What It Was Like to Compete Against Roger Ailes and Fox News
Mr. Ailes had created the greatest news show on earth. Even the Fox News slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” was somehow a mantra anyone could remember: It tweaked Fox’s strait-laced competitors and winked to delighted Republican viewers.
Fox was cleaning our clocks in the ratings in part because conservatives were flocking to that one network while the rest of us scrapped over the remaining and divided moderates, independents and liberals. But to claim Fox’s success was only political would be a cop-out. They were just better. And I needed to figure out why.
.. Mr. Ailes would pick one or two “hot” stories, add numerous live guests and stick to that story throughout the day. Many cable viewers, it turned out, were not interested in television news’s bread and butter — a diverse newscast of multiple dispassionate stories — no matter how important. Despite what they might tell pollsters, viewers were clearly looking for a great yarn, and Mr. Ailes knew how to spin one.These days that sort of live blanket coverage (for example, a certain plane crash on CNN) has become far more commonplace but had been considered anathema to the very fiber of what a news network ought to be doing.
Mr. Ailes was equally adept at knowing what not to cover... So while MSNBC and CNN were focusing on the challenges and failures of the war, Fox covered the story far less often, and when they did so, in a far more sanguine way, highlighting successes from the field... Mr. Ailes didn’t seem to care how anyone reacted to his often-controversial network... Fox News would simply ignore them or hit back harder, on the air or through its relentless public relations department. There were no objective norms, no establishment rules, no journalistic sanctity. Just Roger’s rules... We knew it was the right call when Mr. Ailes began treating Mr. Olbermann’s success as a potential threat, leading him to instruct Bill O’Reilly to refrain from responding to Mr. Olbermann’s attacks.