Ailes, 74, arguably the most powerful person of the next election, opens up about Rupert Murdoch, his dislikes (Elisabeth Murdoch's "creepy" ex-husband Matthew Freud), that MLK photo in his office and lesbian friends ("People don't know me"), and the new field of candidates as he grows his $15 billion empire.
This story first appeared in the May 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine,
Roger Ailes greets me in the doorway of his
second-floor office at the Fox News headquarters on Avenue of the
Americas. The 74-year-old is dressed in a crisp slate gray suit with
lavender necktie and pocket square combination. The suit looks new, and
he holds his arms out in the universal gesture for: "What do you think?"
Ailes recently has lost 30 pounds, he says, by cutting down on
hamburgers and eating more roughage. On his desk is a plate of fruit and
pastries, untouched, the same offerings that can be found in the
network's greenrooms.
At one point, he offers me some fruit. I explain that I've already
had my morning ration, mango actually. He looks up, a grin spreading
across his face. "Mango," he says, "liberal fruit."
Why, I wonder, does he consider mango liberal fruit? Because it's
from South America? He nods: "All those commies live down there."
We talk for nearly two hours about everything from Hillary Clinton
("Do you believe that the stuff on 30,000 emails that were destroyed
after the prosecutor told [her] to keep it had things on it about yoga? I
don't"), the 2016 presidential field in general ("I haven't heard
anybody in election campaigns say things that would make me run out and
vote for them yet"), exiled NBC News anchor Brian Williams
("I'd put Brian back, but I'd do it the right way"), fatherhood ("It
made me a coward") and his legacy ("I don't give a rat's ass what the
world thinks").
As I sit across from Ailes on this Wednesday morning in early April,
his eyes dart reflexively to the wall of six televisions to the left of
his desk; his networks, Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, and
the competition, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and Bloomberg. My eyes repeatedly
wander to a framed photo on a shelf over his left shoulder. It is an
iconic black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. escorting children into their newly integrated school in Grenada, Miss., in 1966.
The picture is signed by Dr. Bernice King and Dr. Alveda King,
King's daughter and niece, respectively, who attended in November the
graduation ceremony for the Ailes Apprenticeship Program, a diversity
education program he founded in 2004. In point of fact, though, Ailes
actually knew Dr. King back in the 1960s — the two crossed paths
occasionally when Ailes was a local TV producer in Philadelphia. It's a
nugget of Ailes' 'biography that some might find surprising.
"They certainly don't know me," says Ailes.
•••
Ailes has spent his entire career "stand[ing] in the doorway," as he
puts it, a rare "dissenting voice" amid liberal media orthodoxy and
coastal elitism, the only backstop against political correctness (some
would say) run amok. Combative and brutally funny, he seems to enjoy
stoking the popular caricature of the liberals' bogeyman.
"I think liberals have a lot of good ideas actually," he says. "But I've been pigeonholed and I'm quite comfortable with it."
Since creating Fox News in 1996 after leaving NBC in frustration, he
has become the most powerful executive in TV news, with an ability to
influence — his detractors say degrade — the national discourse that
remains unrivaled. His network and its dissentious stars provide endless
fodder for progressive foes including Jon Stewart. ("We're the only reason he's a success," says Ailes.)
Along the way, Ailes has built a brand valued by Wall Street analysts at $15 billion for Rupert Murdoch's
21st Century Fox empire; Fox News Channel contributed 18 percent of
21st Century profits in 2014. The company has notched 70 consecutive
quarters of profit growth. And SNL Kagan projects that Ailes' network
will generate $2.18 billion this year from advertising dollars and
affiliate revenue. Fox News isn't merely the most watched cable news
channel (since 2002, when it surpassed CNN); in February, it was the
most watched primetime network on all of cable and finished the first
quarter in fourth place overall in primetime behind only ESPN, TBS
(which had March Madness) and USA. It commands some of the richest fees
in cable at more than $1 per subscriber per month (CNN, by comparison,
gets 61 cents and MSNBC gets about 30 cents). And in the next few years,
those fees will jump to $1.50 as new carriage deals kick in — including
one with Dish Network finalized in January after a contentious
monthlong blackout.
