 I'm Frank Four and delighted to be here to do this panel. Gabe has been a colleague of mine for a long time. He did a stint as a special correspondent for the New Republic where I got to see firsthand how he reported. In fact, the first time I got to see Gabe's reporting was I was about to get my current job which is editing the magazine. I had gone way out of my way to try to keep the news secret and we had some deal with the New York Times where it was supposed to be embargoed but Gabe, who is an indefatigable reporter, got wind of this. He started to systematically call everybody in the New Republic office and he started at the top of the masthead, worked his way through the middle of the masthead, then started calling interns and assistants and he called everybody in the office and I instructed everybody not to talk to this Gabe Sherman guy because I have my own inner Roger Ailes wanting to keep this guy away and he finally got the one guy in the office who I hadn't actually told and that proved to be the most effective way of getting him off the scent. But I'm really, as somebody who's been your editor in the past just really proud of this book. I think it's an incredible achievement. It enters the pantheon of media books that really transcends media, that it's about our times, it's about our politics, it's about our culture. We're also joined today by Amy Mitchell who is with Pew's Journalism Project and I think you come across a lot of data, you trade in data, it's your socket trade and I think there's a way in which you can take some of Gabe's assertions and his broad historical analysis and apply some empirical rigor to his theses to see if they pan out. So Gabe, one place to start is, I think one of the things that your book does is it tries to actually, in addition to telling the story, it's telling a history and you're kind of periodizing a time that this is in a way, we've lived through this fox era and it's elicited a whole debate about whether liberals in particular should pay so much attention to Fox News, whether they're just giving Roger Ailes exactly what they want and part of this is a sense that maybe Fox News is over, that we're actually exiting this period where Ailes and Fox have exerted outsized influence in our society. What's your sense of this? Where are we in the broad trajectory of Fox? Is it at the peak of its powers? Is it in decline? I think that's a great question and my book attempts to trace that arc and I think now in the year 2014, Fox is in a state of terminal decline. Where that endpoint is, we can't predict, but to understand Roger Ailes' life you have to see it through the prism of his start in politics which was working on Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign and it was that coalition of voters that Nixon assembled that Ailes has spent his career maintaining that coalition, the famous silent majority the white middle class heartland coalition that were the Reagan Democrats that voted for George H.W. Bush that Fox is really appealed to and what's so interesting is that it's kind of an actuarial game at this point Fox's audience has continued to get older, the median age of the viewer has crept up and so that audience is still there, it's a very loyal audience but it's not a growing audience and so I think in the underlying demographics that Ailes knows how to reach and program with like wedge issues, issues of class, race, geography, that coalition is changing and we don't know quite what will rise up behind it but I think that the power to use media to speak to that audience is definitely on the way down. Does Ailes share that analysis? Does he know that, is he looking at those actuarial tables and thinking my coalition of viewers is graying or does he not worry about that because the time horizon is changing? Well I think what's so interesting is that my book attempts to tell this personal story of him as an American figure and the end of my book really shows a portrait of a man who's kind of raging against the night. I mean he's seeing the America that he knew and he understood and he thrived in changing and it's manifesting itself through a lot of anger. If you watch Fox's programming since 2008 the channel has become even more angry as it's become more of a manifestation of Ailes' worldview, the checks and the balances that existed inside the network for much of the first ten years of its history have kind of unleashed themselves. So Ailes is now sort of, it's purely a reflection of his worldview and it's an angry worldview because he sees the America of the mid-century, 1950s America that he grew up in where white Christian men were the dominant voice in American politics changing. And so I don't know if he connects it to this idea that his audience is aging out but he sees it almost as a threat to the America, he actually said this that he thinks he's saving the Republic, he sees Fox News as a mission to save America and that I think ties into what... Let's just disaggregate a couple of things there. One is one way in which Ailes has been extremely successful is creating a very, very lucrative, profitable enterprise and to what extent in his worldview is he able to separate... Does he separate commerce and politics? Is he putting on... He's able to manufacture a lot of outrage. To what extent do you think in his own head he knows he's manufacturing stuff and he's putting on a show. To what extent is this all just kind of a perfect confluence of commercial and commerce and politics where his angry, resentful worldview just happens to make for very watchable and television. I think the profits are what have given him political power. Without the profits he would not have the editorial independence within Rupert Murdoch's media empire to program the channel as he sees fit. So the money gives him a power base that he can then leverage for his own ends and what I think is so interesting is that he will at times manufacture storylines. I tell a wonderful story in the book about the war on Christmas which has become an annual Fox News tradition and Ailes' brother told me in an interview that Ailes basically looked out at America and he said the country is 90, a vast majority celebrates Christmas so I'm going to make Fox the pro-Christmas channel and I'll let the other networks fight over the scraps. So that's a marketing plan. Literally he was finding a demographic and he was coming up with programming to reach it but that manufactured controversy then gives him real political power to advance issues that he cares about which are the Middle East foreign policy, entitlement spending, environmental regulation. I