Murdoch's World (40 page)

AILES HAD thought hard enough about his legacy that he had
arranged to write a memoir with Jim Pinkerton, the former White House aide under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush who had become a columnist and Fox News media critic. But he never quite found the time. Gabriel Sherman, a reporter for
New York
magazine, wrote a cover story on Ailes and signed a book contract to write an unauthorized biography. He interviewed Fox journalists, followed Ailes to public events around the country, and even wrote about the Putnam County, New York, newspaper that Ailes owns and operates with his wife, Elizabeth Tilson Ailes.

Andrea Tantaros, co-host of Fox's
The Five
, called Sherman a “stalker,” a “harasser,” and a “Soros puppet”—that last epithet a reference to his affiliation with the New America Foundation, which has received donations from George Soros and his son Jonathan. (As it happens, Pinkerton had also been a fellow at the New America Foundation.) To handle the competing narrative of his life, Ailes instead granted generous access to Zev Chafets, a magazine writer and former
New York Daily News
columnist who had written a favorable biography of Rush Limbaugh. Chafets said he had adopted Fox's mantra as his own: “I report. You decide.” His authorized biography, which Ailes did not review before publication, came out in March 2013.

Fox commentators such as Patrick Caddell blasted Sherman; a writer for Breitbart News questioned his mental well-being; while another media blogger asked Sherman to comment on
whether he took prescription pills. An outfit in Scottsdale, Arizona, with no relationship to Sherman or his publisher
bought a bunch of domain addresses that incorporated the author's name and the planned title of his book. It began to look to some Fox watchers like a campaign.

What Ailes really wanted for his final hurrah at Fox was less a memoir than an equity stake. He wanted more than just additional shares of News Corp stock, and he wanted his payday to dwarf what other major media executives received. One Ailes associate said the Fox News chief was
obsessed with the pay of David Zaslav of Discovery Communications. According to Discovery's 2012 filings with federal regulators, Zaslav was paid $3 million in salary and another $4.84 million as a cash bonus (of a possible $5 million maximum bonus). And he was granted “long-term incentive compensation” in stock worth $23.9 million in fair market value. The tidy package amounted to more than $36 million for the year. Much to Ailes's chagrin, Rupert Murdoch wasn't about to pay him that much.

That chafed Ailes. So in early 2012 he talked to Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, whose conservative news outfit had established a highly profitable network of newsletters and a magazine from its opinion and news website. Ruddy had built up offices in West Palm Beach, Florida, as well as in midtown Manhattan, just seven blocks from News Corp. He had hopes of creating a television channel for the brand too.
Come on board
, Ruddy told Ailes. Ruddy promised him a $25 million a year salary and equity, holding out the promise of a payday worth hundreds of millions.

Ailes was tempted. But
he was aging and had health issues—not just his weight and hemophilia but arthritis and others too. A start-up might be exciting but also exhausting. And he had little inclination to relinquish control at Fox.
He had never groomed a successor who
could guide Fox after he left or a new generation of prime-time stars either, with the possible exception of Megyn Kelly. The network's big names were stable but aging. Over the years, some executives had internally speculated the next stage of Fox's development might demand a manager rather than an all-consuming visionary like Ailes. It is a mark of his force of personality that people at Fox typically wondered whom Ailes would recommend to succeed him (if he had reached such a conclusion, he did not share it with others), rather than whom the Murdochs would want.

In late October, Fox announced that
Ailes had signed a four-year contract extension that would take him through June 2017, past his seventy-seventh birthday. The network and News Corp leaked that he had received a big raise.

ON ELECTION night Fox analysts and reporters rightly noted that 2012 had not inspired the kind of captivating campaign that Obama ginned up for victory in 2008. At the start of the night, the Fox News chairman warned commentators participating in his channel's election coverage: “If things don't go your way tonight, don't go out there
looking like someone ran over your dog.” Yet the coverage on Fox proved largely dour and depressive. “President Obama will win because he ran a good campaign,” political anchor Bret Baier said early in the evening. “He will not win because of the state of the economy.”

Even the Democratic and liberal analysts on Fox were largely reduced to talking about electoral tactics and the unresolved grid-lock ahead. Viewers would find it hard to believe that the final tally showed Obama had won by nearly four percentage points in the popular vote. Several pundits, including Bill O'Reilly and Stephen Hayes, circled back to Superstorm Sandy as a stroke of good fortune for the
incumbent. “While Governor Romney was talking about bipartisanship,” Brit Hume said, “the president gave an image to Americans on television of him practicing it.
That's pretty strong medicine.”

O'Reilly said Republicans had failed to grapple with the changing demographic face of the American electorate. But there was a thread of melancholy woven into his analysis. The day of the traditional white American was done, he said. The US was becoming more like Western Europe, he went on, as Americans wanted others to bear their every burden—turning President John F. Kennedy's famed admonition on its head. O'Reilly ascribed Obama's victory to the desire for handouts, especially among people of color, though O'Reilly very explicitly said such indolence cut across racial lines. (In so doing, intentionally or not, he echoed a Murdoch tweet of November 3:
“Just look at European welfare state and broken countries. Some want US to follow, others not. Why can't we debate civilly?”)

