Beck broke the mold at Fox. Unlike most of the unknowns and has-beens Ailes recruited, Beck joined Fox at a time when he was well on his way to becoming a star. He was also a driven businessman. He founded his own company, Mercury Radio Arts (a play off Orson Welles’s radio broadcasts of the 1930s), and brought in executives to run it. In a break from Fox tradition, Beck had his own team of aggressive public relations counselors who had worked with Katie Couric and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
But Beck’s show built on Ailes’s playbook, making the culture wars personal. He seemed to many to be Fox News’s id made visible, saying things—Obama is a racist, Nazi tactics are progressive tactics—dredged from the right-wing subconscious. Beck crossed lines that weren’t supposed to be crossed, even at Fox, and the presentation—childlike, angry, often tearful—was as remarkable as the content. Some at Fox were alarmed by Beck’s rhetoric but Ailes was fully on-board. Privately, Ailes said Beck was telling the truth. The day after Beck said on air that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” Ailes told his executives, “I think he’s right.” The only question was how to manage the fallout. It was decided Bill Shine would release a statement. “Glenn Beck expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel,” it read. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions.”
The White House failed to recognize Beck’s growing influence, until he dug up and publicized White House green jobs czar Van Jones’s collegiate flirtation with black nationalism and communism. At the time, Jones was something of a media darling, and the subject of a recent New Yorker profile. One day in the summer of 2009, Jones received a Google alert on his BlackBerry about one of Beck’s commentaries. When he checked it out, he remembered thinking it was “almost clownish.” “The general attitude in the White House was this guy is a jokester and they didn’t want to give it a lot of oxygen,” he said. But as Beck kept up the barrage, Jones grew concerned. “I started to feel besieged. Because the guy’s ratings exploded and he’s using my face for a springboard,” he said. Jones began asking White House aides to defend him.
Obama officials, consumed over the summer with selling the health care bill and other crises, did not consider Jones a high priority. Dan Pfeiffer, a senior communications staffer, did not even know who Jones was before Beck sparked heat around his posting. Jones asked his chief of staff for security after receiving a death threat, but was told that he did not qualify for Secret Service protection. “I’ve got children,” he said. “I’m just a regular civilian walking around here, and you had someone telling a couple million people every night that I’m a Communist and a felon.”
On September 1, Jones was sitting in his office across from the White House in a townhouse off Lafayette Park when his intern asked, “Did you ever say Republicans are ‘assholes’?”
“Probably,” Jones said.
“That’s what they’re reporting on now.” Jones looked at the screen. A YouTube video of him was going viral on conservative websites. “Somebody found the videotape where I was yukking it up with students at Berkeley,” Jones recalled. Under pressure, he released a statement to Politico apologizing, calling his remarks “offensive” and “clearly inappropriate.” The same week, news broke that Jones had signed a so-called Truther petition that claimed the 9/11 attacks were in fact carried out by the Bush administration. White House officials confronted Jones. “They said, ‘Why did you sign this?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t sign this. I’ve never seen this. In my most wild left-wing days I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. This wasn’t anything I’ve seen.’ ” Jones investigated and discovered a group had approached him at a conference and gotten him to sign his name under false pretenses. “Now other people besides Beck were covering it. That was the beginning of the end,” Jones said. On September 6, Beck got his scalp: Jones resigned. Jones’s ouster was a symbolic victory for Ailes that proved Fox was again driving the news.
Four days later, Ailes dealt another blow. On the morning of September 10, Fox aired the undercover video of conservative activist James O’Keefe’s sting of the Baltimore branch of ACORN, the community organizing group. In the edited clips, O’Keefe captured ACORN employees allegedly showing him how to hide income earned from a brothel. Andrew Breitbart, the conservative provocateur turned Internet publisher, worked with O’Keefe to get the video exclusively to Fox after other media outlets turned him down. One reporter told Breitbart it was “too political.” Breitbart thought it was a bombshell, “the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” he called it.
Inside the White House, a debate unfolded over how to deal with Fox. Michelle Obama particularly loathed the network. That summer Obama himself had lashed out at Fox in an interview with John Harwood on CNBC. “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” he told him. “That’s a pretty big megaphone. And you’d be hard-pressed, if you watched the entire day, to find a positive story about me on that front.” Now Obama advisers were getting word that Fox was actively manipulating the coverage of the health care debate, which at the time was being played out in a national series of town halls. “We had anecdotal reports that where there was no screaming, they would not report it,” said Anita Dunn. In meetings, Ailes told producers that health care reform was a disaster. “He claimed there was nothing wrong with the current system,” one producer said. What most alarmed the White House was that the rest of the media was suddenly following Fox News’s lead. In an interview posted on the New York Times website after Van Jones’s resignation, the paper’s managing editor, Jill Abramson, acknowledged that they would need to follow Fox’s reporting in the future. “The narrative was being hijacked by Fox,” Dunn said. “Fox had taken over a thought-leader role in the national press corps. What we could influence was the way everyone else looks at Fox. Frankly, that’s the real problem.”
As the White House hashed out their strategy, Dunn reached out to David Rhodes at his new perch at Bloomberg Television. He told Dunn the White House was making a mistake. “You guys have this all wrong. Everything you’re doing is anticipating that they’re somewhere having a meeting which is like, ‘What if Beck says something that embarrasses us?’ That’s an NBC meeting. Now, let me tell you what a Fox meeting is: A Fox meeting is, ‘Boy, he’s really emotional. Now he’s tearing up. What if he gets really emotional and doesn’t do the show and we don’t get the ratings, what are we going to do?’ ”
After conferring with Obama, his aides decided that the White House would go to war with Fox. The White House first attempted to isolate the channel. In mid-September, when Obama agreed to appear on the Sunday political shows, he skipped Fox News Sunday, leaving Chris Wallace to complain on The O’Reilly Factor, “They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my thirty years in Washington.” In early October, Dunn went on CNN and declared Fox the “research arm of the Republican Party.” Then, in late October, a Treasury Department official tried to deny Fox an interview with Ken Feinberg, the compensation regulator for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The move backfired when journalists from other networks, angered that the White House was picking on a member of the press, rallied behind Fox. David Axelrod called Ailes and blamed the decision on a low-level Treasury employee.