The Elephant in the Green Room

[Born_A_Truman]

The circus Roger Ailes created at Fox News made his network $900 million last year. But it may have lost him something more important: the next election.
By Gabriel Sherman



On Monday afternoon, March 28, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes summoned Glenn Beck to a meeting in his office on the second floor of News Corp.’s midtown headquarters to discuss his future at the network. Ailes had spent the better part of the weekend at his Putnam County estate thinking about how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Glenn Beck, the situation was a mess, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session. Beck had already indicated he was willing to walk away—“I don’t want to do cable news anymore,” he had told Ailes. But moving him out the door without collateral damage was proving difficult.

Ailes had hired Beck in October 2008 to reenergize Fox’s audience after Obama’s election, and he’d succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest hopes, tapping deep wells of resentment and igniting them into a vast, national conflagration. The problem was that it had almost engulfed Fox itself. Beck was huge and uncontrollable, and some of Fox’s other big names seemed diminished by comparison—and were speaking up about it. Beck seemed to many to be Fox News’s id made visible, saying things—Obama is a racist, Nazi tactics are progressive tactics—dredged from the right-wing subconscious. These were things that weren’t supposed to be said, even at Fox, and they were consuming the brand. Ailes had built his career by artfully tending the emotional undercurrents of both politics and entertainment, using them to power ratings and political careers; now they were out of his control.

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For Ailes, Tucson was a turning point, suggesting an end to the silly season that had lasted most of Obama’s term as president and that Ailes had promoted and profited from. While Sean Hannity and other Fox pundits continue to hammer away at Obama, Ailes is hedging his bets. The network is pushing to make news anchor Bret Baier a bigger star. Shepard Smith’s newscast has flashes of outright liberalism. And last month, Ailes encouraged Bill O’Reilly—who seemed to be fading at the height of Beck’s power but now has been recast as the right’s reasonable man, Jon Stewart’s comic foil—to shoot down the “birther” conspiracy and other assorted right-wing myths that have dogged Obama since his election. “Fox gave the tea party the oxygen to prosper,” Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the conservative magazine Newsmax, told me. “Politically, it was brilliant. There were so many disaffected people after the Bush years. Now I sense a slight movement in a new direction. Roger has a long track record. It’s like the book Blink. He’s just got it. We’re going into an election period, and he doesn’t want Fox to be seen as a front of the Republican Party.”

That the GOP Establishment’s bench seems so thin now is a by-product of how the party, and Fox, reacted to Obama’s presidency. In the fall of 2008, a sense of panic raced through the halls of Fox News. In the waning years of the Bush administration, Fox’s ratings had declined, as the audience, weary from a seemingly never-ending stream of gloomy headlines, lost its ardor for the channel. In the year after Hurricane Katrina, Fox lost more than 30 percent of its viewership. Fox executives knew that the Obama era might usher in a new media environment, one that could favor a cheerleader of the left, or a news network like CNN, whose ratings beat Fox’s during the campaign. “For a while, if you pointed a camera at the news, Fox’s ratings went up,” a person close to Ailes explained. “There was the Florida recount, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the 2004 election—until Katrina. Then the audience was kind of like, ‘This is bad for the home team.’ ”

Even Rupert Murdoch, sensing the shifting tectonic plates, contemplated a move to the middle. In the summer of 2008, Ailes confronted Murdoch after he learned Murdoch was thinking of endorsing Obama in the New York Post; Ailes threatened to quit. It was a politically vulnerable time for Ailes. Murdoch’s children were agitating for a greater role in the company. Ailes surely understood that their politics, along with those of then–News Corp. president Peter Chernin and communications adviser Gary Ginsberg, differed greatly from Murdoch’s. The tensions surrounding Ailes played out in the publication of Michael Wolff’s Murdoch biography. Matthew Freud, husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and a London-based PR executive, encouraged Wolff to portray Fox as a pariah wing of the News Corp. empire. Ailes was furious with Wolff’s account, which was critical of Fox, and Rupert, seeking to quell the turmoil, offered Ailes a new contract. This corporate victory, not to mention Fox’s profits, ensured that Ailes remained unscathed by the succession games playing out among the Murdoch children.

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Saw the author this morning on Morning Joe (yes, insomnia!) and wanted to read this. It's long and I haven't finished yet, but wanted to share.

[Ikonoklast]

I read that article, it's a an excellent read about how close Fox News is to disaster.

The demographics of their viewership would make most tv executives puke.

[Cha]

Really interesting..thanks Pat.

I saw today where beck is getting a tv webcam deal. They can go online for the beck scam.

fox would have to do a giant purge not to be rightly seen as a gopropaganda machine.

[Born_A_Truman]

So Roger Ailes wants to pick the GOP presidential candidate and he isn't happy with the current crop. Imagine if any other network tried that!

[Cha]

(05-25-2011 06:48 PM)Born_A_Truman Wrote:  So Roger Ailes wants to pick the GOP presidential candidate and he isn't happy with the current crop. Imagine if any other network tried that!

Aww..he misses bush..isn't that special.