Roger Ailes’s Permanent Pushback Campaign JAN. 12, 2014 Photo Allies of the Fox News chief Roger Ailes, left, with Rupert Murdoch, have long impugned the author of a new biography. Credit Peter Morgan/Reuters THE MEDIA EQUATION Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News Channel, has little left to accomplish in a remarkable television career. He has made billions for his owners, created an entirely new genre of TV and, in doing so, he has changed the way politics is conducted. His business legacy is secure. Besides, there are only two audiences that would seem to matter to him — Rupert Murdoch and Fox News viewers — and neither could give a rip what “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” an unauthorized biography of Mr. Ailes by Gabriel Sherman that goes on sale Tuesday, says about their guy. So why is the consummate P.R. pro, the man who taught both Richard Nixon and Bill O’Reilly to connect with the masses despite their flaws, pushing back on the book and blowing air into it in the process? It would be a very simple matter for Mr. Ailes to tuck in behind Gov. Chris Christie, another Republican accused of being a bully, and let Mr. Sherman sell his own books. Some of it is reflex, part of the permanent campaign that Mr. Ailes, a former political consultant, has been running all his life. I’ve dealt with Mr. Ailes while covering the news media, and beyond his charms and smarts, he is animated by a belief that just about everyone would like to see him laid low. Even as he has vanquished his opponents, he clings to the role of aggrieved underdog, and Mr. Sherman’s critical book reinforces that worldview. To those of us who have reported on Fox News, Mr. Sherman’s portrayal of the operation — with its loyalty tests, its culture of fear and reprisals, and its deep involvement in stories it was supposed to be covering — is hardly shocking. But it is not a pretty picture, and Mr. Ailes must know that. He has been calling around to some of the people who show up in the book to apologize and spin, saying Mr. Sherman used accounts of disgruntled ex-employees to distort events. Allies of Mr. Ailes initiated counter-ops against the book almost as soon as Mr. Sherman began reporting nearly three years ago, with tweets, blog posts and blind items impugning his motives and work. As a career control freak, Mr. Ailes, 73, can’t abide losing custody of his own narrative. “Up until now, Roger Ailes had been able to control his story in a masterful way,” Mr. Sherman told me the other day. “I think the book provides a nuanced portrait of a man with a bottomless well of ambition and his path to power, telling the story of how he used television to advance his politics.” To be fair, Mr. Sherman has been on a ferocious campaign of his own, appearing on cable and network television to promote the book while assigning all manner of might and motive to Mr. Ailes, whom he calls “the man behind the curtain.” Mr. Sherman’s book is a thoroughly reported look behind that curtain, describing Mr. Ailes’s operational aggression, but there is nothing in it that is off brand or inconsistent with what we’ve learned about Mr. Ailes over the years. He is who we think he is. Part of the reason he and his allies have campaigned against the book is not because it is false, but because it tells a true story. Mr. Ailes has run Fox News as a political operation from the start, enthusiastically serving as a kingmaker in Republican politics. After all, the man in charge of the Fox News decision desk for the highly contested 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was John Ellis, a cousin of Mr. Bush’s. According to Mr. Sherman’s book, as vote totals in Florida crept in on that fateful night, Mr. Ellis got off the phone at 2 a.m. and exclaimed, “Jebbie says we got it!” The walls between the respective estates have never been thinner than that. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story The book portrays life at Fox News as occasionally brutal, run by a leader Mr. Sherman describes over and over as paranoid. My favorite line comes in an account of the very fraught morning meetings Mr. Ailes runs. The goal was not to become the focus: “If you move, will the T-Rex see you?” said one attendee. Some of the book’s tangy revelations came out in an article last week by my colleagues Julie Bosman and Bill Carter. In an interview that had been scheduled before the book leaked, Mr. Ailes pushed back pre-emptively in The Hollywood Reporter, saying that “Random House refused to fact-check the content with me or Fox News; that tells you everything you need to know about this book and its agenda.” What it really tells you is everything you need to know about the reality distortion field around Fox News. It refused to engage with Mr. Sherman, and then attacked him for not engaging. It rebuffed his repeated requests to interview Mr. Ailes, but still believes it would have been appropriate for him to go over all the accusations in the book, arguing that not doing so is irresponsible and not in keeping with standard journalistic practice. In my experience, that would have been the beginning of a grinding war of attrition, with Fox executives pushing back on everything while yielding nothing. On Sunday, a Fox spokeswoman described Mr. Sherman’s appearance on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” as “another example of the agenda-driven cottage industry built on attacking Fox News. The author’s failure to secure an interview with the principal subject does not absolve his fact-checking obligations with the network.” There are a plenty of unnamed sources in the book attributing specific dialogue to Mr. Ailes, but picking on Mr. Sherman over facts will not change the narrative. He spent three years on the book, interviewed over 600 people, had two fact-checkers spend 2,000 hours going over his work and rendered his sourcing and reporting mostly transparent. This isn’t a fight about facts, it is about control. According to the book, Mr. Ailes ended a corporate relationship with Google because it would not alter search engine results that put him in a negative light. In 2010, I worked on a piece about how when Mr. Ailes moved to Putnam County, he bought the local newspaper to exercise might in local affairs, a fight that is detailed in Mr. Sherman’s book. And Mr. Ailes tried to maintain dominion over his own legacy, and pre-empt Mr. Sherman’s book, by commissioning a friendly and feckless authorized biography — “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” — that was published last year. The most devastating takeaway in Mr. Sherman’s book is the idea that Mr. Ailes, a man who carried more bananas for the elephant than almost anyone, did significant damage to the Republican Party. Mr. Ailes is, in essence, a fairly moderate Republican, a fan of both Bushes, a promoter of Mr. Christie and the former military leader David Petraeus. Those versions of middle-of-the-road Republicans would have an awfully hard time running the Tea Party gantlet Mr. Ailes all but invented in his push for ratings. As Mr. Sherman writes near the end of his book, Mr. Ailes discovered that “television and politics were different disciplines.” Fox News doesn’t need a working majority, it does not have to govern or compromise, it does not need to do anything other than win enough ratings to stay on top. But in the last election, Mr. Ailes conflated his two passions to damaging effect. He gave jobs to many Republican candidates, offered oodles of advice to them, and provided hundreds of hours of airtime for the cooking and serving of conservative red meat. With an economy in shambles and a foreign policy that was all over the road, the incumbent seemed vulnerable. But that was before the conservative fringe, with a big assist from Fox News, all but kidnapped the Republican side of the argument. In Mr. Sherman’s book, Mr. Ailes is quoted by fellow Fox News executives as saying, “I want to elect the next U.S. president.” It could be argued that he succeeded, although it wasn’t the candidate he wanted.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 19:43:43 +0000
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