Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires Read online

  The deluge of queries can crop up at just about any network. But Fox’s creativity far surpasses such controlling techniques, as it believes its bargaining position has solidified with its ratings lead.

  My own early encounters with Fox’s public relations representatives when I was a reporter and media critic at the Baltimore Sun showed them to be sharp and contentious. On Election Day 2000, television networks announced and withdrew calls awarding the White House first to Al Gore and then to George W. Bush. The Baltimore Sun had arranged to have a young freelancer, a former intern for the paper, spend the night inside Fox’s New York City studios. John Ellis, one of the top analysts on Fox’s decision desk, helped Fox become the first network to call Bush the winner at 2:17 AM. He was also in contact with his cousins, George W. Bush and Florida governor Jeb Bush. (Jeb’s given name is John Ellis Bush.) When their consultations were revealed by Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker magazine, Fox spokesman Rob Zimmerman pressured me to convince our freelancer to get on a conference call with other reporters to refute the story. Zimmerman said Ellis was barely involved at all.

  When I talked with our freelancer, she said Ellis had actually bragged to her that night that he would greatly influence the network’s call. Furthermore, though she had remained late into the night, she left before the Bush decision played out in full, as she had to show up early the next morning for her day job at a financial trade publication. I called Fox back, saying the editors had decided against putting the freelancer on the spot to defend the network. What’s more, I said, even if she were to speak out, she wouldn’t confirm Fox’s version of events. Zimmerman told me it was clear the Baltimore Sun’s fairness was in doubt.

  The inconclusive election results—“RECOUNT” in the inevitable on-screen caption—did not damage Fox and served as one of the episodes the channel used to cement the loyalty of its viewers. One of the secrets of Fox’s success lies in its ability to draw viewers who stay tuned to the one channel for much longer than other cable stations. The aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks marked another such opportunity. Fox News proudly flew a graphic flag in the corner of its screen. Anchors wore flags in their lapel pins. MSNBC and CNN rushed to catch up.

  Little more than year after the election, early one morning in December 2001, I called Fox in trying to sort out the basis of a story by the network’s new chief war correspondent, Geraldo Rivera. He had been a swashbuckling investigative reporter, then a network news magazine star, a tabloid talk show host, and finally a political talk show host under Ailes at CNBC. Still under contract to CNBC in the fall of 2001, he had bristled at the idea of staying behind a desk while a war raged elsewhere, quit his CNBC talk show, and rejoined Ailes at Fox. Rivera soon traveled to the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.

  He was, Rivera announced, on a quest to track down “the dastardly one” (his personal term for Osama bin Laden). On an early December day, he showed footage from Afghanistan, twice in a twenty-four-hour period, in which he prayed over the site where he said three American soldiers and numerous allied Afghan fighters had been killed by a US bombing raid in what was euphemistically called a “friendly fire” incident. He said he had seen their tattered uniforms and showed himself, on video, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  There was, however, a problem: Rivera filed his report less than a day later from Tora Bora, a cave complex in the White Mountains roughly three hundred miles northeast of the site where the bombs actually fell in Kandahar. I talked to reporters in Afghanistan, people who handled logistics at rival networks, senior staffers with international relief agencies and human rights groups active there, and US military officials. None of them thought the journey from Tora Bora to Kandahar and back was feasible by road in less than twenty-four hours, while an official at the Pentagon said Rivera certainly had not hitched a ride with US forces or aircraft.

  When I asked how he could have made the round trip down and back in a single day, given the bombed-out roads, the rival warlords, and the highway bandits patrolling what routes were functioning, a Fox News spokeswoman angrily asked whether I was saying he made it up. By the time the network consented to an interview, deadlines approached. Because of the nine-and-a-half-hour time-zone difference in Afghanistan, they said, Rivera was asleep and unreachable. Wait a day, and we’ll give you Geraldo. By that point, we could have run a story without speaking to him. But my section’s editors and I agreed it would make the story much stronger to talk to Rivera. I imposed one condition: that he would talk to no other reporters that day. Fox News agreed.

