When Ailes got wind of the meetings, he called Stewart and asked him whether he was a member of the “Full Moon conspiracy.” Stewart laughed.
But by the time of the zoning town hall at Haldane in April 2010, Stewart’s benign view of the PCN&R was changing. Under Joe Lindsley’s editorship, Stewart saw undeniable evidence that the paper was taking on a partisan tack. He also heard a string of troubling stories of Ailes threatening locals who stood in his way. “You want to see a Fox News truck parked outside your place? I can have one up here tomorrow,” he said to one.
It struck Stewart how disconnected Ailes’s simplified vision of the town was from the diverse reality Stewart had come to know. “Until Roger showed up, no one much cared what your party affiliation was,” Stewart said. “With nine thousand people it doesn’t work too well. It’s hard to demonize people for party affiliation when they all know each other. Scaling Rogerism and Foxism down is a disaster.” A canny businessman, Stewart sensed opportunity. The Full Moon meetings had produced a lot of talk, but Stewart was ready for action. He set out in secret to launch a local news website to take on Ailes directly.
On Tuesday morning, July 6, 2010, Lindsley was at his desk at the PCN&R working on the coverage of the Independence Day parade, which Roger and Beth had revived in 2009 after a thirty-year absence, when he let out a grunt. While searching the Internet, he came across the bylines of two PCN&R writers, Michael Turton and Liz Schevtchuk Armstrong, writing about Putnam County news on a site called Philipstown.info, which he had never heard of before, the proprietor of which was none other than Gordon Stewart. Alison Rooney, the copy editor, had also defected. Lindsley pushed his chair back from his computer and called Ailes. “What does this mean? Are we going to have trouble getting the paper out?” Ailes asked in light of the staff walkout. “Absolutely not,” Lindsley replied. The lineup was already settled with a July Fourth recap and Federalist Paper no. 78.
The following day Ailes called Stewart and screamed at him for stealing his people. Stewart returned the bluster. “You’re a big United States Constitution guy,” he said. “The last time I checked, indentured servitude is illegal in the United States. I didn’t steal them. They left. They don’t want to work for you.”
“I can give them all health insurance and they will quit and come back!” Ailes replied.
“Good. At least then I will have reformed your miserable labor practices.”
Stewart’s newsroom, set up across the street from the PCN&R in a former aromatherapy shop, posed a significant problem for Ailes. Despite the small-town stakes, it was a rivalry freighted with larger symbolism: for the first time since launching Fox News, the media business was changing in ways Ailes did not fully understand. The Internet was a wave washing over every corner of the communications industry. Newspapers and magazines had been the first casualties. It was only a matter of time until cable television began to suffer, too. “There was no push to innovate technologically,” a former senior Fox executive said. CNN invested millions in the latest gadgetry such as touch screens and holograms. Fox didn’t. Ailes, the executive added, felt “his core audience of older, white viewers preferred the simplicity of a traditional television newscast.”
Ailes decided to sit down with Stewart in New York to gauge his intentions. Over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour meal at Fox News, Ailes was surprisingly open about his lack of knowledge of new media. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he told Stewart. “I have the same problem with you that I have at Fox News. I don’t do a lot of web at Fox News.” Ailes indicated if he gave away content for free on the web, his viewers might not pay for cable bills. “I’d be eating my own lunch,” he said. The best Ailes could hope for was a war of attrition. “I’m going to run you out of money,” Ailes assured Stewart. “What he didn’t know is, I don’t have any money,” Stewart later said. “My deal with my wife was, if you want to spend the money you earn on the website, it’s better than a blonde and a red sportscar.”
In the days after the reporters defected, a cloud of suspicion enveloped the PCN&R newsroom. “They thought everyone was a traitor,” reporter Liz Schevtchuk Armstrong said. Alison Rooney noticed strange activity on her PCN&R laptop: her email box had been opened remotely. Later, Roger and Beth accused her of all manner of conspiracies. “It was weird,” one person familiar with the events said. “There was this whole James Bond spy type of stuff, like we were dealing with national security here, but all her emails were like, ‘Dammit I hate my job!’ ”
As a final measure, just in case the reporters did not fully grasp what Roger and Beth thought of their decision to leave, the PCN&R printed a reminder the week after they jumped ship. Tucked between the articles, readers came across a small cartoon of a rat.
The exodus of reporters created an opening on the staff. A few days after the Philipstown.info walkout, T. J. Haley, the PCN&R’s paperboy, mentioned to Lindsley that he was a good writer. Lindsley said he would give him a tryout. In June, Fox News HR had placed Haley, a twenty-three-year-old former Marine and O’Reilly Factor intern, with the paper. In his interview, the HR rep told Haley, who was eager for a full-time job at Fox, that working upstate was a way to get a leg up and impress Ailes. And so, after a month delivering papers for ten bucks an hour, Haley began contributing articles.
The commute to Cold Spring was soul-crushing. Haley was spending almost three hours in the car each day driving to and from his parents’ house on Long Island, paying out what little he earned on gas. Beth offered to let him crash upstairs on an office couch next to the conference room where Roger addressed local politicians. “When you are here at the office, you’re at home. This is a family,” Beth told him. He slept there for three months. In the mornings, Haley cleaned himself up in the paper’s bathroom. The decor in the bathroom unsettled him: on one wall hung a decorative artwork with a small photo of Beth’s face, and on another, a drawing of Roger. Although Lindsley was a contemporary, Haley at first found his secretive manner off-putting. When Haley quoted lines from his favorite movies to Lindsley, the references did not register. Lindsley’s touchstones were confined to conservative politics, journalism, and Notre Dame football. He seemed more like a factotum for the Ailes family than a newspaper editor. “Don’t talk about them,” he would say. Haley got along far better with Carli-Rae Panny, a bubbly Catholic twentysomething from east Putnam County, who joined the paper around the same time he did. Like Haley, Panny had been a Fox News intern, and they often had lunch together.
Ailes made zoning the litmus test by which politicians would be judged, even Republicans. Vincent Leibell, Putnam County’s long-serving state senator, soon learned this painful lesson. A successful estate lawyer, Leibell was the godfather of the Putnam County GOP. His wide shoulders, jowly cheeks, and bald pate contributed to his bosslike persona. “Uncle Vinnie,” locals called him. “Anytime that anyone new would come on the scene he’d want to know everything about them. Everything,” a local politician recalled. “Vinnie would co-opt them or if they wouldn’t do what he’d say, he’d kill them in the cradle. He called it a ‘crib death.’ ” Ailes, for a time, was a welcome presence. “Vinnie thought it was great Ailes was buying the newspaper and it’d be a Republican propaganda machine,” Sam Oliverio, a Democrat on the Putnam County legislature, said.