think he also believes that you had another funny anecdote about his Christmas at his child's school. Yeah, tell the story, that's a good one. Exactly, this is the wonderful complexity of Ailes as a character. So on the one hand he does a crass programming strategy which he manufactures the war on Christmas but on the other hand he actually does believe that Christmas is this American tradition under siege and he went to his son's private school and had a row with the headmaster because they no longer could display Christmas trees and Ailes is telling they could only display friendship trees and so Ailes went to a meeting at the school and as he was leaving he grabbed a crayon and he scrawled on the wall, Merry Christmas and his wife was like what are you doing and he's like screw him and so he was like literally defacing the school's wall in the hallway because he felt like he needed to make a statement and so I think that gets at this heart of how he really is a true believer but then he's also a canny showman and he knows how to leverage his true beliefs into these spectacles. One last question before I turn to Amy to see if we can test some of your sense of history here with some data but how does somebody I mean this is like maybe a transcendent question for people who hold a worldview similar to Ailes but how does somebody, he's so powerful yet still so resentful about kind of being disempowered as a white Christian male from small town America how does he reconcile that in his own head does he have any, I mean you spend all this time with him does he acknowledge that tension is it an important tension even? I think it's the core to his identity of the end of my book really explores a lot of the contradictions I try to step back and explore the contradictions of his character and the empire he's built and he fashions himself as a scrapper from a flyover state and yet he has a regular table at the Four Seasons restaurant in midtown Manhattan he says he never cares about going to cocktail parties and yet Barbara Walters and Henry Kissinger are some of his closest friends so it's this duality between needing to feel persecuted but also being the consummate insider and that's why my book sees so many echoes to Richard Nixon Ailes there's so many echoes of Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes and it is interesting that his formative career experience at the 27 year old was working for Nixon because he imbibed that worldview of being persecuted by the insiders and yet desperately kind of seeking out that confirmation of that you are an insider and so I feel like you can't understand Ailes he is so powerful and yet he needs the world to feel like he's being held down So Amy do you... Gabe started off basically saying that he saw Fox on the way down do you think that... do the numbers bear that out or is Fox as powerful as it ever was? Well if you look at the straight audience numbers the last few years have not been great for cable news in general Fox first of all has more audience than MSNBC, CNN and HLN combined still at this point but 2013 overall the three cables are down in prime time 11% Fox is down 6% MSNBC was down 24% CNN was in between the election year was not a great year audience wise for cable either Fox was flat in prime time MSNBC had a little bump overall there was only about a 3% rise it's a small audience so you compare that 1.7 million that Fox has on average for prime time to 20 million roughly that are watching a network evening newscast so it is a small audience there are though other measures to consider when it comes to the impact that those audience members have they are a very engaged audience and it become much more politically divided so if you look at just the ideological makeup the party IDs self described of these audiences from 2000 to 2012 you've got 10% point increase in Republicans on Fox 10% point decrease on the Dem side so that you now have twice as many twice as much of their audience describing themselves as Republican and Democrats MSNBC has even gone further where they now have more than three times their audience that's describing as Democrats the time that is spent with cable news for those of you far exceeds the time that's spent with local or network evening news so the engagement even if it's a small group the question is what happens to those messages that comes through in that content one of the other things that we look at is what's in the content itself and here you can see read a which consumers a particular if you look at cable get a very different sense of what's important that day the important news events of the day so agenda setting as well as what to think of those events the data so if you know if you're if you're a liberal MSNBC watcher you assume that you assume very proudly that the quality of the information that you're getting on that network is superior to the quality of the information that conservatives are getting from Fox and I'm sure you know and the same as the reverse is also true does is there what qualitatively does the data show or the differences between the two networks should if you look at it from where you sit is there are they essentially equivalent in the way that they operate when you you apply your metrics to disaggregate well there's more I mean there's more opinion on MSNBC prime time at this point but if you look at the they're both making choices about agenda you look at coverage of the typhoon story versus Obama care which happened the same week the typhoon disaster you had 80 times as much coverage on Fox of the health care story as you did of typhoon you had four times as much on MSNBC early 2007 Fox covered to very very small degree the debate over Iraq which MSNBC and CNN covered to a far greater degree so that choice about what to put on the air what to talk about is one that has an influence in terms of you know what what people are hearing what messages are getting I want to pick up on one point because it connects to this scene that I was captivated by in my book which explores the the moment that the Statue of Saddam Hussein came down in Central Baghdad is you know weeks into the war it looked like the American forces were marching to topple the regime and inside Fox and all the networks but Fox really pushed this they made that image of the statue coming down like the fall of the Berlin Wall and I interviewed producers who were in the control room and they were literally trying to make this image this larger message about the American victory in Iraq and after that statue came down Fox producers made a conscious decision to limit the coverage of the war the