  The next day, Rivera gave me a vivid and livid interview by satellite phone. But he interspersed his anger toward what he clearly saw as my impertinence with a fascinatingly self-aware account of the various twists and turns in his career. Finally Rivera said he had been confused by another, similar friendly-fire incident that killed a group of Afghan rebels: “The fog of war,” he said. As contemporary newspaper reports and accounts by human rights groups subsequently demonstrated, that separate incident involving only Afghans did not happen until the following week.

  The Fox PR people had taken some protective steps. Despite their promise, Rivera also spoke to Associated Press television reporter David Bauder. In this interview, Rivera boasted that he carried a gun despite journalistic conventions advising against it. Such bravado created the fear that armed reporters might appear to Al Qaida fighters little different from combatants, and then all journalists in war zones would become targets. The AP’s global reach ensured that Rivera’s tale of packing heat drained the appetite for any other controversies he might have engendered. Hundreds of newspapers published Bauder’s story. Fox’s Irena Briganti left a message on my voice mail, suggesting only minor media outlets paid attention: “Reuters and MarketWatch? Pretty pathetic placement, my friend.”

  I wrote a second article, a few days later, weighing whether a television news network had an obligation to acknowledge and correct an error such as the one Rivera had made. The Drudge Report picked that one up—and the second story ricocheted around the world. Fox put out a tepid statement to the Associated Press between Christmas and New Year’s Eve—a media dead zone—stating that Rivera had made an “honest mistake.” No formal correction appeared on air. All this landed me on Fox’s blacklist. I later learned that internally staffers called it “Irena’s doghouse”: the constantly changing catalog of offenders that PR staffers review on a regular basis.

  After about fifteen months, Zimmerman called me to say Fox was wiping the slate clean. I continued to work with the public relations department on what I consider to be a professional basis—profiling such Fox anchors and hosts as Shepard Smith, Brit Hume, Bret Baier, John Stossel, and Glenn Beck. The PR department’s retribution was meant to punish me and to warn others. But it was not personal.

  A year or two after I broke the Rivera story, Fox News invited me as a guest to the White House correspondent’s dinner. It was a deeply inside joke for the amusement of its publicity department and the small world of media reporters who took any note. The Baltimore Sun paid the cost of my $135 ticket. And I had a good time, dining and drinking, without guilt, among the same Fox News staffers who had been told not to talk to me for more than a year. Years later, when my wife and I married, the Fox News PR team sent over an exquisite bottle of champagne from a 2002 vintage—specifically picked by Brian Lewis, Briganti pointed out, to honor a prize I won for the Rivera story. Nice touch. It was a shame to have to return it.

  As the campaign against Al Qaida and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan yielded to the drive to invade Iraq in 2003, Fox News adopted a pro-war tenor that overrode that of many of the reports of their reporters in the field. Anchor Neil Cavuto mocked a professor he deemed an “obnoxious, pontificating jerk,” a “self-absorbed, condescending imbecile,” and an “Ivy League intellectual Lilliputian,” for criticizing his broadcast as setting aside journalistic traditions of objectivity for outright nationalism.

  “Am I
slanted and biased? You damn well bet I am, professor. I’m more in favor of a system that lets me say what I’m saying here rather than one who would be killing me for doing the same thing over there,” Cavuto said. “You say I wear my biases on my sleeve? Better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work.” As if to prove his point, during an antiwar protest in Manhattan, the Fox News ticker that wrapped around the front of the News Corp headquarters switched from headlines to jeers against the demonstrators.

  At times the network’s publicity staffers turned their sights on their own former colleagues. When Fox host Paula Zahn moved to CNN, Zimmerman said it was like “putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse.” Ailes himself told the New York Times, “I could have put a dead raccoon on the air and gotten a better rating.”

