’t even bother to deny it.
Muto’s revelations put him in a small club of Fox whistle-blowers. In 2001, Matt Gross, a junior figure at the Fox website, left the company. Two years later he charged that Fox reporters are lazy and that the network tries to provoke liberals and appeal to middle-aged white men. It is fair to say that the damage from those revelations was minimal. Gross is now an editor at New York magazine, a proudly progressive weekly.
In 1998, at a Fox affiliate in Tampa, two reporters, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, prepared a series of reports on the agricultural biotechnology company Monsanto and its use of bovine growth hormone. The company protested, the reports were not shown, and the reporters were let go. They filed suit against Fox, and a jury decided against them on all counts except the question of whether they were legitimate whistle-blowers. An appellate court overturned that charge, and the two found themselves out of work but lionized by environmentalists—including Ailes’s old friend Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Charlie Reina was a producer at Fox from 1997 to 2003 who, according to Brian Lewis, left after being told that he wouldn’t be getting the promotion he expected. Reina blew the whistle on the daily memo sent by John Moody to Fox bureaus around the world. “To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel’s daytime programming, The Memo is the Bible,” he told the Poynter Institute. “At the Fair and Balanced network everyone knows management’s point of view, and in case they aren’t sure how to get it on the air, The Memo is there to remind them.” Reina was also the source of the information that Fox news reporters had been invited by management to refer to suicide bombers as “homicide bombers.” Fox dismisses him as a disgruntled employee, and in any case, his charges didn’t amount to much. Everyone already knew about the “homicide bomber” usage (it was right there on the air) and as for the daily memo, it revealed the not very shocking fact that the management of Fox News was involved in shaping the news coverage of Fox News. These days, Reina occasionally writes critical articles about Fox for the Huffington Post, although he hasn’t been a source of any further scoops.
That’s pretty much the extent of the leaks from Fox News. The Vatican has had more leaks in the past sixteen years. Of course, the pontiff believes in turning the other cheek. The head of Fox News does not.
As we boarded the plane, the Internet was buzzing with developments on the Muto case. Ailes was continuously updated by Brian Lewis, who stayed attached to his BlackBerry. Ailes regarded Fox’s quick response as the first step of an effective deterrent action. The second step would be punishment. “He’s probably sorry he ever tried this,” said Lewis, to which Ailes muttered, “He will be by the time I get done with him.”
Soon after I met Ailes, he told me about a lesson he had learned from Chet Collier: “Don’t go out and shoot people. Just wait and they’ll come by into your crosshairs. Then you squeeze the trigger.”
Ailes revels in and works on his image as a badass. “In college, two buddies and I were drinking and we ran into a pack of frat boys,” he told me one time. “We took them on, twelve to three, and they kicked the shit out of us.” He has lots of stories like these, and he loves the bellicose picture they paint of him. When he first discovered e-mail he couldn’t resist responding to nasty critics with offers to meet him in Manhattan and settle things like men. He offered to pay the airline ticket for one online heckler. “One way,” he wrote. “You won’t be going back.” His staff eventually convinced him to give up the practice (as he subsequently attempted to convince an equally bellicose Rupert Murdoch to stay off Twitter).
It has been a long time since Ailes has had a physical fight, and he doesn’t look like he could do much damage these days. But he is fond of recalling rougher times, like the night he punched a hole in the wall of an NBC control room where he was producing The Tomorrow Show. “It was just a drywall, and luckily I didn’t hit any beams. But somebody put a frame around the hole and wrote, ‘Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.’ I have my suspicions about who wrote that message. After all, if you have a reputation as a badass, you don’t need to fight.”
Ailes admits that he sometimes flies off the handle and, as he puts it, “creates bullshit.” This can happen pretty much anywhere. Not long ago, on a ball field near his place in Garrison, his nephew accidentally hit a baseball through the window of a 2012 Prius parked in a church lot. The owners were Koreans who didn’t speak much English, and they were extremely agitated. “It’s just a damn window,” Ailes told them. “I’ll pay for the damn thing.”
The owner was indignant. “We pray, you curse,” he said.
“Fine,” said Ailes. “Then let’s pray over the fucking window. Maybe that’ll fix it.”
“It was a ten-minute incident that I turned into an hour,” Ailes said when he told me the story. “Hell, it’s lucky they didn’t recognize me. It could have turned into a goddamn international scandal. But I told them I was sorry. . . .” He laughed. “Damn it, though, I was kind of glad that it was a Prius.”