actual amount of time spent on covering the war even though American casualties you know the numbers continue to creep up the volume of coverage came down because it fit this narrative that they were building literally they were programming it like movie directors this was the narrative that the Americans were marching into Baghdad and the war had this moment of victory and then was going to wrap up but actually as we know the messy reality on the ground was that the insurgency was just beginning and so I think you see when you went and you had those conversations with those producers how did they how did they explain it did they explain that they were doing it because victory rated well or were they explaining it because they had they wanted the American people to feel good about a war that they similarly believed in what I think is so fascinating is that the complexity of that so you have the true believers around Ailes who are real conservative believers ideologues and they believed in the American mission but then you have a lot of producers who are down in the mid level at Fox who are just TV guys and they know what's good television and what's good television is is essentially an action movie where the Americans are G.I. Joe and they're kicking butt and so you have that mix of commerce and partisanship that came together to make the war this incredibly seductive story for Fox's audience and that's from 2001 from 9-11 through 05 that's when Fox's audience exploded and they passed CNN in 2002 and they never looked back but it was really the war where I think Fox's audience found this type of programming that spoke to them you know Fox referred to the American troops as our troops it was this notion of they were speaking for the home team it was almost like an NFL pregame show where the announcers were building up the audience before the game Amy do you find that that the viewers of these channels respond to different sets of news that news is optimistic about certain things that they tune in more when there's pessimism about the issues that they care about they tune out? Well I think one of the other questions that centers around that is to what degree are the messages from the campaigns or the candidates themselves getting into those channels and then getting into the very engaged audiences and then getting beyond that because at the same time that we've seen this polarization occur in the audiences the two cable audiences were seeing it occur across the country in the electorate I mean the political divide that we're seeing in the electorate has grown tremendously over the last 25 years in particular since 2000 but so one of the things that we've seen also is that in the conversations around the last two presidential campaigns each of both MSNBC and Fox are focusing far more on delivering the negative messages about the opposing candidate than they are focusing on their own candidate at all but driving in that negative messages which is more and more coming directly from the mouths of the campaigns and the surrogates the degree to which the journalistic voices in there has decreased 50% between 2000 and 2012 across the media. Gabe you kind of just following you on Twitter over the horse a few years seemed like you were watching Fox News almost 24 hours a day I need to apologize to my wife who's in the audience who was subjected to a lot of that viewership viewing do you view do you view Fox and MSNBC as essentially equivalence or do you think that do you think that Fox the way that Fox operates is that journalistically or I think Fox is a much more powerful media platform than MSNBC which is a testament to Ailes' talents as both a political strategist and a television producer you know I think it's important to step back for much of Fox's history the notion of fair and balanced for a lot of the journalism and political establishment was something that was hotly debated but it was actually debated Fox will say we have liberal voices on Fox they will say that there was the split between opinion and news opinion was in prime time news during the day and prior to 2008 and 2009 you could actually have somewhat of a debate about that I think MSNBC the difference is that they have decided to go all in as pure aggressive liberal programming beyond some voices like it really is just democratic TV whereas Ailes realized that his audience did not just want red meat they wanted to see the conflict they wanted to see liberals throwing some bones to conservatives to chew on and so that made it a much more powerful platform because it wasn't strictly propaganda in the eyes of its audience it really was viewed by millions of people as news and so I think that's what the difference is MSNBC is really just speaking to a progressive audience it's kind of a progressive echo chamber whereas Fox really tried to say we're trying to be a news network no different than the New York Times no different than CNN one of the other places where you can see the power being exerted is in license fees arrangements I mean Fox has come down very very very hard on demanding very high license fees from the carriers and have succeeded in doing so and so now the cost for Fox is far greater than the cost for either CNN or MSNBC but it's sort of seeing it from a business standpoint feeling the power that the corporation senses they can put forward and demanding that revenue come through so just talk about the process of the process of reporting this book the stories in the book about you reporting it are kind of astonishing that they really desperately did not want you to do this book and you made you went to great lengths to try to try to shut you down and so you were you tried to report it like you reported on the New Republic where you went down the mass dead and you tried to call everybody until you got people to talk to you on the phone but how does it reflect the Fox their method I think you know one of the big revelations of the book is that the reporting validates the idea that Fox is a political organization that has journalists working there and Ailes built the network on the culture of a political campaign where secrecy is paramount leaks are ruthlessly punished there is a daily message of the day just the way a campaign war room would say this is the message we're pushing the day that's the way Fox operates and so a reporter like me who tries to paint a nuanced measured picture get a lot of voices talk to everyone assemble and reconstruct this complicated world is a direct threat to that that desire for control so it was the most challenging reporting assignment of my career layered on top of