The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (33 page)

At 9:00 a.m., after a televised countdown clock ticked to zero, MSNBC went live for the first time. Following the headlines, anchor
Jodi Applegate, who also anchored the
Today
show on weekends, talked with fellow NBC News correspondents whose faces appeared on a sleek video monitor suspended from the ceiling. Tom Brokaw, speaking from the
North Lawn of the White House, hyped
InterNight
, an interview program airing weeknights at 8:00 p.m. with Brokaw and other NBC veterans as hosts. That evening, viewers would enjoy, he said, “a very important appointment” with President Bill Clinton, who would answer questions that had been submitted to MSNBC’s new website. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer chatted from 30 Rock about MSNBC’s coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, set to open in five days. “I want you to know that Matt and I are extremely jealous, and we’re gonna demand a cappuccino machine in our next contract,” Couric said to Applegate. Jane Pauley, the anchor of
Time & Again
, a history program on at 7:00 p.m., promoted a documentary about the Apollo 11 moon mission. Brian Williams, host of the 9:00 p.m. newscast, sat in front of an oversized glass map of the world that was like a prop from NASA Mission Control. “It’s been a dream around here … to have a full hour in prime time to present the news,” he told Applegate. Last to appear on the video monitor was Soledad O’Brien, live from San Francisco, where she introduced her 10:00 p.m. technology show,
The Site
. “Hi, Jodi,” O’Brien said. “Tell Katie and Matt if they want to borrow my cappuccino machine I’d love to have them borrow it if they ever come out to San Francisco.”

On the day of the launch, Ailes himself fired a salvo, delineating the battle lines. “They’re basing 98% of their promotion on five of their stars,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. Broadcast news glamour was liberal bias by another name.
“MSNBC,” he had told
USA Today
the previous month, “believes in giving face time to anchors. We believe in fact time for viewers.” His point was that NBC was applying to cable news Manhattan-centric knowingness, but star power did not necessarily translate to the world of cable news.

As NBC took out half-page ads in
TV Guide
, featuring pictures of Brokaw, Gumbel, and Couric, Ailes was exploring the contours and mind-set of his new audience. That winter,
Ailes assigned Scott Ehrlich to commission a poll on viewer attitudes about the news media. Ehrlich hired Democratic pollster John Gorman, who had worked on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Gorman’s results confirmed Ailes’s instincts: more than half the country did not trust the news media.
“It was a no-brainer,” Ailes’s brother, Robert, said. “When Roger was starting Fox, he saw that the needs of sixty percent of Americans weren’t being filled by the existing media.”

The point of view MSNBC was selling at its launch, though not overtly political, was elitist. Its sensibility was reinforced
two days later,
when SNBC announced a deal to simulcast Don Imus’s radio show, a favorite of the Northeast corridor chattering class.

O
n Thursday, July 18, Ailes stood in a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, California, parrying questions from journalists like a candidate before a crowd of voters at a rally.
The assembled reporters received printouts of Gorman’s poll results—essentially opposition research. Only 14 percent of Americans viewed the press favorably, compared to 31 percent with respect to the Supreme Court and 47 percent with respect to the military. Furthermore, 67 percent of Americans believed television news was biased.

Ailes’s description of his own channel focused mostly on what it was not, keeping the heat on MSNBC while avoiding being boxed in.
“We’re not going to consider ourselves in the business of having to sell computers every five minutes,” he said. “Nor will we have to be in the business to tell people to turn off their television set and go to their computer to get more information.”
Gone was the hype on display during his debut press conference with Murdoch, when they promised “a worldwide platform” for the channel. In Pasadena, Ailes practiced the communications art of lowering expectations.
“We have not claimed we’re going to be revolutionary,” he said, knocking MSNBC. “I believe in underpromising and overdelivering.”

But, subtly, he began to introduce the trope that would become Fox’s hallmark.
“If you couldn’t give me two sides to a major issue I wouldn’t hire you because I think you might have an agenda for one side,” he said. “What I’ve said to my people in the newsroom is don’t have any fear of anybody’s ideas just because they are not your ideas.”

