Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets

Author:Zev Chafets [Chafets, Zev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595230959
Publisher: Sentinel HC
Published: 2013-03-18T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

THE BOSS

At precisely two thirty in the afternoon, Roger Ailes walked down the hall from his office to the meeting room. Eight men—seven of them white—and one woman, all middle-aged and dressed in business attire, were gathered around the polished table. The room is functional, not fancy. The rear wall holds a battery of television screens silently showing all the cable news channels. The only art is a poster with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson that Ailes likes: “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” Sometimes visiting delegations meet with Ailes in this room; he serves them sandwiches and soft drinks and jokes about his girth. But there were no refreshments at this meeting. Ailes loosened his tie, draped his jacket over the back of the chair, and eased himself into what is, literally, the seat of power at Fox News. It is from here that Ailes exercises his influence, and the executives gathered at the table are what he sometimes calls, with only the faintest hint of irony, his “loyal lieutenants.”

The two-thirty meeting is one of two that take place every day. The first is at 8:00 a.m., an hour when Ailes is sometimes taking his son to school. On those mornings he is present via speakerphone. Zac sometimes pipes up with a question or story suggestion, which delights Ailes. “He’ll probably be a vice president by the time he’s twenty-one,” Geraldo Rivera once told me.

Like his prime-time talent, Ailes’s executive lineup doesn’t change much. He prizes loyalty and competence, and once he finds them he holds on. Bill Shine, the man who some think will be Ailes’s eventual successor, has been at Fox since the beginning, working first as the producer for Hannity & Colmes and now in his current post as senior vice president for programming. Shine, like Hannity, is a Long Island kid from a lower-middle-class background. He attended a SUNY college and broke into television at WLIG-TV, a New York–area CBS affiliate. It was Hannity who brought him to Fox.

Shine has the job of managing the vast egos of some of the Fox stars, as well as riding herd over about a hundred paid commentators. He is plainspoken and sharp-witted: When Ailes introduced me to the group as a writer working on a book about Fox News, he winced theatrically and said, “Write this down. My name is John Moody.”

I sat next to Michael Clemente, a large, open-faced, slightly unkempt man who, I noticed, refrained from laughing along with the others. In 2009, Clemente replaced Moody as vice president in charge of news as a part of Ailes’s well-publicized repositioning toward the center. Moody was moved to a job as head of the experimental News Corp in-house wire service. Clemente discontinued the controversial daily memo, but he sees nothing wrong with it. “I worked at ABC and CNN and I have friends at the other networks, and they all have variations on a memo.

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