As the country enters a presidential campaign season with dynastic
implications, Ailes has a dilemma: How much oxygen does he give the
fringe GOP candidates who could torment likely frontrunner Jeb Bush
and potentially aid Hillary Clinton in the process. It's not a question
he answers directly. "I just don't think I should weigh in on it, even
in the press because people will think, 'Well, that's the way he's
making the network go.' But it looks like Hillary is going to do
whatever she wants," he says, "and the press is going to vote for her."
Asked if he thinks Ted Cruz, the intransigent Texas tea party candidate, has a chance of securing the GOP nomination, Ailes deflects: "Listen, we elected Warren G. Harding.
Anybody has a chance. You don't know who you're going to be running
against. If the other guy falls on his rear end, you could win."
Meanwhile, there is another succession playing out, that of his
84-year-old boss Rupert Murdoch. Talk has intensified since Murdoch's
eldest son, Lachlan, 43, returned to the family fold —
and the succession race — as the nonexecutive co-chairman of News Corp
and 21st Century Fox. Meanwhile, James Murdoch, 42, now has the title of co-chief operating officer of 21st Century Fox, one he shares with Chase Carey, Rupert's reliable No. 2 and a close colleague of Ailes'.
Ailes remains in regular communication with Rupert; they talk three
or four times a week. "If he's in town, the door may open and he'll walk
in and plop down. He just hangs out for an hour, wrecks my schedule,"
laughs Ailes. "He's terribly polite. He says, 'Oh, sorry, I've ruined
your schedule.' I say, 'Hey, you own the company, what the hell am I
going to do?' So we have a very good, direct, joking relationship. He
likes Fox News, so I don't have a lot of business discussions with him."
(Murdoch declined to be interviewed but through a representative sent a
statement: "He has built an enormously successful news business that
dwarfs by almost any measure the establishment players we were ridiculed
for taking on years ago. Roger is simply second to none.")
Photographs by Wesley Mann
Ailes' relationship with Murdoch's sons, whose political views are
known to diverge with those of their father, is less close. He
characterizes them as "smart" and "capable" but adds: "I don't know them
very well. I don't interact with them on a daily or even weekly basis."
And he admits he only sees Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, 46, about once
a year at the Fox Christmas party. "Her ex-husband despises me, of
course," says Ailes, referring to PR executive Matthew Freud.
"That creepy guy." Asked what happens when Rupert Murdoch retires,
Ailes replies: "Nobody knows. Rupert says he's never going to [retire]."
Meanwhile, Ailes' contract comes up for renewal in 15 months, just a
few months before the 2016 election. I ask Ailes, who turns 75 on May
15, if he's going to sign an extension. "They haven't asked me to."
Granted, it might be a bit early to be having those discussions. But
when I ask him if he's envisioned his life after Fox News, he's quick to
reply: "No, no. What would I do?"
Politics? I suggest. "Too late," he says quickly. "If I had gone in
20 years ago. … But I hated the political life. Every night is a
fundraiser. It's sort of empty. If you're in the Senate and in the
minority, you just get to give speeches and run around and raise money.
If you're in the majority, you're under attack from the press every
day."
He could make a comfortable living on the speaker circuit, I suggest.
"I have a lot of offers for speeches now," he says. "But you really
don't affect anything. It seems a little narcissist and empty."
Perhaps the better question is, what would Fox News be without Ailes?
"It's his creation. He built it," says CBS News president David Rhodes, who got his start as a production assistant at Fox News in 1996. "I'm not sure anyone else can run it."
