Around-the-clock cable news coverage provided the free promotion. By the time Kerry defended himself, one poll found nearly half the country had heard about the Swift Boat ad or had seen it. In the closing days of the race, Kerry’s camp exploded when Fox painted Kerry as a terrorist favorite. After a tape of Osama bin Laden was released in late October, Fox anchor Neil Cavuto said on-camera that he thought he saw a Kerry “button” in bin Laden’s cave. John Sasso, a veteran Kerry adviser and onetime Dukakis campaign manager, threatened to throw Fox producer Catherine Loper off the campaign plane.
“Is that the one? Is that her?” Sasso said as he looked at Loper. “I want her off the plane tomorrow. I’m not kidding.”
On the night of November 2, Ailes and Murdoch watched the returns together at Fox News. Moody fed Ailes updates from the decision desk.
Fox called Ohio for Bush at 12:40 a.m. The battleground win put Bush a single electoral vote shy of 270, and all but guaranteed him a second term. But hoping to avoid a repeat of 2000, Fox refused to take any gambles. As the minutes ticked by, Bush aides became apoplectic that Fox and the networks refused to declare their man the winner based on the projections in western states that would definitively put him over the top. Rove called Fox analyst Michael Barone.
“I just got some spin from Rove on New Mexico,” Barone told Moody and the decision team members shortly after 2:00 in the morning.
“Not yet,” Moody cautioned.
Dan Bartlett, at Bush high command, frantically tried to reach Ailes, but could not get through. Ailes had been burned after his memo to Rove leaked, and he understandably did not want to be seen coordinating with Bushworld. “You know I wasn’t going to take your call, Bartlett,” Ailes told him a few weeks later. In the end, Kerry made the decision easy for Fox. On Wednesday morning, he conceded.
After Bush’s victory, “Swift Boating” joined the American political lexicon. Kerry’s failings as a candidate—his Brahmin reserve and deliberative mien—certainly contributed to his defeat. But according to Sean Hannity, Fox News deserved at least some credit. “Sean said he felt he played an important role in taking Kerry down,” Pat Halpin later said, recalling a conversation he had with Hannity not long after the election. Halpin said he felt unsettled at his minor role in promoting the Swift Boaters. “I was one of the props, unfortunately,” he said.
Months later, Halpin sat in for Colmes and decided to speak up. Before a segment about Bush’s intervention in the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case, Hannity told him to lay off his guests Rick Santorum and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. “Go easy on these guys, they get good ratings,” Hannity said. Halpin ignored the directive. He pressed both men with tough questions. “Sean was pissed off. He was like, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” Halpin remembered. “I never got invited on to guest host again. Bill Shine indicated that Sean didn’t want me.”
For Democrats, the trauma of losing consecutive presidential elections confirmed the political reality: post-9/11 America was a Republican country. Fox News got much of the credit for this development, of course. But the victory made Fox News and Ailes himself into something they had never been on such a scale: a target.
Fox News was now a juggernaut, earning more than $200 million per year, and its success changed the gravity of the cable TV world, and the wider culture, too. As MSNBC tried to siphon off Ailes’s viewers by bulking up with conservative commentary, Comedy Central began to prosper with Fox News satire. In July 2004, the progressive documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald released Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Liberal groups like MoveOn.org, which was a producer of the film, aggressively promoted the exposé and turned it into a surprise hit.
The passion of Roger Ailes’s audience was something that had never before existed in TV news, a consequence of Fox’s hybrid of politics and entertainment. Fox did not have viewers. It had fans. They watched on average 30 percent longer than CNN viewers in prime time. In journalism, it was an achievement without precedent. When Ailes later decided to launch a website to aggregate conservative headlines, it was aptly named Fox Nation. To watch Fox was to belong to a tribe.
Fox’s gleeful dismembering of Kerry’s campaign forced liberals to acknowledge that Fox had changed politics. “Before Fox News, a lot of stories never would have gotten attention,” Bob Shrum later said. “Take the Swift Boat story: If you had had the old Huntley-Brinkley hour, it would not have appeared on the network.” Conservative passions had exploded into the mainstream, repackaged as prime-time entertainment. The dream of Bob Pauley and Joe Coors had been realized.
Democrats were in general agreement that something needed to be done to counter Ailes’s influence. Unsurprisingly, they argued bitterly over strategy. The debate over Fox News was, in reality, a proxy war in a much bigger conflict within the Democratic Party. On one side, moderates, led by Bill Clinton and his allies, championed engagement with Fox. They contended it was a matter of basic electoral math. Given Ailes’s audience—which at that point had grown larger than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined—it was folly to ignore him. When Ailes hired Dick Morris in 1998, Clinton told his former adviser that he was happy he would be embedding with the opposition. “It’s stupid to avoid Fox,” Van Susteren’s husband, John Coale, said, echoing the Clinton argument. “What’s the worst case scenario? You get yelled at by Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity? But your base is going to love you for getting yelled at so there’s no downside.”
But Clintonian pragmatism incited vocal opposition among the party’s ascendant grassroots base. Connecting online through nascent social networks and progressive websites like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, members of the so-called Netroots movement espoused a brand of liberal populism that viewed Fox as the enemy. Confrontation, not engagement, was their preferred strategy. The left’s anti-Fox groundswell started in the wake of the 2000 recount. During a 2002 interview with The New York Observer, Al Gore declared that Fox News was “part and parcel of the Republican Party.” Admittedly, it was a partisan analysis. But Gore’s claims had resonance on the left. And throughout the contentious 2004 Democratic primary, his combative stance was picked up by former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean’s implosion in the Iowa caucuses ended his insurgent campaign, but the base’s zeal was unabated.
Dean’s eventual ascension to chair of the Democratic National Committee propelled his confrontational style toward the mainstream. At a Democratic fundraiser held shortly after Bush’s second inauguration, pro-Fox Democrats from Clinton’s camp attempted to stage an intervention. Dean was the honored guest that night. John Coale was in attendance and decided to confront Dean during the cocktail hour. “Let me talk to you,” he said, pulling him into an empty bedroom. Why are Democrats boycotting Fox?
“They’re not a real news organization!” Dean snapped.
“Good, cede it to the goddamn right,” Coale said, angrily. “Let them go on and say anything they want. They have more Democrats watching than CNN does!”