As he told the story, Ailes was already spinning it. “I do have a hair trigger, but I only use it on things that don’t matter these days,” he said. “I just do it to blow off steam, create some bullshit.”
It recalled Ailes’s boyhood awe at his father’s volcanic anger. Perhaps Ailes was thinking of it, too. “I told Zac, ‘Son, don’t ever act like your father,’” he said. “And Zac said, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’”
The other crisis du jour was an accusation by Newt Gingrich that Fox News’ support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor primary showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim when he dropped out of the race (Romney, on a visit to Ailes’s office, had complained that Fox favored Gingrich and Santorum). Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.”
Lewis nodded. Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.”
Lewis looked at his boss. They have been together for sixteen years and he has lasted because he is loyal and smart—smart enough, certainly, to know when an Ailes comment is better left unreported. “Doing PR for Fox News is like working on a permanent presidential campaign,” Lewis told me.
The Fox public relations division is a marvel of speedy response and harsh, often ad hominem, replies to critics. “I don’t start fights,” Ailes likes to say, “but I do counterpunch.” Some of those punches land below the belt. When the University of Maryland published its survey alleging that Fox viewers are misinformed, Michael Clemente responded by noting that the university had been ranked by the Princeton Review as one of the schools whose students do the least studying, and as the nation’s best party campus. “Given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was researched with,” Clemente said. More recently, Fairleigh Dickinson University published a poll purporting to show that Fox viewers were chronically uninformed. A spokesman for Fox answered, “Considering FDU’s undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling—their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed.”
Ailes took the same hard-line tack in dealing with the complaints of Santorum and Gingrich. “Santorum lost his Senate seat in Pennsylvania by seventeen points,” he said. “I suppose Fox was responsible for that. And Newt was in Congress all those years and just about none of his fellow congressmen are supporting him. That’s supposed to be my fault, too?”
Ailes had inflamed his enemies on the left by hiring Santorum, Gingrich, Mike Huckabee—and especially Sarah Palin—as commentators. Some critics charged that he was trying to buy up all the candidates for the presidency. The accusation rankled him because it was so obviously amateurish—an example of journalists who don’t know politics trying to impute dumb motives to him. “I knew when I hired them they weren’t viable candidates,” Ailes told me. “Huckabee couldn’t raise a dime for a campaign. Evan Bayh [a former Democratic senator from Indiana now on Fox] has a better chance to be nominated.” He publicly said that he had hired Palin because he knew she had no chance to be nominated. Palin fired back with a statement of her own: “I wonder if he is aware that the same thing was said about me when I ran for city council, mayor, and eventually governor.” Palin was still on the Fox payroll and Ailes decided later that week to placate her with a clarification—he had merely been referring to 2012.
When Palin first went to work for Fox, there had been righteous outrage at many of the other networks—here was another example of Ailes turning Fox into an annex (or the center) of the GOP. In fact, almost everyone wanted Palin; she had, according to a Fox insider, offers from CNN, CBS, and ABC. Now there were rumors, sparked by a recent appearance on NBC’s Today Show, that she was headed to the Peacock Network.
Ailes was untroubled by this. For one thing, it was far from certain that he wanted to keep her: Palin is an expensive commentator; Fox had helped build a studio equipped with a state-of-the-art camera, and a satellite, in her Alaska home. When I asked Ailes, somewhere over Kentucky, if he was angry at Palin’s appearance on Today, he shook his head. “She couldn’t have done The Today Show without my permission,” he explained. “We have a contract.” Ailes had agreed because he knew that if she did well on Today (which most critics thought she had) it would strengthen the journalistic cred of one of Fox’s star commentators. Allowing her to go on Today meant that the show owed him a favor. And the rumor that she might defect to NBC put pressure on ABC, whose Good Morning America was trying to displace Today’s long-standing hold on first place in the morning. For Ailes it was win-win-win, a three-cushion bank shot. And, as a bonus, Palin had to be wondering how much Ailes actually wanted her and what, when her contract expired, he would be willing to pay.
• • •
The flight to Chapel Hill took an hour and twenty minutes, and Ailes spent most of the time looking over typed notes for his speech. He had been working on it for some time, and using visitors as sounding boards for the remarks he intended to make. A few weeks earlier, a delegation of students from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces had come to see him at Fox. These were Ailes’s kind of students—officers just breaking into the senior ranks, dressed in suits, sporting neat haircuts, and with respectful manners. They were there to hear his views on a subject they were studying: how to ensure that the news media enhance national security.
