The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine Read online

  David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt,

  and Media Matters for America

  The Fox Effect

  David Brock, the founder and Chairman of Media Matters, is the author of five books, including The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy and his bestselling memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

  Ari Rabin-Havt is Media Matters’s executive vice president.

  www.mediamatters.org

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ANCHOR BOOKS

  Free Ride: John McCain and the Media

  by David Brock and Paul Waldman

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  Cover images: Jill Fromer (flag); ULTRA.f (tv) © Photodisc/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brock, David.

  The Fox effect: how Roger Ailes turned a network into a propaganda machine /

  David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94768-0

  1. Ailes, Roger. 2. Fox News. 3. Television broadcasting of news—United States.

  4. Television broadcasting of news—Objectivity—United States.

  5. Television and politics—United States. I. Rabin-Havt, Ari. II. Title.

  PN4888.T4B76 2012

  791.450973—dc23

  2011042839

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction: Not Necessarily the News

  PART I: ATTACK AND DESTROY

  Chapter 1: Roger’s Rise

  Chapter 2: The Path to the Top

  PART II: BUILDING THE MOVEMENT

  Chapter 3: A “Terrorist Fist Jab”?

  Chapter 4: A Stalin-esque Mouthpiece

  Chapter 5: Time for a Tea Party

  Chapter 6: Violent Rhetoric

  Chapter 7: Six Steps

  Chapter 8: Willie Horton … Times a Thousand

  PART III: THE CAMPAIGN

  Chapter 9: A Vote for Liberty

  Chapter 10: One Million Dollars

  PART IV: THE AFTERMATH

  Chapter 11: The Puppet Master

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction:

  Not Necessarily the News

  It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats. They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.

  —a former Fox employee

  On August 2, 2009, on board the “Six-Star Luxury Liner” Crystal Serenity, somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Fox News’s Washington, D.C., managing editor, Bill Sammon, rose to address supporters of Hillsdale College, a conservative institution located just over one hundred miles west of Detroit. His audience had paid between $11,800 and $37,600 per couple to listen to an all-star lineup of conservative journalists and scholars as they traveled from Venice to Athens, via Istanbul. Sammon was the featured speaker. He began with some joking remarks, speculating that conservative political consultant Mary Matalin, who was on board the ship simply on vacation, might have “mischievously arranged” to have her husband, liberal James Carville, along to “save his ideological soul.” Then Sammon made a startling admission:

  You know, speaking of mischief, last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to, quote, “spread the wealth around.” At that time, I have to admit that I went on TV, on Fox News, and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.1

  At the time Sammon made these “mischievous speculations,” he was Fox News’s Washington deputy managing editor, and it was his job to oversee the reporting of the news on one of our country’s major cable networks. Yet here, in front of a friendly audience, on a luxury cruise an ocean away from the United States, he was candidly, nonchalantly admitting to consciously misrepresenting the ideology of a presidential candidate to Fox’s audience days before an election.

  E‑mails we obtained from that time, written by Sammon and a Fox producer, show that this calculated smear against Obama was not an on-air slip but part of a coordinated campaign of deception. Not only had Sammon personally appeared on the network to make these charges against Barack Obama, but he had also sent an e‑mail to journalists who worked for him, encouraging them to cover the Democratic candidate’s “racial obsessions” and supposed connections to Marxism.

  From: Sammon, Bill

  Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 1:02 PM

  To: 069-Politics; 169-SPECIAL REPORT;

  030-Root (FoxNews.Com)

  Subject: fyi: Obama’s references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists in his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.” Plus a couple of his many self-described “racial obsessions”…

  “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.” (Obama writing about his time at Occidental College in “Dreams.”)

  After his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University. He lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for “the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union,” he recalled, adding: “Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal.”

  After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for “a Ralph Nader offshoot” in Harlem. “In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia. At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature.”

  During this period, according to Obama, he began a serious romantic relationship.

