In the fall of 2012, Ailes held a meeting with Fox Business executives to discuss whether Fox should sign a content arrangement with Dow Jones. That year, Dow Jones was exiting a long-term partnership with CNBC and was free to sign up with Fox. “Why would I pay them anything?” Ailes said. Neil Cavuto stoked Ailes’s fears of a corporate rivalry. “The Wall Street Journal is a Trojan horse. They want the business channel,” he told Ailes.
Then Ailes largely banned Journal reporters from his air. It happened after Ailes learned that Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray, who was steering the Journal’s expansion into video production, made a snide comment about Fox. “Alan made the mistake of telling folks how he could make FBN better,” the executive said. A few months later, a junior Fox Business staffer mistakenly disclosed the ban to a Journal employee. “We had to deny that there ever was a ban. It was so silly,” the Fox executive said.
The feeling at the newspaper was mutual. Some Journal reporters, whenever they had to bring important sources up to the office, intentionally positioned themselves in front of the screens in the elevators that broadcast Fox News.
After the election debacle, Ailes’s position in the company seemed to weaken. By the spring of 2013, Murdoch and senior executives viewed Ailes as a caricature of himself. On issues like gun control and immigration, Murdoch was moving away from Ailes. “Rupert doesn’t have a worldview, Roger does,” a senior executive said. “Roger said Rupert doesn’t understand the threat of China,” a senior producer recalled. “Roger doesn’t think Rupert understands the threat about the Middle East.” In one meeting, Ailes told his team that Murdoch asked him to meet with Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who was at the time News Corp’s second-largest voting shareholder after Murdoch. “Roger said he wouldn’t do it,” the producer said. “He said it was the only time he told Rupert ‘No.’ ”
Top News Corp brass traded stories of Ailes’s paranoia. “He was convinced that the Democratic National Committee had targeted him for assassination,” one Murdoch family intimate remarked. “Michelle Obama had come up to him at a dinner and smiled and said, ‘I’m surprised to see you here.’ He took that to mean it was a real threat.” Other executives spoke of Ailes’s tangles with Joel Klein, the former New York City school chancellor, whom Murdoch hired in November 2010 to launch a for-profit education business. “Roger said, ‘The education business is a big mistake. The teachers’ unions will never let Rupert Murdoch educate their children,’ ” an executive said. About a year after Klein joined the company, News Corp hired Klein’s former spokeswoman, Natalie Ravitz, to serve as Murdoch’s chief of staff. Ravitz went to Fox News to introduce herself to Ailes. She reported back to colleagues that her conversation with Ailes went well. Ailes had a different take. “I’ve just seen that spy!” he later told Chase Carey. “I know she’s a Clinton spy and Joel’s spy!”
Ailes was more isolated than ever. “Roger doesn’t trust anyone around him anymore,” an executive said after the election. No one was spared from Ailes’s eruptions. He vented constantly about his talent. He complained about The Five co-host Andrea Tantaros, who was a former political consultant. “She’s pretty, but did she ever get anyone elected, even a dog catcher?” When Gretchen Carlson’s name came up, Ailes pointed out she was once Miss America, then added, “It must not have been a good year.” Her co-host, Brian Kilmeade, was a “soccer coach from Long Island.” Bill O’Reilly was a “book salesman with a TV show.”
No one seemed safe, even his longest-serving confidants. On the afternoon of July 25, 2013, Ailes called Brian Lewis to his office. News Corp’s outside counsel Ronald Green was sitting in the room. Ailes told Lewis to take “a vacation.”
“A paid vacation?” Lewis asked.
“Yeah,” Ailes said.
Before Lewis walked out of his office, Ailes said to him, “You’re one of the best I’ve ever seen. But I’m still better.”
Over the next several weeks, Lewis negotiated a separation agreement. On August 20, after talks derailed, Fox released a statement saying that Lewis was terminated for cause, due to “issues relating to financial irregularities” as well as “multiple, material and significant breaches of his employment contract.” Ailes cut off Lewis’s salary and dispatched Fox executives and personalities to trash Lewis publicly as a turncoat and a nonperson.
Lewis retained powerhouse lawyer Judd Burstein. “People hire Burstein not because they’re guilty. They hire him because they’re pissed-off!” Lewis told people. On August 27, Burstein fired off a statement to Gawker, a move designed to tweak Ailes. “Roger Ailes and Newscorp have a lot more to fear from Brian Lewis telling the truth about them than Brian Lewis has to fear from Roger Ailes and his toadies telling lies about Brian Lewis,” it read. “The toadie” was Lewis’s well-known nickname for Shine. It was Lewis’s way to send a message to Shine that he knew Shine had carried out Ailes’s press attacks against him.
The veiled threat brought Ailes to heel. In September, Burstein met with Ronald Green and Peter Johnson Jr. A year earlier, Johnson tried to salvage Lewis’s relationship with Ailes. “Brian, you’ve got to show him some respect,” Johnson said. “You and I are like the sons he never had.” Later that fall, Fox settled with Lewis for millions. To friends, Lewis expressed relief to be on the outside. He talked about opening a Subway franchise in New Jersey. Lewis had been in the game long enough not to fear the end. “I got whacked,” he told a friend.
Even as Lewis and Ailes’s longtime relationship collapsed, others close to Ailes continued to profess adulation. When Beth Ailes received an honorary doctorate from Mount Saint Mary College in May 2012, she said in her remarks, “I am the wife of a great man, Roger Ailes.” “Roger Ailes is like my second father,” Shepard Smith told a journalist that January. “He’s one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. I respect and admire him infinitely.” “He changed my life,” Sean Hannity said on camera in March 2013. “I would not be known in American households to whatever extent I might be if he didn’t take a chance on me.” “Who has been your biggest career influence?” a man asked Megyn Kelly in October 2013 over Twitter. “My boss Roger Ailes,” she responded.
A month before the 2012 election, Joe McGinniss thought a lot about Roger. It was a tough time. McGinniss, who had turned seventy, had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Roger was treating him like family. “He said, ‘You never have to worry about money. If you get to the point where you can’t work anymore, just let me know, I’ll write a check.’ ” Roger made some calls and put him in touch with Dr. Eugene Kwon, one of the country’s preeminent specialists for his particular condition. McGinniss was touched by Roger’s warm generosity, but also felt sad for his old friend, recalling an episode of The Sopranos, the HBO mob drama. “It was the one where Carmela says to Tony: You don’t have friends. All those people? They laugh at your jokes, but that’s just because you’re the boss and they’re afraid of you. And he says: What are you talking about?” McGinniss went on, “Then they have a scene later in the show where Tony says a really stupid joke, and all of a sudden, all these guys are going ‘Hah hah hah.’ And then it slows down to real slow motion, and you just see Tony looking at their faces with this fake laughter. And he’s realizing that, of course, she’s absolutely right.”