“Good luck with that one,” said Ailes with a laugh. “That’ll be a new role for ’em.” He was in his customary place at the head of the table with his tie undone and his suit jacket thrown over the back of his chair. The officers stared at him keenly, as if this was their first brush with cynicism. But he knew exactly who they were. He meets with groups almost every day, and he doesn’t like surprises. He had scanned the bios of the officers. Only two had spent time at Ivy League schools, a telltale liberal credential to Ailes. The rest, he assumed, would be more or less sympathetic. Still, he wanted to make it clear that he had no apologies to make. After running through some of the statistics on Fox’s supremacy, he said, “We have our detractors, but they are always people we are beating. I don’t let it hurt my feelings. We are fair and balanced here. We always cover the news. We give Obama crap—that’s our job. When Bush was in, we gave him crap, showing pictures of Abu Ghraib and so on. We make mistakes sometimes and we correct ’em right away, but we have never had to take a story down, like the New York Times, CBS, and CNN.” It was a random selection: Ailes has a very detailed list of the self-inflicted humiliations of his mainstream competitors.
“Sir, when is it justified to ask the media to hold off on news for national security reasons?” a future brigadier asked.
“I have no problem delaying news when national security is involved,” said Ailes. “I respect the public’s right to know, but it’s moronic to say there are never extenuating circumstances.” To illustrate, he recounted the time when two Fox journalists were captured by Palestinian terrorists and held hostage in Gaza for thirteen days. Ailes had given the order to Fox News people to mention the capture but not to discuss it. He made a similar request to the other networks, and they complied. “The terrorists were holding rifles to our guys’ heads, trying to make them convert to Islam or some damn thing,” Ailes said. “One of our guys was gay, and his partner wanted to go on the air and ask the terrorists to let him go. Shit, that would have been good, right? Our guy would have had a whole new problem over there. So yeah, I’m not a neutral when people’s lives are at stake.”
There were enthusiastic nods around the table. Ailes was now on a roll. In quick order he pronounced green cars a waste of time (“I’ll buy one when they can make ’em comfortable, affordable, and cost effective”), denounced the American educational system (“Iceland beats us in math scores! Iceland, what the hell is that? Four people?”), sneered at his former employer, NBC (“I told them not to name the cable channel MSNBC. MS is a damn disease”), and explained that citizen journalism is mostly crap (“These days even real reporters almost never abide by the normal rules of journalism, let alone so-called citizen journalists”).
“A lot of kids go into journalism because they want to change the world, or they want to get invited to Washington cocktail parties,” Ailes said. “Those are lousy reasons. That’s not what this job is all about, being on good terms with the people in power or the people you agree with. They put one story critical of something the president is doing on the air and they think it covers them, that they’re doing their job. Bullshit.”
The officers didn’t know it at the time, and neither did I, but Ailes had been rehearsing his message to the journalism students of North Carolina.
• • •
We were fifteen minutes from landing in North Carolina when Ailes put down his notes and asked Brian Lewis what was going on in the world. “Newt is saying that Fox is less conservative than CNN,” Lewis reported. Ailes laughed. “Newt’s auditioning for a job over there. He’s going to need one, because he’s sure as hell not getting one with us again.”
Lewis read Ailes a summary of the flap over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney, mother of five, had never worked a day in her life. Ailes spun it without hesitation. “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.” He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, “I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.” (What Obama said was that he feels a laziness in himself that he attributes to his laid-back upbringing in Hawaii.)
Talk turned to the trial, due to start that day in Chapel Hill, of former senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards. Edwards was accused of having illegally used campaign funds to support his mistress, Rielle Hunter. The amounts were relatively small, and I wondered aloud why a man as rich as Edwards would have taken that kind of risk.
“A married man who gives money to another woman can’t very well take it out of the joint account,” Ailes observed drily.
A car was waiting for us when we deplaned. On the way to the Carolina Inn, a charming hotel on campus, Lewis briefed Ailes for a last time on what to expect. The dean of the school, Susan King, was a TV journalist whom Ailes knew from the old days at CNBC. “She’s a nice lady,” Ailes said. “Probably a liberal, but pleasant.” He had done his own research on the faculty of the journalism school. “Eleven to one, liberals. Well, that’s not as bad as some of them.”