  “There was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white,” Obama wrote in “Dreams.” “We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs.” But Obama said their relationship was doomed by the racial difference. “I pushed her away,” he recalled. “The emotion between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing from ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

  In June 1985, Obama was interviewed in New York by Marty Kaufman, a community organizer from Chicago. Obama recalled: “There was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”2

  Less than ninety minutes later, Sammon was on Fox
engaging in “mischievous speculation” claiming Barack Obama “was drawn to Marxists, and he was drawn to liberals, and he was drawn to socialists by his own admission as a young man.”3

  The next morning, Sammon appeared on the network’s morning show, Fox & Friends, to reiterate his “far-fetched” theory about Obama’s Marxism and racial obsessions. Memos from the show’s producers reveal that the entire third segment was built around his e‑mail.

  From: Cunningham, Jennifer

  To: 044—Web Show Producers; 064—Desk Assignment; 069—Politics; 081- Radio; 085—DC Booking;

  100—Media Relations; 162—Promos; Brown, David; Glick, Alexis; Magee, Kevin; Moody, John; Scott, Suzanne; Shine, Bill; Tammero, Michael; Wallace, Jay

  Sent: Mon Oct 27 18:17:41 2008

  Subject: FOX & FRIENDS GUESTS FOR TUESDAY OCTOBER. 28—

  EXACTLY 1 WEEK BEFORE ELECTION DAY

  FOX & FRIENDS GUESTS FOR TUESDAY OCTOBER. 28—EXACTLY 1 WEEK BEFORE ELECTION DAY

  5:59 (A-BLOCK) COLD OPEN // QUICK TEASE// News HEADLINES // TALKING POINTS WX BUMP OUT TO TEASE———————————

  6:15 (B-BLOCK)—2 STORIES AMANDA CARPENTER—

  DEMS PLAYBOOK SHOWS DIRTY TACTICS

  ((DC BUREAU))———————————

  6:22 (C-BLOCK)—2 STORIES ((ANCHOR)) & BILL SAMMON—FYI: OBAMA’S REFERENCES TO SOCIALISM, LIBERALISM, MARXISM AND MARXISTS IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, “DREAMS FROM MY FATHER.”

  PLUS A COUPLE OF HIS MANY SELF-DESCRIBED

  “RACIAL OBSESSIONS”… ((FOX DC)) >>

  BDAY IN TEASE———————————4

  As Sammon spoke, the chyron, the graphic appearing on the lower section of the screen, read: “The Real Barack Obama; Aligned W/ Marxists, Socialists”; “Obama’s Radical Past; Close Friends W/ Marxist”; “Obama’s Chosen Friends; Marxist Profs & Structural Feminists”; and “Obama’s Racial Divide; ‘Emotion B/W Races Never Be Pure.’ ”5

  That same day Sammon published a piece claiming that “Obama laughs off charges of socialism… [but] Obama himself acknowledges that he was drawn to socialists and even Marxists as a college student.”6

  It was a peculiar amount of attention to give to a story Sammon didn’t really believe, particularly since the information involved was neither new nor particularly newsworthy—the contemporary political relevance of Obama’s candid account of his early years as described in Dreams from My Father (which had been published in 1995) had already been thoroughly covered by the press, including by Sammon himself in a book published earlier that year. Why, a week before Election Day, were years-old, out-of-context quotes suddenly being treated as a major, breaking story on “fair and balanced” Fox News?

  When criticized for such on-air behavior, Fox News and its defenders will often assert that the network maintains a firewall between its news and opinion programming similar to that between a newspaper’s front page and its opinion section. But as a “news” executive, Bill Sammon clearly crossed this line, as veteran journalist Marc Sandalow, a former bureau chief at the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington office, points out. “[Sammon] is overseeing the news operation,” he said in an interview with Media Matters. “For news gatherers, credibility is everything. You should never deceive viewers or readers.”7

  After his e‑mails were revealed in 2011, Sammon defended his actions to The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz, who wrote of the affair:

  Sammon says his reference to “mischievous speculation” was “my probably inartful way of saying, ‘Can you believe how far this thing has come?’ ” The socialism question indeed “struck me as a far-fetched idea” in 2008. “I considered it kind of a remarkable notion that we would even be having the conversation.” He doesn’t regret repeatedly raising it on the air because, Sammon says, “it was a main point of discussion on all the channels, in all the media”—and by 2009 he was “astonished by how the needle had moved.”8

  But a review of the media coverage at the time shows that Fox and Sammon, far from responding to a media narrative, were the driving force behind the reporting of Barack Obama’s supposed attraction to socialism. Two weeks before sending his memo to producers, Sammon appeared on Fox’s afternoon news program The Live Desk to discuss how Barack Obama’s comment to Joe the Plumber, an Ohio man, who became a conservative movement fixture after confronting the future president at a campaign stop—that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”9—was “tantamount to socialism.”10 A few days later Sammon was on Greta Van Susteren’s show discussing the same topic, and later that week on Fox & Friends, he again reported on the political ramifications of Obama’s supposed links to socialism.

