Mainly, his appetite was in keeping with his no-bullshit attitude—you’re hungry, you eat—but it could also be seen as a metaphor for his gargantuan ambition. “I’m never going to be one of those $25,000 a year guys,” he’d vowed at the outset of his career. He also knew what this goal might cost him. “I think I’ll lead an unhappy life, in terms of what most people consider personal happiness,” he said. “Personal unhappiness causes you to work harder, and working harder causes more personal unhappiness.” He married three times and did not become a father until an age when most people think about retirement. He denied himself the American ideal of happiness—“home, family, the 9-to-5 job, a good golf score, three weeks paid vacation, a new car”—in the service of his career.
Money and power were one thing, important measures of success especially to someone from middle America, and Ailes liked to keep score. But another reason he worked so hard was that he saw himself as a field marshal in an epic battle to defend the American dream against the counterculture. “Revolutionaries want to take away from people who have. They don’t want to create. They get in gangs for support,” he said. All of his tactical genius as a political consultant—dismembering Michael Dukakis as soft on crime in the service of George H. W. Bush, for one—was driven by his urge to defeat them. Fox News itself, immensely profitable business though it was, was a continuation of his politics by other means. “A lot of the time Roger sees himself as holding back the tide. And a lot of the hysteria around him is people thinking he might be able to,” said David Rhodes, who spent twelve years working at Fox and in 2011 became the president of CBS News.
For Ailes, Obama’s meteoric ascent onto the national stage was yet another triumph of the counterculture and the liberal news media. “People need to be reminded,” Ailes told Fox News executives around the time Obama declared his candidacy, “this guy never had a job. He’s a community organizer.” A few days after Obama’s historic election, Ailes remarked during his morning editorial meeting, “There’s no reason to have a civil rights movement anymore, since there is a black man in the White House.” Obama’s victory changed the mission of Fox News. “When he started the channel, it was a campaign against CNN. But it is now less about the competition and more about the administration,” a former senior Fox producer said. “He honestly thinks Obama has set back the country forever. He feels like he is the only one out there who can save the republic. He has said it.”
Ailes’s battle did not end when he left the office. At his weekend estate in Putnam County, some forty miles north of New York City, Ailes bought the local newspaper and used it to advance his agenda. He complained to neighbors that Obama refused to call Muslims “terrorists.” He told them that Obama was using the stimulus as a “political tool” in order to buy his reelection in 2012. Obama pushed green energy, when in fact climate change was a “worldwide conspiracy” spun by “foreign nations” to gain control of America’s resources.
Ailes even told his advisers that if Obama were reelected, he could be prosecuted and jailed, like a political prisoner. During a forty-five-minute meeting at Bill Clinton’s foundation in Harlem, Ailes told the former president that he might emigrate to Ireland, and had explored acquiring an Irish passport.
And yet, in the halls of the White House, Ailes kept these feelings to himself. As he walked up to Obama to shake his hand and pose for a photo, he faced a very different politician than the one he’d first met in the summer of 2008. At the time, Obama was a candidate who believed in his ability to overcome the grievance politics of the past through the force of his personal narrative. He told his aides he thought he could win over Fox’s audience—and even Ailes himself—by reasoning with them. Now, nearly three years into his first term, Obama had learned—often the hard way—that his vision of harmony was a pipe dream.
On the rope line, Obama greeted Ailes and his son.
“I see the most powerful man in the world is here,” Obama said.
Ailes grinned. “Don’t believe what you read, Mr. President. I started those rumors myself.”
Whatever President Obama intended to convey, there is no denying an essential truth in the remark. Roger Ailes has the power, more than any single person in American public life, to define the president. For many Americans—admittedly and patently not the ones that voted for him—the Obama they know, the one they are raging against, is the one Ailes has played a large role creating.
All of Obama’s efforts as a conciliator cannot change the fact that conflict is intrinsically more interesting than consensus. And political conflict has never been more compelling than on Ailes’s Fox News. His channel is a self-contained universe, with distinctive laws—“fair and balanced”—and sometimes its own facts. Though marketed as an antidote to the epistemic closure of the mainstream media, Fox News is as closed off as the media world it proposes to balance—Ailes’s audience seldom watches anything else. They have been conditioned by Fox’s pundits to see the broadcast networks, CNN, and MSNBC as opponents in a grand partisan struggle.
On Fox News, the tedious personages of workaday politics are reborn as heroes and villains with triumphs and reverses—never-ending story lines. And the beauty of it is that Ailes’s viewers—the voters—are the protagonists, victims of socialist overlords, or rebels coming to take the government back. The viewers, on their couches, are flattered as the most important participants, the foot soldiers in Ailes’s army.
In the early years of Fox News, Ailes kept a healthy distance between his own worldview and the product that ultimately ended up on the air. The network’s original blueprint was more tabloid and populist than baldly conservative. When the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch hired Ailes in 1996 to launch Fox News, the media establishment wrote the effort off as a joke. Ailes, never one to heed criticism, turned the channel into a powerhouse that would earn more money than any other division in Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2002, Fox passed CNN as the number-one-rated cable news network; within seven years, its audience more than doubled that of CNN and MSNBC, and its profits were believed to exceed those of its cable news rivals and the broadcast evening newscasts combined. In 2012, a Wall Street analyst valued Fox News at $12.4 billion. With numbers like that came privileges, and Ailes wasn’t afraid to press his advantage. “No one could rein Ailes in,” said a former News Corp executive.
Even Rupert Murdoch. It did not matter that Murdoch’s romance with Ailes, which had burned hot at the beginning of their collaboration, had begun to cool after a decade. “He’s paranoid,” Murdoch told Ailes’s friend Liz Smith, the gossip columnist. For all his right-wing bona fides, Rupert Murdoch himself was a pragmatist whose political commitments changed according to the needs of his business. In 2008, Murdoch even contemplated supporting Obama in the pages of the New York Post instead of the Republican, John McCain. When Ailes caught wind of the possible endorsement, he threatened to quit. It was a game of brinkmanship that Ailes won. Murdoch promised Ailes complete editorial independence and gave him a new five-year contract to stay at News Corp. In September, the Post endorsed McCain.