After 9/11, residents saw a new wave of city dwellers moving in. Along with their politics, they brought their own back-to-the-land ethic with all the predictable signifiers. The number of Priuses and Subarus parked in the lot at Foodtown increased, as did the variety of heirloom produce at the weekend farmers’ market. It was this growing population that sustained local groups like the Garrison Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to applying “the transformative power of contemplation to today’s pressing social and environmental concerns.”
It all added up to a rich brew of clashing sensibilities that bred resentments. The contours of the conflict traced the same lines that had defined the old battles of the Nixon years. For a long time, these passions bubbled at a low simmer. With the pages of the PCN&R now at their disposal, the Aileses were about to turn the temperature up.
One morning in July 2008, Brian O’Donnell called the employees of the PCN&R to the newsroom to meet Roger Ailes and his wife. The staff was on edge. “Has he even seen this place?” one employee asked O’Donnell. Although Beth was taking the title of publisher, Roger did most of the talking that day. They could keep their jobs, he said, but there would be “new” rules. “The first one was, ‘Don’t badmouth your employer,’ ” reporter Michael Turton, an affable Canadian, recalled. “In all the places I’ve worked, including on farms, I’ve never been told not to.” Roger’s second proviso was to “get both sides of the story.” “He was talking about the name the News & Recorder,” Turton remembered, “and he said the ‘Recording’ part was fine, but he didn’t think the ‘News’ part was up to snuff.”
In public, Roger and Beth maintained that the PCN&R would not become Fox News. But Roger communicated other intentions privately. “He said the community needed more of a speaking to,” said local journalist Kevin Foley, who was once a campaign volunteer for Democratic governor Mario Cuomo and a deputy superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department. Shortly after buying the paper, Roger invited the fifty-seven-year-old Foley up to the mountain several times to interview for the top editing job. He spent much of the time monologuing about the ills afflicting his adopted home. He said he would never send Zachary to the public school because it was overrun with liberalism. At his window, he pointed at an outdoor sculpture exhibit at Boscobel House and Gardens, a half mile in the distance. “Do you think they have the right to block my view?” Roger asked. “Isn’t it their property?” Foley asked. “It’s not their property! It’s a nonprofit! They get tax breaks!” Roger replied. He spoke of his security more than once. “He worried about his kid and his wife and said he wouldn’t want anything to happen to them because of what he was,” Foley recalled. Roger told him his German shepherd, Champ, helped protect them. “He said, ‘I let the dog out of the car when we come here. The dog gets out first. He’s trained to patrol the whole grounds and report back before we get out.’ ”
Foley quickly lost interest in the job, and Ailes lost interest in him. Later that summer, Ailes hired Maureen Hunt, a Fox News human resources employee and Philipstown resident, to edit the paper, but she didn’t last long.
As summer turned to fall, political issues began to arise. Alison Rooney, the copy editor, at first found reasons to be optimistic about the ownership change. She liked using the new computers to put out the paper and looked forward to the newsroom moving into a renovated two-story building on Main Street. But that honeymoon ended when Rooney laid out a press release from the Garrison Art Center that described a work invoking the “mythological story” of the virgin birth. After the release was published, the priest of Our Lady of Loretto wrote a letter to the editor, and Beth Ailes lit into Rooney. A few weeks later, Rooney got another dressing-down as she formatted a promotion of the high school’s upcoming production of Urinetown, this time from an editor who found the language offensive and removed the title of the show from the headline.
Michael Turton failed to impress. He was assigned to cover Haldane Middle School’s mock presidential election. After the event, Turton filed a report headlined “Mock Election Generated Excitement at Haldane; Obama Defeats McCain by 2–1 Margin.” He went on, “The 2008 U.S. presidential election is now history. And when the votes were tallied, Barack Obama had defeated John McCain by more than a two to one margin. The final vote count was 128 to 53.” Reading the published version a few days later, Turton was shocked. The headline had been changed: “Mock Presidential Election Held at Haldane; Middle School Students Vote to Learn Civic Responsibility.” So had the opening paragraph: “Haldane students in grades 6 through 8 were entitled to vote for president and they did so with great enthusiasm.” Obama’s margin of victory was struck from the article. His win was buried in the last paragraph.
Turton was upset. “I’ve been mulling over the changes made to my article and need to voice my concern,” he wrote in an email to Hunt. “I’m also sure the article left students, parents, teachers, administration and trustees wondering how a reporter can omit the actual results when covering an election.… I know editing is part of the process, but the rationale for the omission escapes me.”
He never heard back from Hunt, but soon received a series of accusatory emails from the Aileses. Turton had disregarded “specific instructions” for the piece, Beth wrote. Accordingly, the piece had been edited. Headline changes occur all the time, she noted. “Do you anticipate this becoming an ongoing problem for you?” A short while later, Roger weighed in. Maureen Hunt’s instructions to focus on the school’s process for teaching about elections had been “very clear,” he wrote, and Turton’s “desire to change the story into a big Obama win” should have taken a backseat. Ailes described himself as “disappointed” by Turton’s failure “to follow the agreed upon direction.”
Turton defended himself. “I would not disregard clear direction,” he replied in an email. “Had the results been exactly opposite I would have written the story in the same manner, including the results.” Beth responded cryptically, thanking Turton for his “thoughtful explanation,” which she said she would “pass on to Roger.” Soon afterward, Turton learned that Maureen Hunt had resigned.
Ailes had seen similar newsroom turbulence at TVN and during the early days at Fox. To bring “fair and balanced” to the people of Philipstown, he continued his search for someone who understood in which direction the paper was meant to take the community.
In February 2009, Ailes met Joe Lindsley, a twenty-five-year-old journalist, for lunch in his private third-floor dining room at Fox News. A fast-rising star in the conservative movement, Lindsley came on the recommendation of Martin Singerman, a former News Corp executive who had worked with Lindsley at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization that funds right-leaning student newspapers on college campuses. When he was a student at Notre Dame, Lindsley completed the rigorous Great Books program and launched The Irish Rover to combat the liberal bias of the Notre Dame News. A fervent Catholic with a low, booming voice and a certain likeness to Ailes, Lindsley inspired his classmates with his earnest sense of mission, once leading a pilgrimage to northern Michigan to visit the home of conservative historian Russell Kirk. After graduating, he worked for The Weekly Standard, assisting executive editor (and Fox News contributor) Fred Barnes, before moving over to the magazine’s culture section.