Ailes always has been in the trenches, and that hasn't changed. He's
known to call the control room if he sees his anchors straying into
territory over which he objects. "I say, 'Tell them to cut this shit
out, but don't tell them I called because that will raise the level too
high.' " He participates in the 8 a.m. executive meeting (usually by
phone), makes all programming decisions and sometimes even negotiates
directly with talent (Megyn Kelly, who is a lawyer, negotiates her own contracts directly with Ailes).
"I tell him he needs to work less," says anchor Shepard Smith.
"Go be with his kid and take time off. That's not Roger's way. I don't
know what else he can accomplish. He's done everything there is to do.
He's got this place pretty damn well-built. It's not as if there will be
problems. But like no other place I've ever worked, it's all about him.
Everything you see and feel about, it is from him. The truth is, he
loves this place."
Bill O'Reilly won't even speculate on Fox News without Ailes. "I have no idea how the network would shake out if he wasn't here."
•••
The 2008 election gave rise to the tea party, Sarah Palin (who joined Fox as a contributor after the election) and Glenn Beck,
who had a brief and volatile run as FNC's 5 p.m. host. After the
Republican loss in the 2012 election — spectacularly crystallized by
Kelly's election night run-in with Karl Rove, who probably still hasn't accepted that Mitt Romney
lost Ohio — the Republican National Committee released a bracingly
candid postmortem. "We have become expert in how to provide ideological
reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the
ability to be persuasive with … those who do not agree with us." The
party, concluded the report, "needs to stop talking to itself."
Asked whether he thinks the RNC report was aimed at Fox News, Ailes
becomes animated. "The dumb bastards ought to turn it off if they don't
like it," he says. "They shouldn't try to get on and get interviewed if
they don't like it." Then he softens slightly. "What I admire about them
is the Republicans at least admit it. The Democrats [will] never say,
'We're ideologically driven.' They never say that. Everything is for a
higher purpose."
Still, there have been changes at the network since the 2012
election, with Ailes clearly wooing a younger brand of conservative.
(The network's median age — over 65 — is the oldest of the news
networks, though Fox News still outrates the competition among the
advertiser-coveted 25-to-54 demographic.) In 2013, he moved Kelly into
the 9 p.m. slot occupied for more than a decade by conservative
firebrand Sean Hannity. And he built Smith — an
empathic reporter often suspected of being liberal — a $7 million studio
and made him the network's on-call anchor throughout the evening.
"Nobody else has this — it's very expensive," says Smith of his
show's News Deck, which is staffed by dozens of producers who monitor
news feeds and social media for what amounts to a perpetual news
factory. "We're paying a lot of people in case something happens. It's
an enormous commitment, and nobody else is making it. But those things
don't get talked about. What gets talked about is O'Reilly bloviating
about something."
Fox News has 19 liberals on the payroll, though they're often dismissed as straw men. When I put this to Juan Williams, a veteran commentator who wrote a well-regarded biography of Thurgood Marshall, he laughs. "Can you get a witness? I'm a witness.
"Clearly the audience likes the kind of tilt that exists [at Fox
News]," he says. "But they're not stupid. They want to hear a real,
honest conversation. I am allowed to make substantial, critical
arguments. And that never gets stepped on."
Williams, in fact, has known Ailes since 1984, when Williams was covering the White House for the Washington Post and Ailes was a campaign advisor for Ronald Reagan.
"Part of the struggle of being a skinny black kid with an afro
covering the Reagan White House is that a lot of people [there]
basically thought I was the enemy. Ailes' response to me was, 'You're an
underdog in this situation, aren't you? I got your back; I'm going to
help you.' And he became a key source for me."
Interestingly, while Fox News is the go-to channel for conservatives,
about 37 percent of its audience holds "mixed" views, according to a
2014 Pew study, while 14 percent are "liberal" and 4 percent are
"consistently liberal." But Ailes doesn't appear to be all that
interested in bringing more of these people to his network. "I don't
give a rat's ass," he says, breaking out his favorite rodent reference.
"My job is to cover the news and do it accurately and fair. And we do.