If reporters were hoping for more than a few specifics, they were disappointed. There was a name: the Fox News Channel. There was a launch date: October 7. There was a schedule: live shows from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. on weekdays and, on weekends, six hours of original content. Otherwise, Ailes refrained from filling in any details of his October surprise.
“It’s a very competitive climate, and we want to keep that under wraps,” he said.
Unlike MSNBC, which had announced a lineup three months before its launch, Ailes did not reveal a single on-camera hire.
“There is no status with Rush Limbaugh,” Ailes said, addressing hearsay that he might ink a deal with his friend to host a Fox News show.

From the beginning, politics was more than a subject to cover. It suffused
everything at Fox News.
“Roger is a political animal,” a former senior Fox News producer said. “That plays into how he manages the place.” Decision making flowed from the top. Secrecy was paramount. A binary win-lose ethic governed the office. The channel’s debut was less than twelve weeks away, and things at campaign headquarters were getting chaotic.

The construction of studio space at News Corp’s headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue was taking longer than expected and blowing through budgets. Fox leased space on the north end of the building’s lobby that had previously housed a Sam Goody record store. The street-level studio was designed to attract tourists, like the
Today
show’s Rockefeller Center plaza. But his team of thirty architects and engineers quickly realized that the space was unworkable. Subways rumbling underneath the building disrupted sensitive satellite signals and made sounds that were difficult to cancel out in the studio. They also were running out of room. The street-level space could only accommodate two studios.
Bahman Samiian, who became a senior director, was forced to design a rotating riser that could turn ninety degrees in less than five minutes for speedy studio backdrop changes.
“We had to do more than eight shows and had to ping-pong between the studios,” a staffer recalled.

Ailes probed the allegiances of potential staff over the summer, ascertaining their ideology, ferreting out dissidents. His interview with Douglas Kennedy, his friend Bobby Jr.’s younger brother, was rocky. It was not merely his last name. The twenty-nine-year-old scion and former
New York Post
reporter was working for the enemy.
MSNBC had recently hired him, but he was considering his options.

“I know your background, Ailes,” Kennedy said.

“Well I know your background, too,” Ailes returned. “I respect what your father stood for even if he had a political agenda different from mine.”

Kennedy asked if Ailes would inject his conservative views into the news. “I have no mission, I have no intention of even looking at your stories,” Ailes said. “But I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you’ll make the effort to be fair on anything you cover.” Kennedy met his gaze and said he would. He was hired.

Refusing to answer was worse than professing liberal ideas. In another interview,
Ailes and Chet Collier questioned the background of
Bob Reichblum, whom they were considering for the executive producer
opening on the 7:00 p.m. newscast. “I’m looking at your résumé,” Ailes said. It stated that Reichblum had been the executive producer of
Good Morning America
. “I see here you’ve worked at a network. And you’re Jewish, so I assume you’re liberal.”

Reichblum winced. “Two of the three things must be true,” he replied. “I’m not going to tell you which ones.”

Ailes chuckled at the retort, but did not offer him a job.

While Ailes turned away refuseniks, he surrounded himself with committed lieutenants who were either conservative or didn’t care. Two of the most important advisers at the channel were Chet Collier, his old boss from
Mike Douglas
, and John Moody, a right-leaning print journalist from
Time
. They were two men who in almost every respect could not have been more different.
Collier was a Massachusetts liberal who had little interest in current affairs or politics.
“Chet’s idea of a show is two chairs and a plant,” Bill Bolster, Ailes’s successor at CNBC, liked to joke. Collier, then sixty-nine, envisioned Fox News as a smorgasbord of talk shows, television personalities, and animals, a personal programming favorite. In addition to working with Ailes, Collier served as president of the Westminster Kennel Club and helped transform the dog show into a national televised spectacle that could sell out Madison Square Garden.
The trade journal
Dog News
called his contribution to dog shows “without comparison.”

