Stewart, who had to hold the phone away from his ear, asked Ailes what on earth he was talking about.
That week, Philipstown.info published a brief item about recent hearings of the local planning board. The final paragraph reported that Ailes and his neighbor were seeking approval to adjust the line between their properties, which were owned by “Hudson Valley 2009, formed by Roger Ailes; Viewsave LLC; and Gerald Morris.”
“I’ll sue you!” Ailes yelled into the phone.
The article, he said, put Zachary in danger because it disclosed the existence of a trust. He began fulminating about unrelated disputes, including the old charge that Stewart encouraged his employees to quit without giving notice. “You must know I did no such thing,” Stewart said.
“You’re a liar!”
“Roger, since you called and I said hello, you have insulted my integrity, called me a liar to my face, have threatened me with a lawsuit, accused me of potentially being an accomplice to the murder of your son,” Stewart said. “Can you explain to me how you can expect that approach will advance the purpose of your calling?”
Ailes paused. “You need to get help!” he blurted out and hung up.
An hour later, Ailes called back. This time, he calmly asked Stewart to take down the article from the website. Stewart told him he would get back to him. After discussing his concerns with his editor, Kevin Foley, and the reporter on the story, Stewart called Ailes and informed him that he would not be removing it.
“You don’t know how people are out to get me! I asked you for a favor and you’re turning me down.”
“First of all,” Stewart said, “there’s no mention of your son. There’s nothing in this article that would jeopardize you and your family. You’re asking me to remove what happened at a public meeting, and I can’t do that.”
Ailes repeated his claim that Stewart needed mental help. The conversation ended there. At home that night, Stewart’s cell phone rang. It was Ailes calling for the third time that day. Stewart didn’t pick up.
Later that month, Ailes’s old nemesis David Brock coauthored a new book, The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine, which synthesized the most damaging research that Media Matters had published over the past decade on its website. “He was obsessed with Brock’s book,” one Fox contributor recalled. In one meeting, Ailes said he couldn’t “do anything” until it was published. Highlighting leaked emails from Fox executives, which expressed overt right-wing bias, and detailing wild on-air claims about Obama’s religion, background, and policies, the text provided Fox’s detractors with rounds of ammunition to deploy in their battle to define Ailes as a master propagandist. In retaliation, Fox aired segments claiming Brock was mentally unstable.
Google, Media Matters, and Philipstown.info were new media antagonists. Ailes’s threats did not have the same effect on them that they did on legacy media outlets. This was especially the case with Gawker. On April 10, the gossip website introduced a new series. “What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole—a longstanding, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization,” the editors wrote. The columns brought about a minor media convulsion, but the show had a short run. Within twenty-four hours, Fox executives successfully identified the Mole as Joe Muto, a thirty-year-old associate producer who’d worked at the network for eight years, and fired him.
When Muto quickly landed a low-six-figure book deal in early May to write about his exploits, Ailes decided to send a message. Jimmy Gildea, Ailes’s security guard, told the boss he could press charges. “If this Gawker paid for stolen goods, it could be part of the crime, same as if somebody hires a hit man,” the former cop said. Brian Lewis wanted Ailes to let it go, but was overruled. “I told them,” Lewis said, “but I was told that legal would be handling this from here forward. I’m like, Okay.”
At 6:30 in the morning on April 25, officers from the New York district attorney’s office arrived at Muto’s apartment with a warrant charging him with grand larceny and conspiracy, among other charges. They seized his iPhone, laptop, and old notebooks. A year later, a month before his book was published, Muto appeared in handcuffs at the Manhattan Criminal Court, where he pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanor charges: attempted unlawful duplication and criminal possession of computer-related material. The judge fined Muto $1,000, ordered him to forfeit a $5,000 fee he earned from Gawker for reporting on Fox, confiscated his Mac, and ordered him to do ten days of community service and two hundred hours of private service.
In the closing weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign, Ailes’s worldview radiated from his daily editorial meetings onto the screen. “He likes to raise questions in chyrons,” a senior producer said, referring to the graphics and the text that appear at the bottom of the screen. “Is Obama a socialist? He tells producers that such an approach is better than simply saying Obama is a socialist.” Ailes’s anchors and pundits breathlessly inflated a panoply of administration blunders into full-blown conspiracies. While Fox reporters did some enterprising coverage of the deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, the journalism was undermined by one host claiming it was “the biggest news story since Watergate.” A few days before the election, the mother of Sean Patrick Smith, a State Department employee killed in Benghazi, said that Fox’s reports had caused her to believe that “Obama murdered my son.” Fox hyped the influence of fringe groups like the New Black Panther Party and pushed fears of stolen elections. “ELECTION OFFICIALS IN BATTLEGROUND STATE OF OHIO FEAR WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD,” one on-screen banner read.
Ailes’s executives flattered him with suggestions that he go on camera and deliver the attack lines himself or even run for president. (Michael Clemente had “Ailes 2012” bumper stickers printed and distributed around the second floor.) At some moments, Ailes demurred. “Those days are gone,” he told his team. At other moments, he indulged them. That summer, he told his inner circle at the afternoon strategy meeting that he wanted to host a talk show. His PR deputy, Irena Briganti, who was sitting in the room, advised him against it. “The media will go after you,” she warned.
So when Ailes wanted to get his message out, he often turned to his lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., who took to Fox & Friends to spread it. In private, Johnson spoke of Ailes like a father. Johnson told a Fox colleague Ailes thought of him as a son. Owing to his special status, Johnson was allowed to use the teleprompter to read from scripts, a perk that was normally reserved for Fox hosts. “He can load a script directly into the teleprompter. So it’s not even Ailes unplugged. It’s Ailes plugged in,” one person familiar with the matter said. Johnson served up frightening scenarios filled with Muslim extremists and Occupy Wall Street anarchists and overreaching government bureaucrats, lacing his commentary with Nixonian bogeymen. On the day before Obama and Romney squared off in their final debate on foreign policy, Johnson discussed the situation in Benghazi. He speculated about whether Obama had known about the attack early enough to have ordered military action to save the Americans who were killed. “If he did nothing, then that is the shame of America,” Johnson said. “I have no evidence for this,” he mused, but “were these people expendable as part of a Mideast foreign policy?”
On the afternoon of November 6—Election Day—Ailes had lunch with Karl Rove, who still believed in a Romney win. Few Fox pundits had stumped as hard as Rove had for the candidate. Rove’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, had vowed to spend up to $300 million to back conservatives in the 2012 political campaigns. “Hell, maybe Karl’s right,” Ailes said later that day.