At times, Murdoch even sided with Ailes against his children. In 2005, Murdoch’s older son, Lachlan, left the company after clashing with Ailes, among others, over management decisions. In 2010, Murdoch cut off contact with Matthew Freud, the husband of his daughter Elisabeth, after Freud told The New York Times, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.” In 2011, during the height of the phone hacking scandal at News Corp’s London tabloids, James, the younger of Rupert’s sons and no fan of Fox News, saw his chances to succeed his father implode. “He’s a fucking dope,” Ailes told a friend over dinner.
The more the hacking crisis engulfed the company, the more Murdoch relied on Ailes’s profits. “They all hate me, I make them a lot of money and they go and spend the money,” Ailes said to Bill Shine, Fox’s head of programming. Ailes took a certain pleasure in watching News Corp executives face lawsuits and criminal prosecution over the scandal. “He was delighted it was happening,” an executive recalled. “He said, ‘It’s nice to not be the only bad guy in the company.’ ”
Ailes’s ego and temper, of the sort that sidelined lesser players, were tolerated. He openly bad-mouthed News Corp board member John Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, who suggested programming ideas to him. “I’m not going to have some fucking liberal tell me how to program my network,” Ailes told Bill Shine.
But Ailes’s true interest was national, not corporate, politics. “I want to elect the next president,” he told Fox executives in a meeting in 2010. If there was anyone in America who could deliver on such a boast, it was Ailes. At Fox News, he had positioned himself as the closest thing to a party boss the country had. In the spring of 2011, Fox employed five prospective Republican presidential candidates, and no serious Republican could run for president without at least seeking Ailes’s blessing. “Every single candidate has consulted with Roger,” one top Republican said. The challenge was that the field of candidates Ailes had assembled in the Fox studios, excellent entertainers though many of them were, were not deemed up to the job of a successful White House run. Although Ailes told one Fox contributor that even his security guard would make a better president than Obama, Ailes did not see any winners among his pundits. “He finds flaws in everyone,” said a confidant. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich was a prick; former senator Rick Santorum was a nobody; former governor Mike Huckabee couldn’t raise a nickel; former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was an idiot. And the two adults in the room, unaffiliated with Fox, former governors Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, were less than impressive.
In a meeting at Fox News, Ailes flatly told Huntsman, “You’re not of our orthodoxy,” citing his stance on climate change. (“To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy,” Huntsman had tweeted.) After finishing third in the New Hampshire primary, Huntsman dropped out of the race. Over the course of his candidacy, he had only banked four hours and thirty-two minutes of Fox face time. By comparison, pizza mogul Herman Cain, who was a candidate for a similar length of time, notched eleven hours and six minutes.
To win the White House, Ailes would have to harness the circus he’d created to a candidate with crossover appeal, and he worked assiduously to recruit one. Ailes twice encouraged the brash New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, to run. Ailes also sent an emissary to Kabul, Afghanistan, urging General David Petraeus to jump into the primary. Both decided to sit out the race.
So Ailes dealt with reality. From the start, he’d been lukewarm on the front-runner and eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. “Romney came for a meeting at Fox during the primaries and did his speech in the second-floor conference room,” a person in the room said. “What was most telling was that Roger himself didn’t ask too many questions. Roger never liked Romney.” Ailes told Romney once over dinner, “You ought to be looser on the air.” In another conversation, he told him, “Be more real. Look the camera in the eye. Stop being a preppy.” Behind his back, he had sharper words. He told one Fox host that Romney was “like Chinese food—twenty minutes after you eat it, you can’t remember what you had.” In a conversation at his Fox office with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Ailes questioned Romney’s spine. “Romney’s gotta rip Obama’s face off,” Ailes said. “It’s really hard to do.”
If Romney would not rip Obama’s face off, Fox would. “Roger was running a political campaign,” a person close to Ailes said. “He felt, ‘We’re going to have to do a lot of things to get this guy elected.’ Instead of propping up Romney, it was more, ‘Let’s go after Obama.’ ” Ailes personally directed and stage-managed his channel’s campaign, using entertainment techniques to shape a political narrative that was presented as unbiased news, a hybrid that makes Ailes a unique American auteur.
On the morning of May 30, 2012, the day after Romney clinched the GOP nomination, Fox unofficially launched Romney’s general election campaign with a Fox & Friends segment. “What sort of change have we really seen over the last four years from the Obama administration?” host Steve Doocy asked.
“Let’s take a look back,” his co-host Gretchen Carlson chirped.
A four-minute video began to play. After several seconds of inspiring images of Obama’s victory night speech in Grant Park, an ominous orchestral score, as if from a horror film, drowned out the cheers of Obama’s supporters. Throughout the segment, the voices of news anchors broadcasted dire headlines. Dissonant alarm sirens blared. An animated money bag made a mockery of the mounting national debt. Unemployment numbers ticked up on the screen like a doomsday clock in reverse. A cartoon image of farm animals on a spinning circular platform illustrated the rising cost of food. At the end, Obama was given the last word: “That’s the power of hope. That’s the change we seek. That’s the change we can stand for.”
The video was Ailes’s brainchild. According to an executive with firsthand knowledge, Ailes “gave the overview” of the segment in a meeting with Bill Shine. Shine then handed off the instructions to Fox & Friends executive producer Lauren Petterson, who tasked associate producer Chris White with the project. Before it was televised, Shine played the clip for Ailes.
Not surprisingly, the segment sparked a media firestorm. A news channel had produced and aired what could only be classified as a political attack ad. Ailes, in classic fashion, took no responsibility. Fox pulled the clip off its website and released a statement with Shine’s name attached that assigned blame to a junior staffer. “Roger was not aware of the video,” a Fox spokeswoman told The New York Times.
Obama’s camp was not persuaded. Senior adviser David Axelrod emailed Ailes that day. “I see you’re back in the spot business,” he wrote, alluding to the infamous attack ads Ailes produced in the 1980s.
As the campaign unfolded, Fox would serve as a crucial plank in Romney’s media strategy. “Fox is watched by the true believers,” Romney told guests at a private fundraiser in Florida. Romney, for the most part, shunned the Big Three networks and CNN in favor of Ailes’s channel. In the year after he announced he was running for president, Romney gave twenty-one separate interviews to Fox & Friends. The appearances gave Romney a pulpit to stoke his base’s passions. So when Gretchen Carlson asked, “Would you go as far as Rush Limbaugh did yesterday in saying this is the first president in modern time who’s going to run a campaign against capitalism?” Romney played along. “Well, it certainly sounds like that’s what he’s doing.”