The battles Ailes had waged to increase his power within News Corp had lingering repercussions. As Ailes approached the channel’s ten-year mark in October 2006, Brian Lewis learned that Julia Angwin, an enterprising investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was preparing a lengthy front-page article about Ailes. From what Lewis gleaned, the story could be damaging. Angwin had discovered that Ailes’s takeover of the television stations that Lachlan Murdoch had run was plagued by mismanagement and mediocre ratings.
Fox’s PR department had history with Angwin. The previous May, when Angwin was working on another story about Fox’s advertising sales department, Lewis’s deputy, Irena Briganti, screamed at Angwin, who was pregnant with her first child, that she was “acting hormonal.” Angwin angrily told Lewis she would no longer deal with Briganti.
In mid-September, a few days before Angwin’s front-page story went to press, Ailes agreed to an interview. He denied undercutting Lachlan. “If that’s what happened, I don’t know it,” he told Angwin. “I don’t think that’s what happened because Lachlan and I get along great.” He also brushed off questions about his sharp elbows. “There are lots of things that can be said about me—but not playing for the full team is not one of them,” he declared. “If the only way to win is to damage someone else … you’re no damn good.” Angwin’s article, headlined “After Riding High with Fox News, Murdoch Aide Has Harder Slog,” appeared on Tuesday, October 3.
Later that day, Ailes and Murdoch gave a joint interview to the Financial Times. Murdoch called Angwin’s article “a hit job,” “cheap,” and “completely wrong.” Ailes was defiant. “I have no knowledge what they are talking about. The Wall Street Journal just flat out got it wrong,” he told the interviewer. “They obviously went in with an agenda and Rupert and I were trying to figure out if he was the target or I was the target.”
Ailes’s campaign against Angwin was not over. At one point, Steve Doocy mocked Angwin during a segment on Fox & Friends while showing a distorted, grainy photo of her snapped from News Corp’s front-desk security camera. Ailes approached Angwin at an event at the Waldorf Astoria. “You’ve had your chance,” he blustered as he walked by her in the crowd. “Now I have the rest of my life to get back at you.”
Even as Murdoch publicly defended Ailes, his attentions had moved beyond Fox to a trophy he had long coveted: The Wall Street Journal. Though Ailes was useful in this regard—Fox’s profits would help finance Murdoch’s $5 billion offer for the Journal—Murdoch realized that Ailes’s role at News Corp, in the interest of corporate harmony, should not extend far beyond his news channel. Peter Chernin expressed concern to colleagues that Ailes might be given control of News Corp’s cable assets, including the entertainment channel FX, which were run out of Chernin’s domain in Los Angeles. Murdoch told a senior executive that Chernin had nothing to worry about. “ ‘We don’t want to give cable to Roger,’ ” he said. “Rupert knew the schtick,” a person close to Murdoch said. “He knew Roger was great fun, but it was great fun in small dosages.” Executives began to see Ailes as akin to on-air talent—as a performer, whose stage was the Fox News offices. Like many of his anchors, Ailes could be temperamental and needy. Colleagues often remarked that the most entertaining show at Fox News was Ailes’s daily editorial meeting, where he would monologue about his political enemies and cable news competitors. “He needs to know he’s being appreciated,” a former News Corp executive explained.
It did not help Ailes’s corporate position that the Republicans’ travails worsened through the 2006 midterms. On the morning of Election Day, the Democrats were poised to reclaim the House of Representatives and the Senate, an outcome Bush would call a “thumpin’.” That afternoon, Ailes assembled his news team for a pre-coverage briefing in a second-floor conference room. No matter what the final score was, he told them to put on a winning face. “I was watching CNN in 2004 and saw some really unhappy people on camera,” he said. “We don’t want that to be on Fox tonight.”
The next day, Nielsen reported that Fox News had beaten CNN by just 100,000 viewers.
For almost a decade, Ailes had played a role in driving the news; now he was captive to it, with few apparent options to reverse the ratings trend, and at Fox there were incipient signs of panic. “We had the concern that the slide could turn into a freefall,” a producer said. Ailes’s plans to turn the ship around were running aground. He made an aggressive bid to convince his old friend Rush Limbaugh to come to Fox. Limbaugh turned him down flat. “Rush was kind of laughing at the whole thing,” a Limbaugh friend who spoke with him during the talks recalled. “He said, ‘Roger is really trying to get me to come back.’ And Rush was like, ‘Why would I do this?’ ” Ailes acknowledged the problems. “We’re in a challenging news cycle because of Hurricane Katrina,” he explained to a reporter around this time. “You are sort of forced in the cable business to play even if you don’t want to.” Ailes sought to play a game he could win. The War on Christmas was a classic Fox ratings ploy. “Roger said, ‘Let me think, 90 percent of the people like Christmas, so CBS, CNN, and MSNBC, you can take the other 10 percent, we’ll say, “Merry Christmas,” and we’ll make all the money,’ ” Ailes’s brother, Robert, recalled. “Roger learned from an early age what you can quote unquote sell on television. He’s looking for an audience. The bigger the audience, the more money the company makes, the more successful he will be.”
Meanwhile, Ailes’s relationship with his news chief, John Moody, was fraying. It was a tension that had existed from Fox’s early days. Moody told executives that his role was “to be the antagonist” and “the conscience of news.” “Roger is not a news guy,” a producer said. “He will respect you for a period of time. After a while, you’ll get on his nerves and he will kill you.” A Fox contributor recalled that Moody “would try and impose some standards and Roger would override him.” Ailes increasingly relied more on programming executives such as Bill Shine and Kevin Magee.
Although Moody shared Ailes’s conservatism, friends and colleagues sensed Moody’s growing discomfort with Ailes’s rage and lack of journalistic rigor. “He was aghast from day one at shit that was going on there,” a person close to Moody recalled. Adam Sank, who left Fox in 2002, said, “I look at John as a tortured soul.”
For a while, Moody tried to downplay Ailes’s crude view of journalism. “He insults me to my face but I don’t want you to think it’s a sign of disrespect,” he told a colleague. But, in early 2006, Moody vented about his boss to a friend over lunch. As it happened, his friend knew Bob Wright and decided to give him a call.
“You should hire John Moody to run MSNBC. In one stroke you steal Roger’s number two and he can run the network.”
“That’s a great idea,” Wright said.
GE sent a helicopter to fly Moody to the corporation’s headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. The courtship, however, was brief. Ailes offered Moody a raise to stay. The MSNBC job went to Phil Griffin instead. Moody’s frustrations were left to simmer, and he would continue to keep an eye on the exit.
Moody was not the only veteran journalist looking to decamp. Kim Hume, the Washington bureau chief, had had enough. At the beginning of the year, she came under fire for Fox’s coverage of the mining accident in Sago, West Virginia, that left a dozen men dead. Kim had been skiing in the Rockies at the time, and after CNN was first with the news, Fox and several other outlets reported a false rumor that the miners had been saved, prompting a barrage of criticism. After returning to work, Kim took her frustrations out on staff members. “You will never embarrass me again,” she told them. In September, Kim resigned.