  Other journalists are not so willing to accept Sammon’s explanation to Kurtz. “I don’t think deception is ever acceptable in journalism,” John Walcott, McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief during the 2008 election, remarked of the Fox executive’s conduct. “I think there are times when we don’t say everything we’ve learned for reasons of personal security and national security. But outright deception, saying something that you know to be untrue or have no basis for believing is true, is not journalism, it is propaganda.”11

  Sammon’s transgressions at the tail end of the 2008 election only marked the beginning of a larger transition at the network, one that would see Fox News change from a network that provided a conservative outlook on the news to an active and unapologetic mouthpiece for the Republican Party.

  Media Matters for America, our organization, produces thousands of pieces of research a year focused on correcting conservative misinformation in the media. Our efforts to squelch such lies and distortions initially were distributed over a wide range of news sources—various conservative websites, radio programs, and television shows. But in early 2009, we noticed a marked increase in politically motivated misinformation coming from Fox News. Our attention was thus drawn increasingly to that channel—not only because they were serial violators of responsible journalism, but because their influence and reach within the media and with the public at large as the most-watched cable news network made it even more important to counteract their distortions of the truth. In early 2009, for instance, approximately 33 percent of our work focused on Fox News and its affiliates; in 2010, that number rose to 44 percent. By the beginning of 2011 we were spending more than 54 percent of our time focused on the network. This was not intentional; it was a matter of responding to this growing trend: the vast majority of the lies, smears, and distortions from conservative media flowed from or through Fox News.

  We live in a cynical time, when words like “fair” and “balanced” are used as slogans to sell content that is anything but. When the words of lobbyists and the politicians they support are given equal weight with the consensus of scientific experts, by journalists who think a news story is a competition between opposing narratives rather than a judicious search for truth. Reporters often ask why they should trust Media Matters any more than Fox, given that both are ideological institutions. But this is precisely our point: Media Matters makes no claim of being neutral; we proudly wear our progressive ideology on our sleeve. We make decisions about the issues we focus on and the lies we debunk, just as newspapers choose what stories to cover. But our research and reporting stick to the facts and are painstakingly documented. Fox, on the other hand, claims to be a “fair and balanced” news network while brazenly broadcasting demonstrable lies and distortions, always with a conservative spin.

  It is critical that the media, Democrats, opinion makers of all stripes, and the public at large understand what Fox News is. Too many reporters and commentators have continued to treat Fox as a news organization. By doing so, they enable the network to conduct a political campaign under the guise of a media outlet, influencing the outcome of legislative debates and elections.

  It is all the more important to keep an eye on Fox because the rhetoric the network wields as a political weapon is filled with violent imagery and demonization. This i
s never a good practice, particularly at a time of economic instability, when social unrest and passions are high. Fox News personalities, unfortunately, have a habit of portraying their ideological opponents in outrageously negative ways. In the past few years its hosts have, among other things, compared President Obama, members of Congress, and progressive leaders to Nazis and genocidal dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, and have referred to the president as a racist. Glenn Beck, one of Fox News’s most popular personalities from 2009 to 2011, even simulated the assassination of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on air by miming giving her a glass of poisoned wine, without any repercussions from network management. It’s all harmless amusement until an unbalanced individual is riled up to perform an unspeakable act against a public official who has been reduced by media images into a two-dimensional, cardboard-cutout villain. The history of the United States—both early and recent—includes many examples of the unintended horrors that can result from this type of relentless and careless demonization.

  Then there is the deliberate spread of misinformation. Polls consistently find Fox News viewers among the most ignorant on a variety of issues. For example, NBC News’s online publication First Read reported in April 2009 that “72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.”12 As First Read pointed out, this was “rampant misinformation” that large numbers of Fox News viewers believed.