  At another point, I noticed that Fox News had fallen into the habit of wishing people well in ways that conveyed the precise opposite. In 2004, then MSNBC host (and former ESPN and Fox Sports anchor) Keith Olbermann criticized Bill O’Reilly, drawing this retort from Brian Lewis: “Since he stopped reading sports scores, Keith has attracted fewer viewers than a test pattern, and his career has been nothing short of a train wreck. We pity his tortured soul and wish him all the best.” (All italics mine.) In 2005, when CNN experienced a mild ratings boost under a new president, Jonathan Klein, Fox’s Briganti replied: “Our focus is on beating the broadcast networks. We wish Jon well in his battle for second place with MSNBC.” That same year, Ted Turner denounced Fox, triggering this: “Ted is understandably bitter, having lost his ratings, his network, and now his mind. We wish him well.”

  The steady stream of cruelty had become funny by sheer force of repetition. Ailes sometimes took part in crafting the put-downs.

  On occasion, Fox News’s PR team aimed its jabs at current colleagues. Laurie Dhue, a Fox anchor who had complained she was not receiving sufficient press coverage, mistook a junior Fox publicity assistant for a young fan seeking an autograph at a black tie event in Washington. Dhue would be taught a lesson. Among Fox’s guests at that radio and TV correspondents’ dinner was Anne Schroeder, a reporter who wrote gossip features for the Washington Post. She sat at a table that included John Moody, a senior news executive, and Chris Wallace, the host of the Sunday political talk show Fox News Sunday. At an after-party, Schroeder witnessed Dhue dancing energetically—and raising some eyebrows among Fox executives.

  Schroeder’s later story for the Post reported that “the Fox News babes were in high spirits—especially Laurie Dhue.” The item mentioned Dhue’s misunderstanding over the autograph and continued: “The sultry anchor boogied the night away on the dance floor, bumping into numerous people in the packed house. Partygoers were overheard hissing (but barely, thanks to the loud music): ‘Laurie don’t, Laurie don’t!’”

  An accompanying photo showed Dhue, glass of champagne in hand, mouth agape in a wide smile—much wider than that of her three colleagues. A Fox News spokesman was quoted in the piece: “Laurie had a good time. Everyone had a good time.” Readers could only draw the clear implication that Dhue had been inebriated. Years later, after leaving the network, Dhue acknowledged publicly that she had been an alcoholic. But this leak was intended to bring her to heel. Fox’s staffers had picked the specific photograph to forward to the Post. And no one shouted “Laurie don’t!” as a pun on her last name. That had been entirely concocted by Fox.

  In a variety of ways, Fox engaged in a pitched public relations battle to dominate the narrative about the cable news business. Fox PR staffers were expected to win every news cycle, on every platform imaginable. When reporters printed quotations from Fox News officials in articles that did not focus exclusively on the network, Briganti upbraided her employees. Why would you embarrass me like this? she would ask.

  For all of Briganti’s tough cop bravado, she was not doing anything that her boss, Brian Lewis, didn’t want done. Lewis was one of Ailes’s closest advisers. Often Ailes was involved in planning in publicity tactics himself. Lewis and Briganti believed that such intensity would be the subject of admiring profiles in the Washington Post or Politico if it surfaced on a political campaign. They thought it was hypocritical for reporters to complain just because it came from a media company.

  On the blogs, the fight was particularly fierce. Fox PR staffers were expected to counter not just negative and even neutral blog postings but the anti-Fox comments beneath them. One former staffer recalled using twenty different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had one hundred. Several employees had to acquire a cell phone thumb drive to provide a wireless broadband connection that could not be traced back to a Fox News or News Corp account. Another used an AOL dial-up connection, even in the age of widespread broadband access, on the rationale it would be harder to pinpoint its origins. Old laptops were distributed for these cyber operations. Even blogs with minor followings were reviewed to ensure no claim went unchecked.

  I HAVE spoken with Roger Ailes only a few times in person. One encounter took place in October 2007, several years after I joined NPR, when I reintroduced myself to him at an event staged by his own company. With suddenly blazing eyes turned on my face he said: Oh, I remember who you are, as he gripped my hand firmly. You tried to fuck us.

  We were standing a few yards away from a stone temple with intricately carved depictions of Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess of magic and fertility, and Osiris, the ruler of the underworld.