Throughout the spring and summer, Collier personally reviewed hundreds of tapes of potential hosts to present to Ailes. To gauge the appeal of possible anchors, Collier watched the screen with the sound off.
“I’m not hiring talent for their brain power,” he said to an executive. While news costs were strictly policed, Collier made sure the makeup department was a $1 million line item in the budget.
“I didn’t understand why makeup was a big deal,” one skeptical producer said. “Chet would say, ‘You have to get this
right
.’ He just knew that those women in the makeup department were like psychologists—they had the talent in their hands.” Like Ailes and the Nixon ad men, Collier was a devoted student of Marshall McLuhan.
“Viewers don’t want to
be
informed; they want to
feel
informed,” Collier often told producers.
“He hated anything to do with the news,” a Fox News executive recalled.

Collier regularly rebuked Emily Rooney and her team of former network producers, condescendingly referring to them as “newsies.” A constant presence at Ailes’s side, Collier, as much as anyone, shaped the
emerging talk show culture of the network.
“Chet told me every section has to have a payoff,” one Fox producer said, echoing
Mike Douglas
creator Woody Fraser’s adage. “The segment needs to be produced.”

John Moody, on the contrary, was a cerebral conservative journalist with a chip on his shoulder.
He had spent a decade climbing the masthead at
Time
as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Rome. But Moody, a devout Catholic who had written
a Cold War thriller in his spare time, had topped out as New York bureau chief, and aspired to a more significant position. In the establishment clubhouse of Time Inc., where baby boomer values prevailed, he stuck out.
A “first-class journalist,” and a “real pro,” according to two former colleagues, Moody could be a dissenting voice at
Time
, willing to indicate his displeasure about basic assumptions they made. In 1992, Moody spoke up as editors were discussing a speech in which Vice President Dan Quayle critiqued
Murphy Brown
, the CBS sitcom.
“There are a lot of people out there who don’t think the way we do,” he said, according to Janice Simpson, a former assistant managing editor at
Time
. “I wish we would take that into consideration.”

It was an attitude Ailes shared. During a job interview in the spring of 1996, Ailes told Moody, “
One of the problems we have to work on here together when we are this network is that most journalists are liberals … and we’ve got to fight that.”
Speaking with a reporter later that year, the men discussed the unflattering stories about Christianity often published in national newsmagazines at Eastertime. Moody called certain covers for
Time
and
Newsweek
“sacrilegious.” Ailes agreed. “It’s always a story that beats up on Jesus,” Ailes said. “They call him a cult figure of his time, some kind of crazy fool, and it’s as if they go out and try to find evidence to trash him.”
As they spoke, Moody found himself “finishing Roger’s sentences.”

As a television neophyte, Moody could provide journalistic ballast to Collier’s talk show instincts without getting in the way too much. Ailes appointed Moody vice president for news, editorial. Moody freely confessed his ignorance in his new role.
“When he first came in, Moody joked he didn’t know broadcasting,” a former senior producer said.
Emily Rooney could not believe her eyes when Moody showed her a script he had worked on. “It was like an 8,000-word newspaper article,” she recalled. Moody did not subscribe to Collier’s news-as-entertainment creed. Like clashing campaign advisers with opposing visions for the candidate, they gave rise to competing camps within Fox News.
“Collier
hated Moody passionately,” a former executive said. And
Moody “hated” Collier’s talk show concepts, a founding producer recalled.

In a certain respect, the animosity was useful to Ailes—it safeguarded his authority. Nixon, Ailes recalled, played his deputies off each other. Instead of conspiring against him, they went after each other.
In meetings, Ailes spoke about the Nixon administration. “There were five guys in the inner circle. We all hated each other. And Nixon made sure we all hated each other,” he told his executives. Though grossly inflating his importance to Nixon—he had never been in the inner circle—Ailes was an astute student.
“He made sure his executives had to fight for his loyalty,” a person close to Ailes said. “It was the most cutthroat place to be. You constantly had to renew your vow.” These clashing viewpoints also helped restrain Ailes’s right-wing impulses at the beginning.
“So much of the success of Fox can be traced to the early years when Chet and John would push back,” a senior executive said.