Some News Corp executives privately discussed whether Ailes would be out of sync with Murdoch’s political allegiances. Murdoch notoriously blew with the political winds, and he began making noises that he would be open to endorsing Obama for president in the pages of the New York Post, lest he be left on the wrong side of history. (In January, the Post had endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination.) Members of Murdoch’s own family were also captivated by the candidate and lobbied Rupert, including his third wife, Wendi. As these tensions played out, the writer Michael Wolff was putting the finishing touches on his authorized biography of Murdoch. The book, based on hours of interviews with Murdoch and many of his lieutenants and family members, itself became a flashpoint within News Corp. Over nearly a decade, Gary Ginsberg had worked tirelessly to soften and massage Murdoch’s image and had done a remarkable job of making News Corp, if not exactly admired, then palatable to a certain subset of Manhattan. Ginsberg, along with Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, a London public relations executive, was involved in dealing with Wolff on the book. But ultimately, much of what Wolff wrote in his book infuriated many camps inside News Corp. In a preview of the book in Vanity Fair, Wolff revealed how embarrassed Murdoch was by Ailes and Bill O’Reilly—a view Wolff says came from interviews with Rupert—and Ailes became enraged. “Is this true?” he demanded in a September 2008 meeting.
“No, it’s not true,” Murdoch replied.
Just as he had done after his confrontation with Lachlan over the anthrax attacks, Ailes forced Murdoch to demonstrate his loyalty. Murdoch assured Ailes he was happy with Fox News and offered him a new five-year contract, which was signed in November, that guaranteed him editorial independence. “That was the beginning of when the network went crazy,” a Murdoch adviser said. Ailes made sure to capitalize on the moment. “As Ginsberg was blowing up because of the Murdoch book, Brian Lewis and Roger would huddle about the best way to leverage that to hurt Peter Chernin,” a senior executive said.
Any speculation about whether Murdoch was becoming liberal ended on September 8, when the New York Post endorsed McCain. Within the next year, News Corp’s top Democrats—Ginsberg and Chernin—would depart the company, leaving Murdoch with fewer checks on Ailes’s power. Ailes savored the moment. “Roger took credit,” an executive close to him recalled. “The day Ginsberg left, Roger walked into his afternoon editorial meeting, dropped the press release onto the conference table and said, ‘In life, there are winners, and there are …’ And just smiled as people passed around the note.”
The promise of a new contract gave Ailes time to prepare for the effect of an Obama win on Fox ratings, but it turned out he didn’t need the time. On September 3, a day after confronting Murdoch, Ailes, watching the Republican convention, was riveted by the appearance of an exotic political creature: Sarah Palin. “She hit a home run,” he told executives the next day. Her gleeful establishment bashing made her a perfect heroine for a new Ailes story line—and Fox’s ratings soared to a cable news record. During Palin’s speech, Fox attracted more than nine million viewers, eclipsing every other news network, cable or broadcast. “At least people care now,” Ailes told his team.
He was intensely interested in the Alaska governor. Palin had somehow managed to graft the old western myth of the self-reliant frontiersman onto a beauty-pageant face and a counterpunching, don’t-tread-on-me verbal style—a new kind of character, and a remarkably compelling one. A few weeks after her convention speech, Ailes secretly met with Palin during her swing through New York, when she toured the U.N. and had a photo op with Henry Kissinger. That afternoon, Shushannah Walshe, a young Fox producer who was covering Palin’s campaign for the network, had gone on-air and criticized McCain’s staff, which had prevented reporters from asking Palin questions during her U.N. visit. “There’s not one chance that Governor Palin would have to answer a question,” Walshe said on camera. “They’re eliminating even the chance of any kind of interaction with the candidate—it’s just unprecedented.”
Ailes didn’t know Walshe, but he was angry when he heard her comments. Liberal media outlets like The Huffington Post were using her words to make it appear that Fox was turning on Palin. He called Suzanne Scott and demanded Walshe be taken off the air. “It’s not fair-and-balanced coverage,” an executive later told Walshe. Walshe was allowed to continue covering Palin but was barred from future on-camera appearances. She soon left Fox.
In October, Ailes found the other star of Fox’s next era: CNN’s Glenn Beck. Ratings for his CNN Headline News show had jumped by more than 200 percent since he joined the channel in 2006. He had a string of New York Times bestsellers, and ratings for his radio show were nearing Rush Limbaugh’s. When Ailes met the forty-four-year-old for the first time that fall, he could tell he was born for television. Beck’s performances, a mix of New Age self-help speak and right-wing fervor, gave him the lineaments of Lonesome Rhodes, the drifter played by Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. With his neat, alabaster hair and doughy cheeks, he was a prophet of a nascent political movement that was rising up in tandem with Obama’s candidacy.
As they spoke, Ailes and Beck bonded over their shared triumphal version of American history. Ailes wanted Beck for the 5:00 p.m. hour, which had continually failed to attract an audience and delivered a weak lead-in to the shows that followed. Fox executives dubbed it the “black hole.” This was especially problematic because Brit Hume was telling executives he wanted to step down from his nightly newscast at 6:00 p.m. His departure would further imperil the lineup. On Thursday, October 16, Fox announced that Beck was jumping from CNN to Fox.
Ailes was assembling his cast for television in the age of Obama. While he was unimpressed with Mike Huckabee as a candidate, he recognized he had a following among social conservatives. In addition to snapping up Huckabee, Ailes signed Karl Rove and John Bolton as pundits. Still, as Election Day approached, Ailes seemed to be in a dour mood. In late September, McCain had suspended his campaign in hopes of negotiating a congressional accord on a proposed financial bailout in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy. “He was so angry when McCain suspended his campaign,” an executive recalled. “He said, ‘The only people who suspend campaigns are the ones who are losing.’ ”
Ailes told executives Obama’s election would be “the worst thing for America,” but others sensed opportunity. Brian Lewis, a savvy operator and pragmatist—“Everything is a situation” was his mantra—felt that an Obama victory would be better for business than a McCain presidency. A few days before the election, Lewis scheduled a meeting to tell Ailes he was voting for Obama.
Before heading to Ailes’s office, he called Gary Ginsberg. “If Obama wins, it’s good for us,” Lewis said. “I wanted to tell you that before I go into the lion’s den.”
TWENTY
COMEBACK
THE WEEK AFTER OBAMA’S 2008 ELECTION NIGHT VICTORY SPEECH in Grant Park, Chicago, Ailes took his son, Zachary, and Beth back to Warren, Ohio, for Veterans Day. Members of the community had asked Ailes to give the keynote address at the dedication ceremony for the Trumbull County Veterans’ Memorial. Since leaving for college fifty years earlier, Ailes had returned home only a handful of times—he had few remaining ties to the community. Ailes decided it was time for his son, who was then eight years old, to see where his father came from. In the plush seats of News Corp’s corporate jet, the Ailes family descended through the clouds over the flat landscape of northeast Ohio. It was unseasonably cold for early November, barely above freezing in the afternoon. From the air, the fallow farmland was a quilt of brown and gray patchwork.