that is the fact that Ailes as a leader is terrifying to his executives the level of fear he inspires and the people who work for him made it such that people would only meet me in diners some people didn't ever want to talk to me on the phone there was kind of this game of cloak and dagger that the reporting required that I had never experienced before most people think covering the media we're in the media we're used to talking to journalists Fox is a whole separate world you think that they were right to fear repercussions from Ailes you know I think I think perception is reality but I think Ailes has demonstrated a willingness to play hardball in a way that most people don't associate with regular corporations you know he has had people followed by private investigators I heard he had me followed by a private investigator and I pity that that soul because I'm so boring that I can just imagine some PI sitting in his car idling being like God why am I here but yeah I think Ailes has he's demonstrated violence in his career you know there's a scene in my book that took place during Rudy Giuliani's 1989 mayoral campaign in New York City in which some AIDS activists disrupted a Giuliani fundraiser and Ailes jumped into the protest and started beating up one of the protesters he's gotten in fist fights in the office he threw a water bottle at one of his top lieutenants he said he missed him on purpose who knows if that's true so I think you know he is this larger than life figure yeah well I I think now you know I think he's so I think that you know this kind of charismatic larger than life aspect to him in gender sphere and I think whether it's validated or not the fact is people who work for him are scared of him alright well why don't we actually open it up to some questions yeah that's a great question I think the answer is no you know Roger Ailes it's important to step back for a second you know Roger Ailes ended up working for Murdoch because he had a complete career implosion at NBC where he was working from 1993 to beginning of 96 he did not fit into the corporate culture of NBC he was like a caged animal he was investigated by the HR department for allegedly making anti-semitic remark he just was completely out of sorts in a corporate environment so when Murdoch hired him he did two things for Roger Ailes he gave him capital Murdoch spent hundreds of millions of dollars literally putting Fox News onto cable systems buying access to cable systems and he gave Ailes freedom to be Ailes News Corporation Murdoch company is famous for having this pirate-like culture where these larger-than-life characters can just be themselves as long as they produce profits there's really no kind of standards and practices that would keep them in check and so really it was this ultimate marriage of convenience where Murdoch gave Ailes both the freedom to create this thing talk a little bit about the very interesting psychology of that relationship I say it's codependent because they are not particularly close personally their relationship is ebbed and flowed through the years for example Rupert Murdoch is very close with Robert Thompson who was his hand-picked editor of the Wall Street Journal they vacation together they're close personal friends Ailes and Murdoch are not close personally they both need each other and the number one thing Murdoch needs from Ailes are the profits because at this point Fox News is the profit engine of Murdoch's empire without Fox News everything else kind of doesn't work because Fox is the number one reliable source of earnings every single year and so even though Ailes has presented Murdoch with problems Murdoch notably cosied up to Obama in 2008 there were intimations that the Murdoch empire would become more centrist Murdoch's kids have feuded with Ailes through the years there's kind of been these flash points but every time there's a flash point Ailes flexes his corporate muscle and Murdoch backs off and says you know what Roger you can have Fox you can do your thing and so I think it's this interesting tension in their relationship where even when they know there's been conflict between the two men they can't survive without each other is it anybody else in that sort of way or is it really Ailes the only person in his universe who can so consistently make him bed I think Ailes is the only person who over time has demonstrated this ability to challenge him I mean Judith Regan was a famously difficult person she got fired from News Corp you know editors Murdoch has discharged editors at will through the years Ailes is the one corporate executive who survived and I think it's a testament to the money the money is just too good Is there anything else in the history of does any of this resonate in other analogues in the history of media that you can think of are there I mean if you think way way back to the beginning of the journalism in this country where you had your yellow newspapers and politically driven newspapers certainly the degree to which newspapers built around political ideology and that's how people got their news the newspapers then went very far in a different direction in terms of trying to have a broad agenda saying we are trying to come at this with as equal sense of viewpoints as possible so absolutely but this certainly speaks to a broader question about what's happening in our country today and it's actually an area of research that the research center is just launching a very big project to look at polarization and the degree to which it's occurring the degree to which it's not occurring what kind of things are connected and not connected including media choice and to what degree are individuals choice of media and segmentation along media lines whether it's their cable viewing or their circles in social media or the feeds that they get inside twitter or any of these others to what degree is that creating different identities inside this country around what's happening and political orientation Yes Hello, my name is Oliver Kim, I'm the correspondent with an Austrian newspaper here in DC against the press in your book at one point you quote Murdoch saying that I think the values of those who report the news aren't the same ones as the values of the people who receive the news and I think this is also kind of a point made in Jill LePore's article about your book in the New Yorker so there's apparently for many people a big gap between what we as journalists consider newsworthy and interesting and what they in their lives consider important Do you think that gap still exists as it did at the time when you know Fox News became great 