Fox analyst and host Dana Perino, the former George W. Bush press secretary, noted that women favored Obama heavily, suggesting that Democrats used abortion to scare them into entering voting booths. Fox's coverage revealed little about the forces behind the election but a great deal about the coming clash within the Republican Party: whether Mitt Romney had been too moderate to win or had failed to connect with the minorities making up an increasing number of US voters.

Once the Fox News Decision Desk put Ohio in Obama's win column, giving the White House to the president,
Fox News Sunday
anchor Chris Wallace announced that officials with the Romney campaign had called to argue the margin was too small to make such a projection. Correspondents on other networks reported similar complaints a bit later. Karl Rove took up the Romney cause on the air and vigorously attacked his own network's analysis—to the point where anchor Megyn Kelly called out, “That was awkward!” Late in the evening, Rove returned to the air and contended the margin of
Obama's lead was small and a significant fraction of ballots cast had yet to be tallied.

Kelly asked Rove, “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?”
Ailes later said he had called Michael Clemente, a senior Fox News executive, and ordered the cameras be kept on Rove. The confrontation was great television. Kelly ultimately strode down the hallways of Fox News to the number-crunchers running the desk to have them explain their projections. She owned the studio that night, shushing Wallace and even darting over to brush some lint off Joe Trippi's shoulders. Yet she couldn't convince Rove, who reviewed counties he thought were still in play, at one point adding, “and then there are cats and dogs elsewhere that add up to another 120,000 votes.” Rove learned the lessons of the 2000 elections all too well.

By the end, having lost the argument and the night, Rove declared that President Obama's victory carried little weight. He had “blown the last two years—he's played small ball,” Rove said around 12:40
AM
on Wednesday. “This does not bode well for the future. . . . He may have won the battle but lost the war.” Dick Morris, who had confidently predicted a Romney landslide, did not appear on air.

Seconds shy of 2:00
AM
Eastern Time, Kelly and Baier found a glimmer of grace to offer the reelected president's victory speech. And then Baier noted: “Hard to believe, but Iowa Caucus is 1,154 days away.”

AS HE watched returns on election night, Ailes told Chafets that
illegal immigrants can no longer be treated with hostility. They cannot be called illegal aliens any more. The following morning, he lectured his senior staff about it on a conference call. Within twenty-four hours, Sean Hannity announced to viewers that his thinking had “evolved” on immigration reform. Things had to change.

The assault against what became known as the conservative media cocoon began swiftly. “Unreal,” George W. Bush's former chief strategist, Matthew Dowd, tweeted later that Wednesday.
“Nearly every piece of data for last 3 weeks pointed to Romney loss. Ray Charles could have seen it coming.”
Hume had offered the closest his network's viewers would receive to a fair-minded note of warning from a non-Democrat. “The state polls portray Obama ahead. And there are a lot of them.” But even he had called the race a tie a few weeks ahead of the election.

Conservatives had taken it on faith that Democratic voter turnout would replicate the deflated levels of 2010, and not the much higher levels of 2008. And Republican professionals had trashed polling altogether. One aspiring conservative Virginia political consultant set up
a blog promising to “unskew” the polls—readjusting them to what he thought they should look like. The polls were the newest front in the all-out war on journalistic bias.

Prominent Republicans angled for cabinet posts just days ahead of the election, convinced the Republican ticket would win. Romney
did not draft a concession speech, which is customary, because he was so confident about the outcome. And then the votes started coming in.

“Because I had a rooting interest in the other side, that view was
strengthened and amplified by what I wanted to happen, which I freely confess,” said
New York Post
columnist John Podhoretz, also the editor of conservative
Commentary
magazine and a cultural critic for the conservative
Weekly Standard
. “People don't ordinarily cast a skeptical eye on data and information that supports their opinions. They're happy to take it.”

“The conservative followership has been fleeced, exploited and lied to by the conservative entertainment complex,” former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum said on MSNBC's
Morning Joe
.

Dick
Morris explained himself. “There was a period of time,” he told Sean Hannity, “when the Romney campaign was falling apart.
People were not optimistic; nobody thought there was a chance of victory. And I felt it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said.”

Morris said he believed what he told viewers, but he betrayed his true intent: not as a network consultant to inform the audience but to rally the Romney campaign. (Fox blurred his motivations further by typically presenting him as a former Clinton adviser—though he had cast his lot with Republicans for more than a decade.)
Ailes fired Morris from Fox after the election and kept Rove off the air for a few days. Sarah Palin's contract was allowed to lapse, unmourned in Fox's corporate suites. But the people who replaced them were just as partisan.

Jon Huntsman Sr., a chemical company billionaire and father of the former Utah governor and failed Republican presidential candidate, took Fox to task during an interview on the channel itself. “I just think the Republican Party was misled by Dick Morris and Karl Rove and these folks,” Huntsman told Fox's Neil Cavuto. “I am an avid Fox News fan, but, you know, Intrade and . . . [the
New York Times
's] Nate Silver—and all these polling services had it right, except Fox. And they lulled us to sleep.”