Branding issues aside, the Fox Primary was a cunning programming ploy. It gave Ailes’s audience a new reality TV show with a revolving cast of characters to follow. In May 2011, Mike Huckabee ginned up interest in his weekly Fox show by promising to reveal his presidential ambitions live. “Governor Huckabee will announce tomorrow night on his program whether or not he intends to explore a presidential bid,” his producer, Woody Fraser, teased in a press release. “He has not told anyone at Fox News Channel his decision.” On the night of May 14, when Huckabee announced he was not running, ratings soared to 2.2 million.
But when the action took place off his set, Ailes, like any director, went wild. In October, Sarah Palin made the mistake of breaking the news that she would not be running for president on Mark Levin’s talk radio show. “I paid her for two years to make this announcement on my network,” Ailes told Bill Shine in a meeting. Fox was left with sloppy seconds: a follow-up interview with Palin on Greta Van Susteren’s 10:00 p.m. show, after news of Palin’s decision had been drowned out by Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs’s death. Ailes was so furious that he considered pulling Palin off Fox entirely until her $1 million annual contract expired in 2013. Shine told Palin’s agent, Bob Barnett, that Palin was at risk of being “benched.” After conferring with Palin, Barnett called Shine back and told him that Palin recognized the misstep. But tensions between Palin and Fox did not subside.
Ailes questioned the spine of the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. In a private conversation with Bill Kristol, Ailes said, “Romney’s gotta rip Obama’s face off. It’s really hard to do. I did this with Bush Sr. He was uncomfortable with ripping Dukakis’s face off. George had to tell Barbara, ‘Look, this is Roger’s thing.’ It made Barbara uncomfortable that George was going so negative, but I had to rip off Dukakis’s face.”
Romney’s shaky interview with Bret Baier on the afternoon of November 29 proved Ailes’s point. For days, Romney had been declining invitations to appear with a roundtable of “All-Star” pundits. Romney’s campaign did not think it would look “presidential” for the candidate to be surrounded by Fox News commentators lobbing questions at him. Finally, they reached a compromise. Bret Baier would interview Romney at a Conchita Foods warehouse in Miami, where the candidate was on the trail. But just because Baier agreed to travel to Florida did not mean he was going to go soft. After rattling off a list of Romney’s flip-flops on climate change, gay marriage, abortion, and immigration, Baier confronted Romney about his position on universal health care. “Do you believe that that was the right thing for Massachusetts?”
“Bret, I don’t know how many hundred times I’ve said this—” Romney stammered. “This is an unusual interview.” The back-and-forth continued for several excruciating minutes.
When the cameras cut out, Romney complained to Baier about the exchange. Not coming prepared had been Romney’s first mistake. Insulting Baier was his second. The following night, Baier appeared on The O’Reilly Factor and reported Romney’s off-camera tantrum.
At times, it seemed that Ailes was using Fox to manufacture moments of excitement around alternative candidates. After receiving just 9.4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich bounced back in South Carolina. His springboard was a fiery on-air exchange with Fox analyst Juan Williams at a debate in Myrtle Beach held on Martin Luther King Day. Williams, who is black, asked Gingrich about his campaign trail comments that inner city children lacked a “work ethic” and should work as “janitors” in schools. Weren’t these remarks “insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?” “No,” Gingrich shot back. His answer was greeted with rapturous applause. “Only the elites despise earning money,” he said. Gingrich carried the state’s primary five days later.
Some in Romney’s camp blamed the outcome on Ailes. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s media strategist, later told Romney’s advisers that he thought Ailes put a black newsman onstage as a way of symbolically putting Obama in a room filled mainly with white conservatives. Gingrich’s defiant retort, red meat in the cradle of Dixie, was a symbolic smack-down of the president.
In one editorial meeting, Fox News executive Suzanne Scott wondered aloud if Ailes was damaging the party by stoking on-air death matches. “You can create a Reagan through an intra-party fight,” Ailes responded. “If there’s a fight, we should be the one doing the shooting.”
By any measure, 2012 was shaping up to be a phenomenal year for Ailes: Fox News was on track to make $1 billion in profit, the network was in the driver’s seat during the fractious Republican primary, and it still was crushing its cable news rivals. And yet, to some who knew him, Ailes seemed to be consumed by increasingly paranoid and morbid thoughts. “Listen, one out of every twenty-five people in America is a psychopath,” he told his executives. Petty grievances and past battles triggered outsized responses.
In the fall of 2011, Ailes found himself in a row with Google after the company co-sponsored a GOP debate with Fox at the Orlando Convention Center in Florida. Michael Clemente had worked hard to develop the relationship with the Internet search giant, but the relationship did not last long. Ailes was furious that the third hit in search results for his name was a liberal blog called rogerailes.blogspot.com (“Not affiliated with the fat FOX fuck,” the blog informed readers at the top of its homepage). Ailes told Fox executives that he wanted Google to push the blog’s ranking down. Google told Fox that they did not intervene in such matters. Afterward, Fox canceled the partnership and did not co-host future debates with Google.
Ailes spoke frequently about death. “I’d give anything for another ten years,” Ailes would say. Having a child amplified these sentiments. “I don’t want the kid growin’ up in a fouled-up world,” he told a reporter. “He has common feelings of a parent who wants to protect a son,” a close colleague said. “The thing is, most parents don’t run a television network.” To prepare Zachary for his absence, he gave him an accelerated education. When Zachary was twelve, Roger set up a summer internship for him at the Manhattan-based PR firm the Dilenschneider Group, whose founder, Robert Dilenschneider, was Ailes’s personal PR consultant. Each morning, Zachary would put on a coat and tie and get driven in Roger’s News Corp SUV to the office. Around this time, Roger told a journalist that he set aside boxes filled with keepsakes. Besides family photographs and letters, the contents included a pocket-size copy of the Constitution (“The founders believed it and so should you,” he wrote on it), press clippings lionizing his accomplishments, some gold coins (“in case everything goes to hell”), and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, with a note inscribed on the opening page:
Avoid war if at all possible but never give up your freedom—or your honor. Always stand for what is right.
If absolutely FORCED to fight, then fight with courage and win. Don’t try to win … win!
Love,
Dad
But there was more on his mind than his own mortality. He sometimes feared the worst for Zachary. In February 2012, Gordon Stewart received an unexpected, hysterical call from Ailes.
“You’re putting a target on my son’s back!” he screamed. “You’ll be responsible if something happens!”