Both men began shouting over each other in a ten-minute free-for-all.
Coale’s diplomatic reasoning had merit, along with a self-serving element, given that his wife was a prime-time Fox anchor. But it was a losing argument. The momentum had already shifted in Dean’s favor. Increasingly, Democrats viewed the media as the central front in the country’s ideological struggle.
One morning in the summer of 2003, David Brock arrived for a private meeting with a small group of liberal senators on Capitol Hill. Leo Hindery, the Manhattan media entrepreneur and Democratic fundraiser, had set up a gathering in South Dakota senator Tom Daschle’s office to discuss a shared goaclass="underline" taking down Fox News and conservative radio. If there was one man who knew how the right-wing media machine worked from the inside, it was David Brock, the former conservative muckraker. In the 1990s, Brock wrote for the right-wing magazine The American Spectator and was hailed as the Bob Woodward of the Clinton scandals. In 2002, he published a caustic tell-all memoir, Blinded by the Right, that detailed his years as a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Brock told Daschle and his colleagues that they needed to build a media arsenal of their own. Brock had helped draw up plans for a liberal talk radio network and proposed launching a watchdog organization that would expose right-wing media bias. It was a stratagem conservatives had pioneered. Over the years, the right established a phalanx of activist groups that tarred newspapers and broadcast news as liberal mouthpieces. The tactic became known as “working the refs.” Brock wanted to do the same for the left. He named his group Media Matters.
Like the groundbreaking conservative organizations Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center, Media Matters’ base of operations would be a war room. Instead of hounding The New York Times and CBS News with press releases, its targets would be Fox News and talk radio. Brock’s operatives would instantly post incendiary comments made by a Fox pundit or Rush Limbaugh on the Media Matters website. Peter Lewis, the billionaire owner of the Progressive Insurance Corporation, invested $1 million. Other liberals, including hedge fund manager George Soros, would chip in $1 million more.
Media Matters launched in May 2004. A few months earlier, Democracy Radio went on the air. Its debut program was The Ed Schultz Show. Both projects were the first salvos in the liberals’ counteroffensive against Ailes. But to effectively match Ailes, the left needed to alchemize entertainment and politics. Since the 1980s, conservatives had created a parallel media culture that had ended the left’s monopoly on comedy. Right-wing celebrities had vast followings. It was a remarkable achievement given that Ailes came of age during the fractious 1960s, a time when fame became synonymous with fashionable New Left politics. But with the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and conservative book publishers, Republicans were able to build a self-contained thought system that made mocking liberals fun. Comedy motivated people to vote. Liberals were finally realizing they needed personalities of their own who were capable of performing at the same decibel level as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly. Al Franken had been rehearsing for the part for almost a decade.
A member of the comedy elite from his time as a Saturday Night Live writer and performer, Franken was also a diligent student of the culture and a political junkie. He figured out there was an untapped market on the left for a style of argument that could simulate conservative outrage while at the same time delivering a sophisticated critique of it. In 1996, he published the bestselling Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. For his follow-up, Franken set his sights on the entire conservative-media-industrial-complex itself. He assembled a team of fourteen Harvard students to research his new book, which he titled Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The book, published in September 2003, featured chapters devoted to slaying conservative giants with titles such as “Ann Coulter: Nutcase.” Fox News came in for particular scorn. And one Fox pundit in particular wound up in Franken’s crosshairs. Chapter Thirteen was titled “Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully.” Unexpectedly, Franken’s transformation from improv comedian to muckraking polemicist was about to trigger a chain reaction that threatened to destroy Ailes’s most valuable star.
By the spring of 2003, Bill O’Reilly was a booming national industry. On camera, he aspired to be a kind of cultural vigilante. Every night he went out to defend the little guy against the depredations of corrupt elites. Often his targets were Democrats. Or Hollywood celebrities. But O’Reilly could also aim his weaponized commentaries at less expected marks. He hammered the Red Cross and United Way for mismanaging restitution for 9/11 victims. “We’ve changed the country,” he proudly declared. “Bad guys get it. They’ll pay a price for doing bad things.” O’Reilly’s ambition was seemingly bottomless, and he continually found new ways to monetize his brand. Through his various ventures, O’Reilly was earning roughly $10 million a year. Ailes grumbled to his executives that O’Reilly shamelessly plugged his wares on his network. In a sense, they were competitive with each other. “He sees O’Reilly and says, ‘If he can write a shitty book that’s a bestseller, I want to do my own,’ ” an executive recalled. But there was little Ailes could do about it. O’Reilly delivered the eyeballs night after night. He was the linchpin of Ailes’s prime-time lineup.
As O’Reilly’s fame grew, his fuse shortened. More powerful than ever, he increasingly found himself consumed with petty feuds. One night, he called New York Times columnist Frank Rich a “weasel.” On another program, he commanded his audience to boycott Pepsi because the company had hired the rapper Ludacris as its celebrity pitchman. His worldview became increasingly conspiratorial even as his grandiosity reached new heights. “He’s hyper-suspicious about things, one of the things he shares with Ailes,” a former O’Reilly staffer said. O’Reilly declared to a reporter that the press “are going to try to destroy me.” He saw himself as part of a struggle with historical sweep. “This has happened since the Founding Fathers,” he explained. “It has to do with power. It has to do with jealousy. It has to do with ideology. It has to do with money. The more power I get, the more lawyers I have to deal with, the more insanity I have to deal with.”
O’Reilly was becoming an acute management challenge for Ailes. On- and off-camera, his rages were becoming less theatrical and more vituperative. Some days, he seemed to be spiraling out of control. During a February 2003 segment on the Iraq War protest movement, he blew up at a young antiwar activist named Jeremy Glick, whose father, a Port Authority worker at the World Trade Center, had died on 9/11. “Shut up, shut up!” O’Reilly said. At one point, O’Reilly accused Glick of shaming his family. “Man, I hope your mom isn’t watching this,” he told him, shortly before ordering Glick’s mic cut and going to commercial. The argument continued off-camera. “Get the fuck off my set before I tear your head off,” one producer recalled O’Reilly saying.
Staff came in for equally harsh treatment. After one taping, he stormed toward his staff’s cubicles and tore into a young female producer, whom he blamed for botching a segment. Staffers watched in shock as O’Reilly, easily a foot taller than the woman, started yelling and slamming his fist down on a shelf. “He got really close and in her face,” an eyewitness said. “She was scared he was going to hit her,” recalled another colleague. O’Reilly stalked off. A senior Fox executive was called in and escorted the woman, in tears, out of the building to calm her down. She was later given paid vacation from Fox. “Bill never apologized,” a person close to the matter said.