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 O n 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.”