And just to ensure that there was no confusion about Ailes’s ultimate wishes, Ailes conducted “fair and balanced” seminars himself. “He would call a group of senior producers and make you watch the channel and he’d point out stuff, like a banner that’s slightly liberal,” a senior producer recalled. “He would say, ‘The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.’ ”
Ailes maintained to his newsroom that “fair and balanced” had nothing to do with a partisan agenda. “Am I a Republican? Sure,” he said in a staff meeting. “But does that mean that my news network is biased Republican? Of course not.”
Beyond the politics, however, Fox’s lodestar was Ailes himself. At the Fox News Christmas party in 2002, held at a Midtown Manhattan bar, Ailes was conspicuously absent, but at one point in the evening employees were instructed to watch a Fox News presentation on a large video monitor set up in the basement. The MSNBC and CNN logos appeared on the screen and elicited boos from the crowd. On the third slide, Ailes’s picture popped up. The attendees went wild, chanting, “Roger … Roger … Roger … Roger!”
As the administration rolled out its sales pitch for the war, Ailes installed a new head of daytime programming to package the production, promoting Jerry Burke, the producer of Shepard Smith’s nightly newscast. Burke expressed a tabloid editor’s thrill for the biggest story of a generation. Not long after 9/11, John Moody offered him the position overseeing the 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. news block.
“Will you keep the car on the road or will you crash it?” Moody said.
“I want to see how fast it can go,” Burke told him.
Fox’s raucous cheerleading disguised the fact that, on a complex story like international terrorism, the channel was at a distinct disadvantage against its rivals. At the time, Fox News had just 1,200 employees and six foreign bureaus. CNN, in contrast, employed 4,000 people and had thirty-one international bureaus. When the war in Afghanistan started, Fox had no one on the ground, while CNN had a correspondent in the country. Although MSNBC was struggling to develop an identity, it still had the robust newsgathering assets of NBC News to fall back on.
So Burke improvised. Shortly after receiving the promotion, he teamed up with two staffers on the assignment desk—David Rhodes and Eric Spinato—to develop a flanking maneuver designed to pick away viewers from their better-funded rivals. They called it “Operation Rolling Thunder.” CNN may have been the entrenched opposition, but Fox News would cover the story in a way that would be irresistible to viewers. Terrorism would become serial entertainment. “Fox approached news differently,” a staffer who had done time at other networks said. “It wasn’t actual journalism where you say, ‘Let’s go see what’s going on.’ At Fox, it’s ‘This is what we’re doing, so go do it.’ ”
Every morning, Burke got off the commuter train at Penn Station determined to inflict damage on the competition. He told people that producing news was like scanning a searchlight across the horizon to hunt for the right story. His first read of the day was the Drudge Report, not The New York Times. Whatever items seemed to be generating heat on the right were fodder for the air. Conflict was good. Too much conflict was bad. After an interview with a Muslim guest devolved into a shouting match, Burke hollered across the newsroom, “I need a better Muslim!” He was adept at convincing angry subjects to keep coming back. He cajoled another prominent Muslim guest to back off on his threat to boycott Fox after one particularly harsh interview. “Why would I come on to have someone say I’m a child murderer?” he told Burke.
“You’re doing a service, you’re getting your message across,” Burke replied. He also told him that, at the end of the day, it was just television. “You need to lighten up.”
Fox News promoted the buildup to war like a pregame show. Anchors played the role of announcers, championing the home team: America. George Bush was the star quarterback, carrying the hopes of an expectant fan base on his shoulders. On-air, troops were “heroes” and “warriors.” Ailes developed a roster of opponents who sought to block America’s drive down the field. Saddam Hussein was the principal foe, backed up by supporting players: the United Nations, France, Germany, and Al Jazeera. “If they’re going to get us, it’s going to be in a gunfight,” Geraldo Rivera said in one segment from Afghanistan. In November 2001, Ailes lured Rivera away from CNBC to be Fox’s war correspondent. Rivera could be embarrassingly thin on his facts. On December 5, 2001, he reported that he visited the site of a friendly fire bombing raid that left three American servicemen and several Afghan fighters dead. “We walked over what I consider hallowed ground today.… It was just—the whole place, just fried, really—and bits of uniforms and tattered clothing everywhere. I said the Lord’s Prayer and really choked up.” A week later, Baltimore Sun reporter David Folkenflik revealed that Rivera was actually hundreds of miles from the incident he cited. Rivera was indignant. He attributed the error to the “fog of war” and impugned Folkenflik’s manhood. “Have you ever been shot at?” he asked him.
Ailes was constantly on the lookout for developments to keep the story moving. When Dan Rather sat down with Hussein on CBS News in February 2003, Ailes smelled a rat. “Did [the Iraqis] have pre-look at his questions?” he complained to his executives. “Was anybody in the room with a weapon? … I have less of a problem in getting in a room with Saddam Hussein with ground rules as long as those ground rules are disclosed.” Similarly, Time magazine’s interview with French president Jacques Chirac—a former Ailes Communications client—was a “total setup” and “anti-American.” “Nowhere in the Time magazine interview,” Ailes huffed, “do they say, ‘Mr. Chirac, do you have any business dealings with Iraq? Mr. Chirac, is there a one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar oil contract with Iraq? Mr. Chirac, weren’t you the guy that went over and set up a nuclear reactor? … How about the seven million Muslims down the street that are going to blow up the Eiffel Tower? Does that bother you?’ There are a few other questions that a few other good journalists would work into the interview.”
People who questioned Bush’s policies were put on notice. “Americans and, indeed, our allies who actively work against our military once the war is under way will be considered enemies of the state by me,” Bill O’Reilly told his viewers. “Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand, and others who see the world as you do.” You could even see it if you walked by Fox’s Manhattan headquarters. When antiwar protesters staged a rally on Fifth Avenue in March 2003, Ailes allowed Marvin Himelfarb, the comedy writer who had worked with him at America’s Talking, to use the ticker to taunt them. It read: “ATTENTION PROTESTERS: THE MICHAEL MOORE FAN CLUB MEETS THURSDAY AT A PHONE BOOTH AT SIXTH AVENUE AND 50TH STREET.”
Five days before America began its Shock and Awe bombing campaign, Fox News’s creative director, Richard O’Brien, hired a composer to write the network’s theme music for the war. He titled it “Liberation Iraq Music.” “The other networks, they always go for that John Williams, big, grand music, but our music is always pointedly more aggressive,” O’Brien explained. After listening to the sample, O’Brien told the composer to ramp up the intensity and add “more tom-tom drums because they had more urgency. I wanted it to sound like, I don’t want to say war drums, but …”