Roger Ailes: Off Camera (8 page)

The story of Cramer became a cautionary tale at the new network. Certain things were fine. You didn’t have to be a Republican or a conservative. You could get away with coupling your commercial interests with your work as a commentator. You were welcome to be as eccentric as you liked. What you couldn’t do was flout the rules, which Ailes set out in the employees’ handbook and gave (and still gives) to new employees.

1. Excellence requires hard work, clear thinking, and the application of your unique talent. A desire to get better at your job every day is the cornerstone of a great career.
   
2. Nothing is more important than giving your word and keeping it. Don’t blame others for your mistakes. Don’t take credit for someone else’s work. Don’t lie, cheat, steal—people always figure it out, and you will never regain your reputation.
   
3. Our common goal is the success of Fox News. Only teams go to the Super Bowl. Volunteer to help others once your own job is finished. Ask for help when you need it. Solve problems together and give credit to others.
   
4. Attitude is everything. You live in your own mind. If you believe you’re a victim, you’re a victim. If you believe you’ll succeed—you will. Negative people make positive people sick. Management relies on positive people for all progress.
   

Cramer was a star, and a friend. But he hadn’t been willing to work hard enough for the good of the team. He didn’t keep his word. He had been publicly negative about his job and disrespectful to his boss. And so he was out. Ailes made an example of Jim Cramer; he wanted everyone to know that his handbook was not a set of lofty aspirations, but a guide to survival in Roger World.

Anchorman Mike Schneider didn’t get it. He was a prototypical Fox hire, an experienced and competent newsman who had been at all three major networks but never quite reached the top. Ailes gave him a chance as host of a prime-time news show. It was a potential star-making job, but Schneider blew it.

In 1997, Fox TV broadcast the Super Bowl, including a halftime show by the Blues Brothers. This was a very big deal for the Murdoch-owned network, and as a cross-promotion for the fledgling Fox News, Ailes decided on a gimmick. At the end of the first half, Fox News anchor Catherine Crier broke in with a special news flash—the Blues Brothers had escaped from jail and were seen heading for the game. It got some media attention, which was Ailes’s goal, but it offended Schneider’s sense of propriety. He blasted the stunt in public. Ailes called him in and read him the riot act. “How dare you criticize your colleagues?” he said. “If I were in a foxhole with you, I’d shoot you first.” Schneider’s prime-time career was over, and Fox declined to renew his contract. After leaving the network, he ran for Congress in New Jersey as a reform Democrat, and lost.

The last case of blatant insubordination was the Paula Zahn affair. Zahn was a talented and glamorous CBS personality who came to Fox in 1999, anchored the nightly news, and then got her own show,
The Edge
, making her one of the first female prime-time hosts in cable news history. Less than two years later, Ailes discovered that although she was still under contract, she had been negotiating with CNN. This wasn’t illegal, but it violated Ailes’s sense of loyalty. The network sued Zahn, and while the case was thrown out, it made the point to all other employees that those who cross Roger Ailes won’t be allowed to go quietly. Zahn went to CNN and then on to PBS, where she hosts cultural programs. Ailes eventually retaliated against CNN by poaching veteran journalist Greta Van Susteren and giving her a prime-time show of her own.

•   •   •

“In fifteen years, CNN and MSNBC have made sixty-three changes to their prime-time lineups,” says Roger Ailes. “We’ve made five.” Three anchors—Crier, Zahn, and Schneider—were replaced early on. In 2009, Alan Colmes was dropped from
Hannity & Colmes
(although he remains at Fox as a commentator). And famously, Ailes moved Bill O’Reilly from six o’clock to eight, setting off the most successful career in the history of cable news.

O’Reilly’s office is on the seventeenth floor of the News Corp building. I was scheduled to meet him at five o’clock, but I arrived a few minutes early and ducked into the men’s room. There I found O’Reilly staring at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth.

He looked at me backward and said, “Hi, Zev.”

“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.

“It’s my job to know everything,” he said, and invited me to continue the meeting in his office down the hall.

You don’t just wander around Fox News randomly interviewing personnel. In every meeting there is someone, usually a member of the public relations staff, sitting in unobtrusively. O’Reilly had his own witness, Dave Tabacoff, the executive producer of his show,
The O’Reilly Factor
, who came over to Fox from ABC News. O’Reilly also placed a tape recorder prominently on his desk. The congenial mood of our bathroom encounter was replaced by a confrontational aura. Bill O’Reilly is not a trusting man.