10, 15 years ago and what does that mean given that Fox I think the average viewer is 68 so they're pretty old they don't really have a very well functioning online strategy but that gap still exists I think for many people not necessarily for us so who will take over the torch of Ailes once he doesn't do that So two really good questions I think if I can maybe answer your first point I think it's interesting to look at the founding DNA the culture of Fox when Ailes founded it in 1986 and he brought with him to Fox his mentor a man named Chet Collier who was a long time television executive came out of the talk show world Daytime TV was Chet Collier's specialty and there was a saying that Collier pushed around Fox News where he said people don't want to be informed they want to feel informed and I think that really speaks to the culture of Fox News and also the cable news more broadly is this notion of how to create programming that looks and sounds and feels like news but ultimately is appealing to an audience on sort of a deeper emotional level speaking to their cultural affinities and for Fox's case it's a heartland and a conservative audience and so as Fox's audience has grown older you know we've talked about this the programming has become more conservative you know Fox 2000 to 2012 has become more conservative as its audience has grown more conservative and older and vice versa at MSNBC is it's carved out it's niche it's niche is a counter to that and you know part of what we're what we're seeing is the degree to which there are you know audiences that are looking to hear particular messages looking to reinforce the way they see things and if you look at even just the makeup of the programming so we think about reported packages versus on-air interviews versus you know live reporting one of the things that we looked at in the cable stream is that mix and over a six-year period you see a huge increase across the board at these cable stations of the reliance on scheduled interviews so on-air interviews as opposed to going on and doing reported packages now there can be a number of influences into making that decision but it also gives you more control you schedule the guest in advance you kind of know their sensibilities you know what they're going to say it takes less work so from a reporting power perspective there's a difference as well but it clearly has been a shift in terms of the dynamic of what consumers are getting What I think is interesting to me is the point that you're making the politics of Fox are very much cultural politics that something like the war on Christmas is not really I mean it's ridiculously disassociated I think from reality but also ridiculously disassociated from policy and politics as we kind of understand it and one thing I've been told by Republicans is that in DC they're just as likely to watch MSNBC as they are to watch Fox because Fox has so little to do with what's happening here and MSNBC is so much more engaged with debates in Congress and happenings in the White House and foreign policy so just to on the basis of being informed about about the world Fox is kind of off pursuing these pseudo narratives that they pursue that really they're political but not in any sort of conventional sense of political journalism Well I think what's so interesting is that there are times where those narratives do align with the political system like on big stories like healthcare, Iraq but Ailes if he can't find the big story that resonates with his audience then they'll make up stories you know Fox was pushing the notion of Obama's that was a huge storyline that we were having this sort of extra constitutional authority being invested in these policy heads that was a huge story on Fox wasn't a big story elsewhere in the media and wasn't that connected to what was actually happening in Washington so there are moments where Fox's big story that they're pushing will intersect with the Washington conversation but I write in my book it can be its own self-contained universe there is a whole conversation happening on Fox news but not only also in conservative radio online that is it's just literally it's not, if you had a Venn diagram there wouldn't be that much overlap with what is happening in the mainstream well one of the, you know if you think back to again in 2007 when the earlier immigration bill was up for passage and that was when conservative talk show hosts which were both radio and television which included Lou Dobbs at the time on CNN publicly said we're going to defeat this bill you know we're taking upon ourselves to defeat this bill and we looked at the coverage the last you know days you know couple of weeks before the bill got killed and indeed it was by far the number one topic across these conservative talk show hosts across the media overall that we studied it was fourth and you know a much smaller percentage of the coverage overall yeah, yes I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about how influential Fox news actually is in American politics how much is it changing electoral outcomes, how much is it changing the agenda in Washington you hear two narratives for example Fox news sort of elevated the status of the Tea Party and made it a major movement in America yet you also hear a narrative about Roger Ailes desperately wanting to elect a president in 2012 and he failed well I think what I explore in the book through the reporting is that you know Fox throughout the 2000s really both those goals were in sync both the ratings and the politics that Fox is putting on the screen was advancing the interest of the Bush White House and the apex the real peak of Fox's political power to elect a president to sort of shape the macro direction of our country was really around 2005 and 2006 there's a party I describe in the book that took place at Cafe Milano where Fox news was celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Fox News Sunday it's meet the press style show and everyone in Washington turned out it was literally as one person very close to Ailes told me they all came to kiss the ring because Fox had revolutionized Carl Rowe was talking about the Republican majority it looked like we were at the dawn of a real new age and then Hurricane Katrina happened and the fortune of the Bush White House spiraled out of control but what I'm trying to say is that now Fox has its audience the viewers like you talked about are so loyal but it's really a base audience Fox's power I think is really best viewed through the prism of midterm elections and in 2010 the tea party that Ailes nurtured helped us a huge swing in Congress