  At that moment we were also surrounded by powerful forces and shimmering stars from the present-day worlds of media, entertainment, and high finance, including Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, former GE chief Jack Welch, and the comic actor and screenwriter Mel Brooks.

  To get there, they entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the eastern edge of Manhattan’s Central Park, walked past the votive candles spelling out Fox on the main marble staircase, slowed on the red carpet to be immortalized by the paparazzi, and ducked through the rooms with smaller antiquities from Assyria and Babylon, to the glass-encased Sackler Wing that houses the Temple of Dendur. Despite its Egyptian roots, the temple was constructed and dedicated to the honor of a foreign-born conqueror, the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, as was the evening itself, a point not lost on Ailes, who jovially referred to Augustus as the “Rupert Murdoch of his day” as he toasted the launch of a new sister channel that he would also run, the Fox Business Network.

  But at that moment, Ailes was busy erasing my awareness of all that. The man with the increasingly forbidding countenance had been brooding over the Geraldo Rivera story I had written six years earlier.

  You fucked us, Ailes repeated.

  It was all true, I replied. I reported the facts.

  The facts, he spat out. People like you always say that.

  People like what? Reporters? Didn’t he have a bunch on his payroll?

  A photographer popped up and offered to snap our picture, breaking the tension and making us both smile as we pressed closer for the shot.

  Ailes brightened as he shared a thought: Won’t this upset all those left-wing friends of yours at the parties you go to?

  I laughed too, impressed and amused by his audacity, and as I replied, I gestured to the Egyptian temple, the servers circling with chilled champagne glasses filled near the brim, and the hundreds of guests—his guests, and Murdoch’s—who were milling about. You mean, like this one?

  THE 2008 presidential campaign brought new challenges to the cable news ratings front-runner for the first time in years. In the early weeks of that year, Fox’s audiences sagged. Signs appeared to point the Democrats’ way; they had retaken the Congress in 2006; the fallout from the Iraq War attached to Republicans. Nor did candidates John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee stir passion in most voters.

  On the Democratic side, however, the primary had quickly narrowed to two heavyweights—senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Getting viewers to tune in when the headlines focused on Democrats proved a tougher sale. So in Febr
uary 2008, Fox’s claim of ratings dominance appeared shaky. CNN’s estimated ratings in the highly desired set of twenty-five to fifty-four-year-olds (the demographic most television advertisers paid to reach) rose 150 percent above the previous year’s levels. That meant CNN actually beat Fox News for the month in prime time for the demographic in which bragging rights were won and lost.

  MSNBC, then a distant third, enjoyed a jump of 71 percent and some nights beat Fox in the demographic. Fox’s loss of that key demographic in prime time for the first time in six years caught the attention of several media reporters. Two reporters were punished for pursuing their interest in the topic.

  A reporter for Crain’s New York Business, Matthew Flamm, was sandbagged when he decided to turn a relatively quick story on CNN’s ratings successes that month. He called officials at the three big cable channels and hit a brick wall at Fox News. Yet a producer for Bill O’Reilly’s show shot Flamm an email from a private Hotmail account, saying she had heard he was asking questions about the ratings. The producer wrote that she could not talk in person but that he should know top Fox executives were indeed worried and had decided on a shift: They want to copy the success that MSNBC has had with [Keith] Olbermann and [Chris] Matthews anchoring their coverage.

  For those who closely followed the vagaries of cable news, this was a big deal. Fox News winked at the notion of journalistic objectivity with its “fair and balanced” slogan, its carefully chosen story lists, and its list of commentators weighted to the right. But it had always handed major news events to its news anchors, such as Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, and Shepard Smith, although such coverage often gave way to special broadcasts of the big opinion shows. To ask O’Reilly to handle actual anchoring duties would be to erase that clear line of separation. MSNBC had headed in that direction, out-Foxing Fox. Flamm made sure the producer who had emailed him actually existed. But he could not get a second source. His editors split the difference. Don’t write it for the print edition, they said, but post it online. It’ll draw plenty of clicks.