After check-in, Lewis and Jimmy, the security guy, went to the auditorium for a run-through. Ailes and I adjourned to the restaurant, where, over Carolina-style pulled pork sandwiches and fries, he talked about what he saw as the emerging Democratic charge that Republicans were waging a war on women. There had been reporting in the last couple of days that Romney was trailing the president by 7 percent among female voters. Ailes has been reading polls for more than forty years, and he wasn’t impressed. “They’re calling it a gender gap to make Romney look vulnerable,” he said. “What they don’t say is in the same poll Romney is leading among male voters. Why isn’t that a gender gap? What’s the difference?”
It is Ailes’s natural tendency, as a Republican in a Democratic media environment, to turn things upside down. Are white males overwhelmingly for Romney? Fine, what is the percentage of black males supporting Obama? Is the Affordable Care Act imperiled because four conservatives on the Supreme Court vote as a bloc? Okay, how will the liberal bloc vote? Is the Tea Party polarizing? Maybe the other pole is equally at fault. Since the advent of Fox News, there is a television network that frames these stories from a conservative perspective. “We’ll report on the gender gap from both sides,” Ailes said. “The other networks aren’t even aware that there is another side.”
Ailes expects that Romney will be treated unfairly by the mainstream media in the coming campaign, especially in the debates. “Mitt is a lot tougher than he looks,” says Ailes. “There were eight guys in the forest when the primaries started, and he’s the one who came out alive. But in debates, reporters never ask Republican candidates about foreign policy, the economy, or energy. They ask, ‘Do you think Jesus lives in the sky?’ If I were him, I’d hire [Florida congressman] Allen West to play Obama in prep. West’s smart, he knows all the liberal positions, and he’s black. Be a good chance for Mitt to get used to being called a racist.”
We were on a second cup of coffee when Brian and Jimmy returned from their inspection tour. Jimmy reported that security for the event would be handled by the university. Hecklers would be asked politely to desist, and if they didn’t, they’d be escorted out. In fact, Ailes is very rarely challenged in public (and he wasn’t that day), but he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Neither did university authorities, who stationed cops around the building. To Ailes, who remembers the sixties without nostalgia, elite universities are forever enemy territory.
“If I get a job application from someone who went to Princeton or Harvard, they have a harder time selling me. I’d rather hire state school kids,” Ailes once told me. “They hustle, they’re not entitled, and they have a work ethic, a desire to win, and practical intelligence.” This, of course, describes Roger Ailes, son of Warren G. Harding High School and Ohio University, but it is far from a universal truth (I speak as the product of public education). In fact, Fox News is rife with graduates of fancy schools. John Moody, the first executive vice president for news, is a Cornell man. Woody Fraser attended Dartmouth. The Washington bureau includes Harvard grads Jennifer Griffin, Catherine Herridge, Chris Wallace, Charles Krauthammer (who went to Harvard Medical school and also attended Oxford), and Bill Kristol. Lou Dobbs of FBN is a Harvard grad, too. John Stossel, Judy Miller, and Andrew Napolitano have degrees from Princeton. Dick Morris, Gerri Willis (MBA), and Steve Hayes (Law School) are Columbia alums. Foreign correspondent Steve Harrigan has a PhD from Yale. Amy Kellogg matriculated at Brown and holds a master’s degree from Stanford. Business reporter Brenda Buttner is not only a Harvard woman but also a Rhodes scholar. Commentator Charles Lane has degrees from both Harvard and Yale. And this is just a partial list. Ailes’s suspicion of the corrosive effects of an elite American education notwithstanding, Fox’s journalists don’t seem to have been permanently damaged by their exposure to liberal ideas. If anything, it gives Fox an advantage over the competition. Very few network news organizations are staffed with graduates of right-leaning schools such as Hillsdale College, Liberty University, or the service academies; and they therefore often lack an accurate picture of what the plurality of Americans who identify as conservatives are actually thinking about, or interested in.