the biggest I believe since 1948 but that's a base audience they can't appeal beyond that to a national majority so I think now I think Fox's power as a national voice will continue to wane that said it's like we've talked about the polarization in Congress the districts are so gerrymandered that you know Fox News will still get Republican voters to turn out for congressional seats but I don't think 2012 is an indicator that they can appeal beyond that to a national majority to what extent do they try to go liberals something like the white santa controversy that happened and it seems like some of the gaff some of the controversies that they generate aren't even intended to rile their own base they're intended more to just give something for people on Twitter in the and MSNBC they can't get enough of it I mean look at what what happened after President Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker in a recent interview that you know Fox News was responsible for distorting his image to the Republican base you know Megan Kelly took those comments and did an entire segment with Charles Krauthammer you know about you know the president being all riled up about Fox News I mean they love it when they are the persecuted ones when liberals are outraged about Fox it gives them free content I mean they can't get enough of it yes I don't know who it is why don't you add Ibrahim Mukman with Mukman & Associates I'm curious as to L and his leadership's evolution up doing segregation in the south and one of the things I saw as some of the people who were that white majority as they got older it seems like some of them started changing I think about George Wallace and other people so are is there a shift I mean how do they rationalize segregation and stuff in you know back trying to go back to the good old days in the 50s when that was persecution and hell for a lot of people in this country well I mean I think you know Ailes is interesting on the race issue I'll just talk a little bit about his experience you know he came out of the daytime TV world in the 1960s he was born in 1940 so you know he came of age at a time when civil rights was becoming a national issue and I think he is interesting that he put a lot of civil rights leaders on his show the Mike Douglas show when he was a producer so he knows that he felt on certain issues that he was on board with civil rights but also as a political issue he knew as Nixon did that you have to talk about it in ways that doesn't alienate your audience and that's why Fox Nixon kind of delivered I mean he had a southern strategy and he designed his politics in order to kind of stoke racial resentment you know if not by explicitly defending not explicitly by defending Jim Crow but by talking about crime and it does that in its own way by elevating stories you know Bill O'Reilly went on a big campaign when there was that crime in Norfolk, Virginia where he made it a black on white crime so Fox will cover things from the other perspective if MSNBC is talking about a Trayvon Martin case Fox will elevate a black on a white case to make it sort of have an equivalency in the media conversation so that's where I think you see some of the old tensions from the civil rights era playing out in our national media conversation I mean the black debate was obviously a touched on that and I think going back to the 2008 election Fox was pushing this notion of the new black Panther party that there was you know unreported the Justice Department would refuse to take up a civil rights crime against a black group because they were trying to curry favor with that constituency now I think that appeals to Fox's audience that grew up at a time when crossing and segregation was a big issue well Ailes is also though he understands to an extent demographic weakness in that he's kind of flirted with the idea of doing more to reach out to a Latino audience I mean that he's tried I think what's so interesting is that Ailes what his political agenda tells him to do is often at odds with his own personal politics and I tell the story in the book about how in public he talked about Fox's need to moderate on immigration and yet in private his view is that the US should send Navy SEALs to the border to secure the border with orders to shoot people coming across now I don't think Latino groups would find that immigration policy that palatable but Ailes will talk about the Republican party's need to win Latino voters but he can't square that with his desire to seal off the United States from the southern border have you looked at the Hispanic population is huge and growing in this country it is going to be a major part of the electorate and is a major issue for the Republican party to figure out if they want to have a majority vote because the Hispanic population is growing they're more native born than in the past they're more English speaking in the past or they're feeling connected to this electorate and will be a very very powerful voting base you've seen data that looks at the different ways in which the networks the different terminology the networks use about race when they talk about it or the different amount of attention that they devote to some of these we have not we did a study a while back that looked at Hispanic oriented media versus US media in general and there were great differences in terms of the orientation there but not not within the US media yes thank you my name is James I'm a scholar of journalism with Reported Foundation my question is about the philosophy before behind Fox News or whatever the network overall management or the establishment but you can see that the House Sarah Palin, Mike and the former speaker Gingrich but these are losers so what's the philosophy behind them backing these losers do they still have real audience at the same time that my research and actually just a couple of weeks ago or no I'm sorry a couple of years ago during the president election there's a report said that the audience if you listen or watch the Fox News for six months or longer your brain power will be shrinking so from your research during the book Gabe how much is your brain power shrunk over the course of it I've noticed some diminishment well I can answer the first point I'd have to look at your wife answer this but I'd be happy to I'd like to see that report maybe after you can give me a link and I'll take a look at it but Ailes what's so interesting is that those three people you spoke about are in their own way they're all compelling television performers and Ailes looks first and foremost for people who make good television which is sometimes