In the spring of 2011, after moving out of his apartment in Cold Spring, Lindsley traveled around the East Coast staying with friends. He began running again and got back down to his high school weight, eventually taking a job as a writer for Foster Friess, the conservative billionaire. He helped Haley get a job with Friess as well. Panny went on to work as an editor at The Daily Voice, which serves Connecticut, New York, and western Massachusetts. Lindsley’s uncle, a lawyer in Ohio, handled Peter Johnson, and the threatened legal action never materialized.
Roger and Beth did their best to disappear the three journalists. Shortly after Lindsley left, he discovered that their bylines had been erased from the PCN&R archives. On the online version of dozens of articles they had written, the author field stated simply: “Staff Reports.”
On January 31, 2011, a week after Boyer’s Cold Spring article was published in The New Yorker, Tina Brown announced that she was hiring Boyer as a senior correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. It was an inauspicious move for Boyer. On October 18, 2012, the same day Newsweek announced it would fold its print edition by year-end, Boyer found a new job. “I have followed Peter’s work throughout his storied career,” Roger Ailes said in a statement to the press. “He’s a talented and insightful journalist who will add weight and depth to our investigative reporting.” Boyer, Fox’s newest editor-at-large, was welcomed to the family.
TWENTY-TWO
THE LAST CAMPAIGN
MARCH 2011 WAS A TURBULENT MONTH for Roger Ailes. Joe Lindsley had just walked away. He was also losing his biggest star of the Obama era. On Monday afternoon, March 28, Ailes called Glenn Beck to his office to discuss his future at the network. He had spent the better part of the weekend in Garrison strategizing how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Beck, the situation was exhausting, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session. Beck had already indicated his willingness to leave.
“You’ve got to be crazy. No one walks away from television,” Ailes said.
“I may be,” Beck replied.
Ailes asked Beck’s producer, Joel Cheatwood, to translate. “What the fuck is he doing? Does he want a raise? Tell me how much.” Beck’s people held firm.
Moving him out the door without collateral damage was proving difficult.
“Let’s make a deal,” Ailes told Beck flatly.
During a forty-five-minute conversation, the two men agreed on the terms: Beck would give up his daily 5:00 p.m. program and appear in occasional network “specials”—but even that didn’t solve their problem. They haggled over how many specials he would appear in. Fox wanted six a year, Beck’s advisers wanted four. At another sit-down, Beck choked up as he talked about his bond with Ailes over right-wing politics and history. But Ailes threatened to blow up the talks, saying that Beck’s advisers were jerking him around. “I’m just going to fire him and issue a press release,” he snapped to a Fox executive.
The relationship had been strained since Beck joined Fox. In early 2009, Fox News executives denied a request from Beck’s production team to allow Beck’s head writer and close friend, Pat Gray, to accompany Beck to the Fox News studio for his daily program. At CNN, it had never been an issue for Gray to join Beck at the studio; in fact, Beck leased space for his entire staff at the Time Warner Center. Beck wrote an email to Ailes stressing that Gray was a key writer for the show and that his presence in the studio was important. Ailes responded that he did some checking and it was against the “policy” to give out a building pass. In private, Ailes expressed wariness about Beck’s staff. “I don’t want too many of his people here,” he told an executive.
Things took a turn for the worse as Beck gathered 300,000 of his devoted followers in front of the Lincoln Memorial for a “Restoring Honor” rally—scheduled for the August 2010 anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Fox executives showed little enthusiasm. “I’m going to D.C. in case something happens, and we have to react,” Bill Shine told a colleague the day before. “We’ll probably do a cut-in during the news.” In the end, Fox gave the event scant coverage; CNN actually seemed to cover it more. Ailes praised Beck in a meeting with his executives afterward—“I don’t know anyone else in the country who could have done that”—but Beck could not understand why Ailes did not actively promote an event that drew so many potential Fox viewers. Brian Lewis was selling Ailes on the idea that Beck, who had graced the covers of Forbes, Time, and The New York Times Magazine, was amassing a power base independent of Fox. “Beck had his own PR apparatus and Brian resented that,” a colleague said, “so Brian one day explained to Roger during a meeting called on a completely other topic, that Glenn’s problem was that he felt he was bigger than Fox.” Ailes agreed: talent should never eclipse the brand. “From that day on, that was Roger’s theme with Glenn: he didn’t appreciate the platform Fox had given him and needed to be pushed out,” the colleague said.
Tensions continued to escalate when, a few days after the rally, Beck launched The Blaze, a conservative news website. Fox executives told Beck he couldn’t promote his new venture on air. At times, The Blaze undermined stories that Fox pushed, like its piece debunking conservative provocateur James O’Keefe’s NPR sting, which had received wall-to-wall coverage on the channel. After the New Year, the cold war turned hot. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, hired an executive from The Huffington Post to run The Blaze, and later poached Joel Cheatwood from Fox. The moves signaled Beck’s ambition to build a conservative media empire of his own—a clear encroachment on Ailes’s turf. Brian Lewis retaliated by having his department tell the entertainment news website Deadline Hollywood that Cheatwood had earned $700,000 a year at Fox, a low-ball figure that was designed to damage his earning potential at future jobs. “Joel lost Roger’s respect and trust a long time ago,” an unnamed Fox “insider” told the website. Reporters began highlighting that Beck’s ratings had been slipping and that progressive groups had orchestrated an advertising boycott of his show. But ratings for his time slot were still nearly double those from before he joined the network, and Fox simply shifted the advertising inventory to other programs.
On April 6, Fox and Beck announced the breakup. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes did not want a public meltdown to alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers. Most of all, he didn’t want Beck’s departure to be seen as a victory for the liberal media; that would ruin the most important story line of all.
By the time of Beck’s departure, Ailes had been spending considerable energy discussing the consequences of an Obama reelection. For the past two and a half years, he had committed himself to blocking the Obama agenda. When the Affordable Care Act passed the previous March, “he went apeshit,” a senior producer said. Ailes instructed his producers to book former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey, a conservative health care advocate who popularized the notion of “death panels.” “He said she was the best person to talk about this,” the senior producer recalled. “He even gave her a prop: a giant stack of papers of the law itself.”