• • •
That night, Ailed faced his audience dressed in his customary black business suit, looking happy and well rested. After our lunch he had taken a long nap. There were twin beds in his hotel room, and he invited me to join him. I was tempted—being able to say that I had slept with Roger Ailes in North Carolina was almost irresistible—but I declined on the grounds that it would be inhumane to submit him to my snoring. And so he had slumbered away the afternoon undisturbed, arrived at Carroll Hall full of energy, and immediately lit into the crowd. “I understand most of you are journalism students, is that correct? All right. Well, I think you ought to change your major, because you’re probably all interested in politics and you probably are going into journalism because you think you can affect politics. Well, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But if you’re going in to affect it, you have to think about that, because you might want to go to political science where you can join a campaign, help elect who you want, push the issues you believe in.”
The audience murmured, but no one protested. North Carolina is a fine university but it is also in the South, where young people are taught to respect their elders. Besides, Ailes was paying them the compliment of being blunt, which made him interesting.
Ailes told the room that the job of the press is to act as “a watchdog. Not a lapdog or an attack dog, but as a watchdog.” He went on, “If you want to bring world peace or save starving children, both very noble goals, the way to effect that as a journalist is to investigate why the United Nations is so ineffective at doing either of those.” Ailes does not care for the UN, and Fox had aggressively reported on its failures, most notably the corruption in its Oil-for-Food scandal. “I was at a UN party and a man I don’t know came up to me and said, ‘What you are doing on Oil-for-Food is very, very dangerous to you and your family,’” Ailes recalls. He didn’t learn the man’s identity, but Fox security, never lax, was alerted. Before his speech in North Carolina, Ailes had informed Dean Susan King that as the head of a news network, he would have to steer clear of politics. But he nudged up against it. President Obama was developing a strategy of blaming the recession on big capital and demanding that “millionaires and billionaires” pay more taxes.
“Every time I needed a job, I had to go to a rich guy,” Ailes said. “I love the poor guy; he had no job. I got a job. I tried to help the poor, okay? But I’m not going to let anybody divide me against the people who actually gave me the jobs. That does not seem very productive.” Now, of course, he is the millionaire with the jobs. He told the students that under his stewardship, Fox had experienced fifty-eight straight quarters of growth, been the number one cable news network for 123 consecutive months, and is the only television news operation never to have laid anyone off for financial reasons. Here was news a keen journalism student could use. Only Fox and Bloomberg, of the national electronic media, were fertile sources of employment.
Ailes didn’t want to leave an impression that he is a heartless plutocrat. “I’m not a big fan of government confiscating more than a third of what we make,” he said. “I think a third’s fair.” By this time, he was detached from the notes he had carefully prepared and was winging it. He praised Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolence and American soldiers for their willingness to fight and die for their country, without noticing any contradiction. He admonished the students to remember that America is a country that people try to get into, not escape from. He said that he believes in climate change (“every time you go outside it changes”) but that man-made global warming was unproven and environmentalists “keep trying to change the climate for God.” At one point he blanked on the name of CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien and referred to her as “the girl named after the prison.” When the talk ended, the kids applauded politely and some lined up for a photo.
On the way back to the airport in a university SUV, Brian Lewis read Ailes reactions to his remarks, which had been tweeted by reporters in the audience. Ailes seemed amused by how quickly his every word had been disseminated. He was pleased by how it had gone, although he regretted the Soledad O’Brien reference.
Lewis then began summarizing reactions from the mole story, which had been a major topic of conversation all day in the media and on the Internet. Most of the accounts, Ailes thought, were fair and balanced, even sympathetic to Fox. “Nobody likes a rat,” Ailes said.
“I don’t see how a guy could be so disloyal to his own friends and employer,” said Jimmy, who had been silent for most of the day. “I just don’t get that.”
“Gawker paid him five thousand dollars for the stuff he leaked,” said Lewis.
“Five thousand dollars?” Ailes, who was sitting in the front seat, sounded incredulous. A man had committed professional suicide for five grand?
“You know,” said Jimmy, whose career in the NYPD was spent investigating organized crime and drug dealers, “if this Gawker paid for stolen goods, it could be part of the crime, same as if somebody hires a hit man.”
There was a pause and then Ailes said to Brian, “We should have legal look into that.” A few weeks later, the New York district attorney’s office sent detectives to seize Joe Muto’s files and notebooks. Muto tweeted that he was suspected of grand larceny. Fox also let it be known that it was contemplating a suit against Gawker, which would, at a minimum, cost the online publisher a lot of money, and perhaps serve as a deterrent to similar Judas-like betrayals.
Ailes settled back in his seat, and we drove through the Carolina night. He had met the enemy and they were his.