not helpful for the Republican Party for the brand of the party but after 2008 he was you know blown away like many conservatives were with Sarah Palin's convention speech and race to hire her because she was this magnetic television personality and so I think the people that he elevates on Fox are first and foremost have to be TV people and whether their political winners is secondary have you mom as a one of the most die-hard Fox watchers what are there characters on there just as a matter of pure television characters or shows there that you with kind of even hardened journalist end up watching and saying I can't turn away this is such awesome television in its own special way Fox and Friends has a place in my heart it is the quintessential Fox news show and for one main reason because it is essentially Roger Ailes' show he's kind of the unofficial executive producer of the show you know he picked Steve Ducey who used to in the 90's host an NBC syndicated show called House Party which I think tells you kind of everything you need to know about Fox and Friends Steve Ducey from way back he's been a journeyman television personality and it kind of gets at everything that is irresistible about Fox it's a spectacle you never quite know watching Fox and Friends what's going to happen do you have a favorite segment is there one moment if you could watch it over and over again I love the moment when they they do the talking points because it is the cheery morning show format and they sit in the three hosts exchange the most vitriolic right wing talking points but they do it with that morning show smile and it's that dissonance that you just can't turn away can you point out that when Glenn Beck made his famous comment that Obama has a deep seated hatred for white people that was during a Fox and Friends interview they elicited that he could sort of sense the Fox id on the set and drew that out of him yes so Roger L's career is basically as a partisan propagandist before he got back into media and as part of he's sort of a spin meister trying to get the Republican message to be accepted as truth the most important aspect of spin is to get it accepted as not as spin as legitimacy and with Roger L's determination to constantly say that Fox News is fair and balanced I think just a few weeks ago he was talking about it we are the most objective news network and he goes about that how much of that is his need for spin to get his the concept of Fox News and what they do as legitimate how much is it that he legitimizes a pure news source well I can't get in his head so I don't want to answer whether he truly believes it but I can tell you what what he's talked about how important that is and I think the fair and balanced mantra was central to Fox News's success without it it likely would have failed and Ailes himself had said when he launched Fox News that there had been by his count four failures of a right wing TV network they tried to do it it got ghettoized as right wing it wasn't taken seriously by the establishment they couldn't get kind of legitimacy so to position Fox as something that it wasn't that it was objective that it was fair and balanced was central to this idea of it being taken as a legitimate news source they have a seat as we speak in the White House briefing room they're sitting there alongside the New York Times the Washington Post the Associated Press I mean Fox it's one of the most masterful sales jobs in American history that for 17 years until recently that fiction is kind of it's undeniable that it is a conservative news network it's Roger Ailes' megaphone but for much of Fox's history fair and balanced if you asked most people beyond the sort of far progressive left they would say yeah they got some conservatives but they give both sides so it was central to that selling that legitimacy Hannity wouldn't have been successful with Alan Combs and I think the idea that it was an equal fight I didn't get to interview Alan Combs I would love to interview him now just to get his take of what it was like he was set up to fail every night and what that experience was like for him yes Michelle Monat with Meridian International Center congratulations on the book and our remarkable media tour for the book I've heard you multiple times about how he looks at women in America women as the audience the issues that are around women women of all ages and what women have had influence in his life earlier and perhaps now as well thank you that's a great question I think the women on Fox play the role of a 1950s of 1950s gender or sort of hyper feminized they make up the hair Fox is a you could actually speak to the specific data possibly but it's more of a male audience greater than in majority male than female viewers so he is programming he's putting women on the screen that appeal to a male's idea of feminine beauty in sort of Roger Ailes' imagination to an older male to an older 1950s kind of man I think the gender dynamics on Fox it's a male dominated network Roger Ailes comes out of the TV industry which historically was a male dominated industry there's kind of a sorted episode in my book that I described some episodes he had with women that were very sexist, very chauvinist it reflects this kind of male dominated society that he grew out of Fox they're very intelligent I'm not commenting on their intelligence but they're there first for their beauty and to serve that role to kind of represent the feminine ideal to his audience yeah well it's interesting you know Roger Ailes had a had a very domineering mother she was the ambitious one in his family his father didn't go to college neither did his parents went to college but his father was a very frustrated factory foreman he was the one who pushed him to do acting lessons take piano lessons she insisted that the kids, his two siblings the kids get straight A's in school she was the overbearing pushy one and I think it's interesting that Roger Ailes very quickly in ensue his adult life set out to get married on his own he's married three times, he married his first wife in college he on the one hand sort of idolizes or sort of upholds the traditional notion of the American family you know marriage is important to him but on the other hand you know he's been divorced two times, honest to his third marriage so it's that you know that there's tension there and I think it's a very 1950s tension we now know through history that the American family wasn't this leave it to beaver image underneath it was darker there was more of a reality there and I think Fox captures that on the surface it looks the women there serve a purpose