For the White House, Axelrod was a valuable back channel, who willingly played the good cop. “He’s a fierce competitor. He lives on the line. Occasionally, he waddles over it,” Axelrod once told a reporter, referring to Ailes. About a week before Dunn’s CNN appearance in the fall of 2009, Axelrod sat down with Ailes at the Palm in Midtown Manhattan before the restaurant opened to avoid drawing attention. Axelrod told Ailes they should try to defuse things and work together.
But Ailes saw no benefit to laying down arms. Ratings were ticking up. “He relished it,” an executive said. In editorial meetings, he told his lieutenants to return fire. One executive recalled Ailes saying, “They hate America. They hate capitalism.” Another recalled, “He would say, beat the shit out of them.” “To use Roger’s vocabulary, he said, ‘Fuck these guys. Kick them as hard as you can.’ ” Some executives agreed. One told news chief Michael Clemente that the White House’s attacks were like “a hanging curveball” for Fox. But the war was hard on Fox’s more dedicated journalists. For all the larger-than-life talking heads who dominated its airtime, Fox still had a substantial Washington bureau made up of many nonpartisan journalists, and they were already beleaguered watching Glenn Beck become the network’s mascot. “The D.C. bureau’s job was being made much more difficult,” said one producer, “but Roger loved it.”
On Friday, October 23, Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, called Clemente to work out a truce. Clemente didn’t take the call. Gibbs complained to Fox’s well-regarded White House correspondent, Major Garrett, that Clemente had blown him off. On Monday, Garrett told Ailes and Clemente on a conference call that the White House was looking to make peace.
Clemente finally called Gibbs on October 27 and traveled to Washington the next day to try to ease the tensions. In November, on a trip to Asia, Obama granted an interview to Garrett, his first since the war with Fox began. Both sides walked away claiming victory. But Major Garrett had had enough. Months later, he quit Fox to become a correspondent for National Journal.
Garrett’s departure reflected a larger truth. “Roger’s thinking about ‘fair and balanced’ changed,” a senior executive said. “He decided MSNBC and CNN had gone so far to the left in response to him that he needed to go further right. So you didn’t need to hear both sides of the story at Fox. You were getting the other side by coming to Fox.”
But Ailes was the catalyst that politicized the media. By hiring every conservative media personality of significance, he prevented his rival networks from airing prominent voices on the right. “The way the business works is, they control conservative commentary the way ESPN controls the market for sports rights,” a person close to Ailes said. “If you have a league, you have a meeting with ESPN, you find out how much they’re willing to pay, and then everyone else agrees to pay the same amount if they want it.… It’s sort of the same at Fox. I was surprised at some of what was being paid until I processed it that way. If you’re ABC and you don’t have Newt Gingrich on a particular morning, you can put someone else on. But if you’re Fox, and Newt is moving and talking today, you got to have him. Otherwise, your people are like, ‘Where’s Newt? Why isn’t he on my channel?’ ”
By 2009, Ailes had fundamentally altered the basic idea of news on television as it was historically understood. While millions continued to watch the Big Three nightly newscasts, partisan cable news drove politics. And CNN, lacking a partisan brand, was left out of the conversation. In the months since the 2008 election, CNN’s prime-time ratings dived nearly 25 percent. The down-spiral dashed any hope that the network’s 2008 surge might usher in a post-ideological media moment. Jonathan Klein, the swaggering president of CNN/U.S., grasped for a solution to reverse the trend line.
Meanwhile, CNN’s rivals were happily trading blows, and eating away at CNN’s audience. The main event took place nightly at 8:00 p.m. Olbermann operatically savaged “Bill-O the Clown” O’Reilly. The attacks were successful enough that Murdoch took notice. “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly,” Murdoch complained to an interviewer. O’Reilly was regularly crowned “Worst Person in the World” and at one point Olbermann tastelessly invoked O’Reilly’s family in a segment about a transgendered man who became pregnant. “Kind of like life at home for Bill’s kids,” he said.
O’Reilly fired back, although he never mentioned Olbermann by name (“a vicious smear merchant,” he called him). Raising the stakes, he went after Olbermann’s boss and his boss’s boss, airing a series of segments on General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and Bob Wright’s successor, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker. O’Reilly slagged Immelt for GE’s business deals with Iran, claiming the company had blood on its hands. “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt,” O’Reilly said. At other points, he called Immelt a “pinhead,” “a despicable human being,” and featured GE’s logo alongside a photograph of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the caption “Business Partners.” Zucker came in for similar treatment. O’Reilly railed that Zucker’s network “spews out far-left propaganda” and was “the most aggressive anti-Bush network.” Ailes had warned Zucker that Olbermann was playing with fire. In the summer of 2007, Ailes called Zucker’s cell phone and vowed that if Olbermann did not stand down, he would tell the New York Post to go after Zucker.
Both sides realized the collateral damage threatened to outpace the feud’s ratings gains. Beth Comstock, Immelt’s marketing chief, reached out to Brian Lewis to arrange a private sit-down with Ailes. One afternoon in April 2009, Ailes was spirited into a private entrance at 30 Rock and ascended to Immelt’s fifty-third-floor dining room for lunch.
Both men had talking points ready. Ailes said MSNBC was to blame, not Fox. I can control my nutcases, but you can’t control yours, he said.
Immelt responded that his mother in Cincinnati was a loyal O’Reilly viewer. How did she feel when O’Reilly blamed her son for killing U.S. troops?
What about O’Reilly’s wife? Ailes shot back. Olbermann constantly brought up the Andrea Mackris sex harassment suit. After clearing the air, both executives agreed to talk to their stars and try to calm the waters. The following month, Immelt and Murdoch were guests at a Microsoft corporate retreat in Redmond, Washington. During an off-the-record panel discussion moderated by Charlie Rose, Murdoch and Immelt shook hands and agreed to a truce against personal attacks.
It took a few weeks, but by June, Olbermann and O’Reilly were staying quiet.
The whole deal got blowtorched in July after New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter began calling around to confirm the Immelt-Murdoch summit. Stelter’s front-page article, published on Friday, July 31, shattered the uneasy peace. Olbermann defiantly told Stelter he was “party to no deal.” Three days later, he proved it. During his “Worst Persons” segment, Olbermann denounced Stelter, O’Reilly, and Murdoch. O’Reilly answered two nights later. He reported that GE was forced to pay $50 million to settle SEC charges of misleading investors. The feud appeared to be back on. But it died down just as quickly as it flared.
Shut out of the partisan cage match, CNN flailed, and Ailes pressed his advantage. He set up an anonymous blog called The Cable Game that took shots at his rivals. Ailes assigned Fox News contributor Jim Pinkerton to write the entries. “The Cable Game was Roger’s creation,” one person close to Ailes said. “Is CNN on the Side of the Killers and Terrorists in Iraq?” one headline read. “David Brock Gets Caught! (Although Secretly, He Probably Loves Being Naughty and Nasty),” blared another. The item’s text was accompanied by a photo of Brock posing in a skintight tank top with Congressman Barney Frank. “Media Matters, of course, is the notoriously left-wing hit group, founded by that flamboyantly self-hating conservative apostate, David Brock,” it said. “Brock has that rare distinction of being accused of being dishonest by both liberals and conservatives alike. But don’t take my word for it: Here’s what you get if you type ‘David Brock liar’ on Google: 168,000 hits.” CNN chief Jon Klein saw Ailes’s hand behind the articles. He called Ailes and blamed Fox for posting anonymous online gossip that outed the sexual orientation of CNN’s star prime-time anchor, Anderson Cooper. Ailes denied any role. (Cooper wouldn’t announce he was gay until July 2012.)