On Tuesday, July 26, 2005, Lachlan flew to Los Angeles to see his father for lunch. “I have to do my own thing,” Lachlan told his dad. “I have to be my own man.” Three days later, News Corp announced Lachlan’s resignation.
Lachlan’s departure created a power vacuum within News Corp—and Ailes wasted no time in filling it. It was an illustration of Ailes’s gifts for bureaucratic infighting that he was able to transform his adversarial relationship with Lachlan into a strategic alliance. Lachlan, too, saw that he could position Ailes to damage Chernin, who was his true adversary. When it came time for Rupert to divvy up Lachlan’s businesses, Lachlan lobbied Rupert to give Ailes control of the broadcast stations. In December, Rupert gave Ailes a new contract that added the unit to his Fox News portfolio. Rupert also named Ailes to the Office of the Chairman, an elite group of a half dozen executives who ran the company, and gave him Lachlan’s vacant office on the eighth floor.
In the company, and in the wider culture, Ailes was at a peak. Fox News had conquered its cable rivals, revolutionized news, and helped secure Bush’s reelection. It was profitable years ahead of schedule. Rupert was after Ailes to launch a cable business channel to take on CNBC, and Fox News Talk, its radio arm, struck lucrative deals to air on Sirius satellite radio. Moreover, Ailes had positioned himself as a hedge against Chernin’s dominance. Chernin eyed Ailes warily. “There was a thinking from Peter, what is Roger going to do now?” an executive recalled. There was reason for concern: Ailes was throwing his weight around in Chernin’s West Coast cable realm. In the winter of 2003, the News Corp cable channel FX released a docudrama about the Pentagon Papers. Ailes was not pleased. He called Peter Liguori, the president of FX.
“You making a movie about the Pentagon Papers?” Ailes said.
“Yeah,” Liguori said.
“Why would you do that? It’s bad for America,” Ailes said, echoing the complaint Joe Coors had leveled when TVN covered Daniel Ellsberg. The FX film was already scheduled to air, so there was nothing Liguori could do. As a half measure, he told his team to cut the marketing budget in half.
Around this time, a Fox executive went to visit Ailes in his new office on the eighth floor, “the biggest I’ve ever seen,” the executive thought, “like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” The executive was startled to walk in and find Ailes with his back turned, scrolling through his email. It made the executive uncomfortable. “Roger talks about being in places people don’t expect to keep them off guard,” a Fox producer later said.
Ailes swiveled around. “Do you know whose chair I’m sitting in? I’m sitting in Lachlan Murdoch’s chair.” There was a cold pause. “Do you know who’s sitting on the other side of that wall? Rupert Murdoch.”
“What are you going to do with all this power now?” the executive ventured.
Ailes looked him in the eye. “We’ll see where it goes,” he said.
NINETEEN
SEARCHING FOR A NEW CAST
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 26, 2006, the luminaries of George Bush’s Washington—all but the president himself—gathered at Cafe Milano, the trendy Italian restaurant in Georgetown, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Fox News Sunday. The party served a more important purpose—it was an opportunity to genuflect before the man who had altered the power equation in American politics. Roger Ailes’s name was at the top of the invitations. No one, it seemed, turned him down. Shortly after 7:00, waiters circulated through the crowd passing out cocktails and cigars as attendees craned their necks to catch glimpses of Cheney, Rove, and the newest addition to the Bush administration’s team, Fox host Tony Snow. Just that morning, Bush had introduced Snow as his new press secretary. “Congratulations on your promotion—or maybe it’s a demotion,” Rupert Murdoch said in front of the guests. Ailes explained that the appointment merely affirmed Fox’s influence. “Ten years ago we could have never gotten the White House press secretary to come to this party,” he said. For attuned observers, the party was a barometer of presidential ambition. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, with eyes on 2008, made sure to pay proper homage to Ailes.
The party represented a new high point. But the network’s success was built on ground that appeared to be dangerously unstable. As the Bush administration’s fortunes turned, so, too, would those of Fox. More than 2,300 troops had been killed in Iraq with no end in sight. Osama bin Laden remained at large, despite Bush’s vow to “smoke ’im out.” Hurricane Katrina, the previous August, provided a visceral shorthand for the administration’s shortcomings, and its failure to represent all Americans. The facts overwhelmed Ailes’s abilities to find a story line that engaged his audience. In the 8:00 a.m. editorial meeting, the talk was getting desperate. “Look at these people,” Fox executive Ken LaCorte said as pictures of bedraggled survivors standing on rooftops, many of them African American, flashed on screens on the wall. “What, do they think the government is supposed to come bail them out?” Executives shifted in their seats uncomfortably. “Everyone tries to out-Roger Roger,” a senior producer recalled.
Fox lost about 15 percent of its total viewership in the year after Katrina. For the first time since 9/11, the polarities that powered Fox’s ascendance had begun to shift. Sensing that the left’s rage was to become almost as potent a media force as the right’s had been, MSNBC tried a new tactic. In September 2005, Keith Olbermann, a former star of ESPN’s SportsCenter who had transformed himself into a voluble MSNBC personality, emerged as an unlikely liberal icon. In one emotionally charged segment, he lashed the Bush administration’s mismanaged response to Katrina. The commentary went viral. On August 30, 2006, Olbermann debuted a segment of his Countdown show called “Special Comment.” The first target was Donald Rumsfeld. “The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack,” Olbermann began. “Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.” That year, Countdown’s ratings jumped 67 percent. Even Ailes’s boss, detecting the shifting landscape, contemplated a move to the middle. That summer, Murdoch hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at News Corp headquarters.
Ailes told executives this moment might come. Even as Fox had rolled over its rivals, Ailes tried to maintain an underdog mentality. He kept costs low. Fox’s green rooms were notoriously grimy. Shows were programmed with a bare-bones staff. One senior executive even changed out the toner cartridges in the copy machine himself. Ailes told a reporter that acting like an underdog was “inspiration to people to try to get out there and do well.” He said he wanted to guard against “complacency on the part of people who get to be successful, get to be stars, get too much money and get comfortable and start to think they are winning.” It was easier in those early years to “fight from behind,” he said.