But he trusts his boss. “There are very few honest television executives,” he told me. “You can count them on the fingers of one hand.” He raised a giant paw to demonstrate how few that actually is.

“When I was at CBS News, I covered the Falklands War,” he said. “I was in Buenos Aires for the [Argentinian] surrender. When I got back to my hotel, my story was bigfooted by a CBS correspondent [he didn’t say who, but he was referring to Bob Schieffer], a guy who had been afraid to go outside. He took my video, put his stand-up on it, and sent it.”

O’Reilly was incensed. “I flew up to New York and said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Their attitude was, ‘Shut up, you’re lucky to be at CBS.’ So I left, and I was branded as a guy who isn’t a team player. When ABC hired me I told Roone Arledge, ‘Just don’t bigfoot me,’ and he didn’t. But what happened at CBS was something that Roger Ailes would never allow
. Ever
.”

O’Reilly knew Ailes from CNBC, where he sometimes sat in for Ailes on
Straight Forward
. On one such occasion he did an unusually tough interview of the New York Mets star Keith Hernandez, who had been caught using cocaine. “Why destroy your career?” he demanded.

“Afterward Roger told me that if he let me keep substituting for him, he wouldn’t be able to book any guests,” said O’Reilly with a grin.

O’Reilly bounced around ABC News and then, in 1989, joined the staff of
Inside Edition,
becoming an anchor shortly after arriving. He was there for six years, won awards for his work, and left the show to enroll at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he earned a master’s degree in public administration. One of his teachers was former network newsman Marvin Kalb.

“Bill was an excellent student,” Kalb says. “But I always had a feeling that no matter what I said or what he read, nothing changed his mind.”

At Harvard, O’Reilly began plotting a return to television. Roger Ailes was just getting set up at Fox, and O’Reilly got in touch. “I told Roger that I had a written outline of a show I wanted to do,” he says. “Roger told me, ‘I don’t need an outline. I know what you can do.’” Ailes was not impressed by O’Reilly’s stint at Harvard, which he dismissively calls a “seven-week degree”; what he saw was O’Reilly’s talent.

The show, originally called
The O’Reilly Report
, debuted at 6:00 p.m. Fox was available in about fifteen million homes at the time. “That’s not even being on the air,” says O’Reilly. But as the network’s viewership expanded, Ailes decided to move O’Reilly’s show to 8:00 p.m., where it took off. “In retrospect, it gave me a year to hone the concept,” says O’Reilly. “And moving it to eight was smart. It meant that more young viewers could watch. A lot of television executives wouldn’t have seen that. They don’t even know the difference between six o’clock and eight.”

The Factor
has been the most watched prime-time show for more than ten years. Most nights O’Reilly’s audience is larger than those of the shows on MSNBC, CNN, and CNBC
combined
. “I write the scripts myself, early in the day,” he says. “I send them to Roger so he can see who I am interviewing and how I am framing subjects. But I have one hundred percent autonomy, and the system works perfectly.”

O’Reilly and Ailes have had relatively few arguments over the years, but Ailes has made it clear to him that
he
runs the network and makes the final decisions.

O’Reilly’s abrasive personality and amazing ratings have made him a target. He harbors a special animosity toward Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBCUniversal, whom he calls, with typical understatement, “the lowest form of humanity.”

“Zucker decided to use MSNBC as a weapon to attack people and hired guttersnipes to do it. There were no boundaries; they launched personal attacks every night. How can you respect a news executive who allows that to happen?” At O’Reilly’s behest, Ailes called Zucker and asked him to call off the anti-O’Reilly campaign, which was being led by Keith Olbermann. “Roger told him that he was putting people in jeopardy.” When Zucker failed to respond, O’Reilly asked for, and got, protection. “You have a right to defend yourself,” he says. “Roger gives me security. We’re taking names. It’s vicious, not something you just ignore.”

There is widespread criticism of his relentless promotion of his bestselling books and public appearances. “He says he gives a lot of the money to charity and maybe he does,” a senior executive at the network told me. “But he does it for free on Murdoch’s air, so maybe Murdoch deserves some of the credit.”