And voila! We have the largest number of independents watching
television of any channel. Why is that? Not because we suck around and
try to talk these people into watching our programming. We do
programming that appeals to them, and so they tune to us. That's how you
get them. You can't be chasing these little balkanized groups of people
around. It's just nuts. Do your programming. It should be American.
We're Americans. It's a culture. We should defend that culture, and we
should reinforce that culture."
•••
Ailes didn't start out aspiring to be the godfather of conservative
news. He grew up in Warren, Ohio, a dingy Rust Belt city, and studied
radio and television at Ohio University in Athens, where he also acted
in a handful of stage productions. After he graduated, he landed a job
as a gofer on the Philadelphia-based The Mike Douglas Show. He
had, by all accounts, an intuitive grasp of what people wanted to see on
television. When he was just 25, he had risen to executive producer.
(He put Barbara Walters, then a Today girl, on
the show, asking her to don a warm-up suit and perform with a Swedish
tumbling team.) It was there, in the Douglas greenroom, that Ailes met
Martin Luther King Jr. And also there, in 1967, where he had his first
encounter with Richard Nixon, who once had dismissed
television as a "gimmick." Ailes advised him to take the medium
seriously; Nixon hired him as an adviser on his 1968 presidential
campaign.
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, Ailes pursued intertwining interests
in politics and entertainment. He produced theater, including a 1972
environmentally themed musical called Mother Earth and, the following year, the award-winning play Hot L Baltimore,
about the denizens of a condemned hotel including prostitutes, a gay
couple and an illegal immigrant. He also produced several TV projects
including a documentary about Federico Fellini and a Caesars Palace-set TV special for Liberace.
To this day, he maintains an interest in Hollywood, and he says he has
friends there (but won't name them). He attended the Oscars this year
with his wife, Beth, a former CNBC executive (Ailes got the tickets as
an anniversary gift; the couple married on Valentine's Day 1998).
By the time Ailes went to work at GE-owned NBC in the early '90s, he
had established himself as a television savant with canny political
instincts. The president of both CNBC and its sister network, America's
Talking, Ailes also hosted an interview program called Straight Forward and made appearances on NBC's flagship morning show Today for political debates. In an email, then-Today co-host Bryant Gumbel
notes that he "never had the feeling that Roger was parroting GOP
talking points, quite the contrary; in those days he often was at odds
with the wackos of the far right."
Today, Ailes' friends continue to be establishment figures; Ron Prosor, the Israeli diplomat and chair of the United Nations Human Rights Committee; Bob Kimmitt, deputy secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush.
"People, of course, don't think I have any friends," says Ailes,
laughing. He also has been known to get along well with at least a
handful of his ideological foes. He wrote a blurb for Rachel Maddow's 2012 book Drift, and the two were spotted having breakfast at The Carlyle last year. Ellen Ratner (a Fox News contributor since 1997 and the sister of New York City developer Bruce Ratner) and her partner, Cholene Espinoza, a retired Air Force pilot, have been to Ailes' home for dinner.
"I had to buy a goddamn goat for her," laughs Ailes, referring to
Ratner's Goats for the Old Goat initiative, which provides she-goats to
the people of South Sudan.
"She has promoted gay rights on our air. She's a sweet woman, and her
partner is a f—ing bomber pilot. So I don't care. It's not my business
how people live. I don't try to tell them what to do. I've hired and
promoted gays all my life. I just don't get involved. It's not my
business. And it's not their business what I like."
Ailes' laissez-faire attitude extends to his workers, sometimes in seemingly willful ways. After Williams
was dumped by NPR in 2010 for admitting (on Fox News) that he viewed
Muslims with some trepidation when he boarded an airplane, Ailes
promoted him. And he stood by weekend anchor Gregg Jarrett
throughout a very public battle with alcoholism (Jarrett appeared on
the network slurring his words). "I like talent and think they're
vulnerable," says Ailes. "They get out there in front of the public and
take all the criticism. They do a lot of hard work. So one of my jobs is
to protect them."
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