Regan’s deft play pushed News Corp to fold. On January 25, 2008, four days before the Florida primary, News Corp settled the lawsuit for $10.75 million, with no admission of guilt by either party. As part of the deal, Regan signed a nondisclosure agreement and a letter stating that Ailes had not pressured her to lie to assist Giuliani (News Corp kept a copy of her letter on file, in case they needed to release it at some point). After the Mackris case, it was the second time in less than four years that a News Corp employee earned millions of dollars for keeping the secrets of Fox News out of the press.
The settlement did not reverse Giuliani’s fortunes. He dropped out of the presidential race five days later, after placing third in Florida. Years later, Regan blamed Ailes for smearing her. “Connect the dots,” she told a reporter.
The marathon battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination was the biggest story of 2008—and for most of the campaign, Fox struggled to grab a piece of it. CNN’s prime-time audience was surging, up 42 percent in January from a year earlier, and up 68 percent in the third quarter of the year. Wolf Blitzer—a decidedly un-cable personality—was somehow anchoring the highest-rated election night show. MSNBC was also finding success as a destination for an energized liberal audience. In the fall of 2007, Tim Russert called Phil Griffin into his office in the Washington bureau and said, “Griff, you’re gonna have the greatest election of our lifetime. Own it.” Griffin debuted a new tagline: “The Place for Politics”—a phrase Russert had happened to say on the air. “It gave us the focus that we never had,” Griffin later said. “We once branded ourselves ‘America’s News Channel.’ It was a lie! We weren’t.”
Watching CNN and MSNBC benefiting from the Obama phenomenon, Ailes found a way to counterprogram. “Roger felt that as Obama emerged as a candidate, the media was giving undue coverage to him,” a person close to Ailes recalled. “At one point he said, ‘We have to be the one to balance the Democratic side.’ ” Despite his partisan bluster, Ailes continued to triangulate. In early 2008, Fox News and Hillary Clinton, who was performing strongly with blue-collar white voters in the industrial heartland—Fox News country—forged one such surprising alliance.
Hillary needed all the allies she could get. Relations between the Clinton campaign and MSNBC had all but broken down. The day after Clinton roared back into the race winning the New Hampshire primary in January, Chris Matthews declared that her political career was made possible because “her husband messed around.” MSNBC president Phil Griffin ordered Matthews to apologize, but it did little to mollify the Clinton camp. At Clinton campaign headquarters, an order went out that none of the twenty televisions in the press room were allowed to be tuned to MSNBC. On the evening of February 7—two days after Super Tuesday—David Shuster, MSNBC’s political correspondent, speculated that Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” in a bid to win over super-delegates. After Hillary threatened to boycott future MSNBC debates, the network suspended Shuster. In early March, Chris Matthews again displayed MSNBC’s Obama tilt when he gushed on air that Obama’s oratory talents gave him a “thrill going up my leg.”
Ailes helped out where he could. On March 19, he forwarded an email to John Moody, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Shine containing an opposition research file on Obama’s relationship with the controversial Illinois state senator and pastor James Meeks with the subject line “Maybe God is a Republican.” “Meeks has denounced ‘Hollywood Jews,’ blaming them for homosexuality; called Mayor [Richard] Daley as a ‘slave master’ and supporters of Daley ‘house niggers’; and called gays ‘evil,’ ” the file read. That night, O’Reilly and Hannity did segments on Meeks. “Now we don’t know the relationship between Reverend Meeks and Barack Obama,” O’Reilly announced. “We are working on that story and a number of other people are as well. But the question tonight is how will the Clinton and McCain campaigns handle all of this? It’s a growing story.”
News Corp was also populated with influential Clinton surrogates who could hit back against MSNBC and Obama. Susan Estrich lobbied behind the scenes to arrange a private meeting between Ailes and Hillary. “This would be a good thing for her,” she told Bill Clinton. “No one has to know about it. Fox isn’t looking for publicity, they understand the sensitivities on the Democratic side.” Gary Ginsberg, Rupert Murdoch’s director of communications, was another pro-Hillary voice. Earlier in the campaign, Ginsberg played a crucial role neutralizing an attack by John Edwards in which he criticized Hillary for accepting donations from Murdoch. Ginsberg called HarperCollins and found out that the company had paid Edwards a $500,000 advance to write a coffee-table book, Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives. (The Edwards campaign said the money went to charity.) Ginsberg promptly fed the information to Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications chief, who leaked it to the press.
Fox’s clubbiness with the Clintons created bad blood inside the Obama campaign. In May, Hillary gave a widely viewed sit-down interview to Bill O’Reilly. “Are you surprised that Fox News has been fairer to you than NBC News and a lot of the other liberal news networks?” he asked. “I wouldn’t expect anything less than a fair and balanced coverage of my campaign,” she replied. “She made some kind of compact with Murdoch,” Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn later said. Another senior Obama adviser recalled, “Our campaign opened with Fox saying that Obama had gone to a madrassa as a child.” “If you watched Fox, you would not have known there was a financial crisis and two wars going on. You would have thought the most important issues in America were Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright.”
Not surprisingly, Obama harbored a deep distrust of Fox. After clinching the Democratic nomination, Obama agreed to meet Murdoch at the Waldorf while he was in town attending a fundraiser. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who had been talking secretly with Gary Ginsberg, had agreed to set up the meeting. For sport, Murdoch brought along Ailes. Obama told Ailes he would not deal with Fox if they continued to portray him and his wife as dangerous subversives. Ailes told Obama that he would get better treatment if he engaged, rather than opposed, Fox. At that, the meeting ended.
Afterward, Murdoch asked Ailes his impression of Obama. “He’s like a middle manager,” Ailes said. Murdoch was taken aback.
“I wasn’t asking you to evaluate him for a position at Fox,” Murdoch replied. “I’m asking what you thought of him as a presidential candidate.”
“Well, that’s what I think,” Ailes said.
A few weeks later, Ailes told Axelrod that he was concerned that Obama wanted to create a national police force.
“You can’t be serious,” Axelrod replied. “What makes you think that?”
Ailes responded by emailing Axelrod a YouTube clip from a campaign speech Obama had given on national service, in which he called for the creation of a new civilian corps to work alongside the military on projects overseas.
Axelrod had a long history with Ailes, having defeated him in 1984 while running Paul Simon’s Senate campaign in Illinois. He later said that the exchange was the moment he realized Ailes truly believed what he was programming.
Ailes eventually settled on McCain as his preferred candidate, though his campaign performance was far from ideal. “He doesn’t have the charisma, the message isn’t honed to the point where you know who he is,” Ailes said of McCain. “He has this fantastic story, and he tends to minimize it.” “Roger is a producer first and foremost,” a former staffer said.