O’Reilly is not a candidate for colleague of the year at Fox. O’Reilly and Sean Hannity don’t speak, and he doesn’t “hand off” his program to Hannity at 9:00 p.m. with an introductory phrase, as is customary. He attributes this to technical difficulties, although it is a problem other anchors seem to have solved. Hannity, for his part, praises O’Reilly’s talent and contribution to Fox, but concedes that he and his fellow Fox star don’t talk to each other—quite a feat considering that the two men work on the same floor, within a hundred feet of each other’s offices.

Hannity is a star in his own right, the Scottie Pippen to O’Reilly’s Michael Jordan. His show is the second-most-watched prime-time cable news program; it, too, often beats the combined opposition. Like O’Reilly, Hannity grew up in an Irish Catholic family on Long Island and, as has become de rigueur at Ailes’s network, he flaunts his working-class credentials. As a kid he scrubbed pots and pans in a restaurant kitchen, worked on construction projects, and did poorly at the preparatory seminary he attended.

O’Reilly developed his TV chops over a long career. Hannity is an Ailes creation. He was an AM talk show host in Atlanta when he applied for a job at Fox. What he brought to the table were boyish good looks, a nice clear tenor voice, a simple conservative perspective, and an important friendship with Newt Gingrich, the Georgia congressman who led the 1994 GOP congressional sweep. By the time Fox went on the air, Gingrich was the Speaker of the House and the country’s most influential Republican. Roger Ailes is a man who places a high premium on access, and Hannity’s closeness to Newt was an important link.

Hannity was not a complete TV virgin. In Atlanta he had done guest spots for CNN and occasionally he did a talking head gig at CNBC. But the medium felt new to him, and uncomfortable. “The first time I was on television I had a panic attack,” he says.

When Ailes started Fox, Hannity’s lawyer, David Limbaugh, Rush’s brother, called and suggested a tryout for his client. Ailes saw potential and hired Hannity to do a debate show with a liberal cohost. They tried out a few before settling on Alan Colmes.

Hannity’s early performances were shaky and awkward. “Looking at them now makes me cringe,” he says. He didn’t even know how to read a teleprompter; he learned by watching and copying Brian Williams. But his most important tutor was Ailes. He showed Hannity how to ask short questions instead of delivering speeches. He instructed him to be better informed, “report instead of just talk.” And, most important, he imparted the practical lesson of
You Are the Message
.

“One morning during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Roger called me in and said, ‘Every time we’re together you smile, but last night on the air you didn’t show me that side of your personality. You seemed angry, and you’re not an angry guy. Lighten up.’ He said it in a fatherly way, and it stuck,” he recalls. “It was the best professional advice I ever got. Roger Ailes changed my life.”

Hannity’s television persona is, indeed, far less abrasive than O’Reilly’s. It is also much more predictable. O’Reilly is a social conservative, but he can be a populist on economic issues and tends to be open-minded on foreign affairs. Hannity only departs from Republican orthodoxy when he criticizes it from the right. When critics accuse Fox News of being a megaphone for Republican talking points, they are primarily pointing (whether they know it or not) to Hannity.

With the morning nailed down, market closing time settled, and prime time dominated by a one-two punch, Ailes had one more key casting issue. He wanted a serious Washington-centered news hour that could hold its own against the networks and the cable competition, led by someone with unquestioned mainstream media credentials, an outstanding professional reputation, and a conservative outlook. There weren’t many of those, but Ailes only needed one, and he found his man at ABC News.

Brit Hume did not boast a blue-collar pedigree. As a boy he attended St. Albans prep school in Washington, DC, where his classmates included Albert Gore Jr. Hume matriculated at the University of Virginia and then followed what was, back then, the usual route to journalist stardom: a stint at a wire service and at a daily newspaper, the
Baltimore Evening Sun
. He worked as an investigative reporter for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and went on to ABC News, where he covered Congress and the White House. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, he sometimes clashed with left-leaning anchor Peter Jennings, but their relationship was mostly amicable. Hume is not the sort of man whose integrity is easily questioned. Bill Clinton, with whom he had an occasionally contentious relationship, hailed him when he left the White House press corps in 1996 for doing an “extraordinary, professional job under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.”