but underneath there is a darker reality that the women there are serving are there to be a subservient role to the male hosts I think one thing I want to point out is Megan Kelly I think is an interesting contradiction there you know she is a feisty host she will speak up and challenge the male host and book the line and I think she's done a very good job of carving out her own power center there that other female hosts haven't been able to do do you have anything to add about the gender I mean I would just say that it's one of the interesting things to watch in the coming years as we move towards the 2016 election is the dynamic particularly among young people and social issues in this country and the degree to which young people tend to be much more liberal in their social issues much more accepting of some of these social issues and also the degree to which we're seeing women that much of our data has shown are taking more and more a primary role in the household the primary breadwinner in the household the number of households that have a woman as a primary breadwinner has increased very substantially over the last several years both in terms of those that are single parent households but not always there are also many a great increase in those where the dad's at home or he's not the primary breadwinner so a real shift in dynamic there in terms of the role that the female plays, that the mom plays in the family dynamic and how that plays out across the broader political spectrum of our country one related question that gave is the revolution in social mores around gay rights and gay marriage kind of penetrated every aspect of culture how does Fox News respond to that? Have they basically given up on the issue or are they still fighting a rearguard action against you know I think they the fact that there's not a there's a war on Christmas tradition but there's not a war on marriage tradition at Fox that shows me that they are they'll do pockets of coverage but institutionally it's not Do they have gay friends? Yes I think that's very interesting is that Ailes personally he's not he's very pro-life abortion is a very black and white issue for him but on gay marriage he is personally does not there's gay anchors at Fox what I think is interesting is that Ailes sort of used the world through political groups conflict and so he's very skeptical of gay activists I've heard stories from people sort of when gay interest groups have there's one episode I reported where they met with him and he insisted on having a witness in the room because he was worried they were going to twist his words and make him seem homophobic so he is kind of paranoid and skeptical of the politics around gay activism but on a personal level he has gay friends it's not a big issue for him let's take two more yeah I work here and so the future of news is the framing here and the notion that to some degree the news we have now is very similar to the news from 1780 or 1800 that some degree the technology of the past century has sort of changed the news in a strange way and that we're actually now naturalizing back to a real meaning more partisan much more demand driven not limited by technology or even regulation so project out 30 years or 2050 project out 30 minutes so demographically Amy and technologically so how will the media we have now change in the next 30 years will be is there a positive trend is it just more of this demand driven organization what does media look like Amy and then Gabe well we are not in the prediction business so I will not necessarily predict what I you know what we do see happening with the development of technology is first and foremost that in all these new realms of technology where it's the various mobile devices from the things you wear in your ear to the things you hold in your hand or your pocket wearing your wrist social media news is a part of what people do in these spaces and it's pretty substantial part I mean again and again when we act about activity base different activities in these spaces news ranks very high up there and it's not all it's it functions differently in different spaces so in some cases people are seeking it out in other cases in social media they bump into it they come across it well certainly it includes civic minded policy journalism the you know when we defined it in our social media surveys that we did this past fall we talked about it as events and issues that are happening that go beyond yourself and your family and friends so it does include entertainment and then when we go through the list of topics entertainment is up there but the information about my local community is very very high it's second national events is very high up there too so there's a pretty wide mix of the kind of things most people get news across at least six different topics in these spaces so news is a part that's in terms of looking at it from a civic engagement that's a good thing in terms of the place for news in this country technology companies are realizing that news is in these spaces so they're reaching out whether it's Facebook or Twitter or Google creating tools for we see a lot of content tech organizations that are now moving into wanting to understand and in some cases do original reporting because news is a part of what people do in these spaces so news is likely to be a part of the dynamic as technology moves ahead one of the other questions though is who's going to be the influencer of the news that any individual gets and to what degree are we moving into areas where there is a much narrower mix of the kind of information that one person gets from their circle of friends to their technologies that's an area where there's still a lot of learning to be done and it's something we're going to be digging into this year. Sorry, I'm hiding the back. Hadaskold from Politico nice to see you in person Gabe. I wanted to ask you Gabe about the reaction to your books since you've published it for everything I know you talked about Maslin yesterday on WNYC so if you wanted to mention that but also whether that surprised you all the different reviews how people are now saying that the New York Times bestseller list is skewed and you're not actually number 9 and all of these things does this surprise you? Do you think it's coming from the Ailes War Room? What do you think it says about how we all view Fox News the fact that your books have been out for a couple weeks now and people are still obsessing over it and writing articles about it every week? Well I'll say a few things I'm thrilled that people are debating and arguing and engaging with the work as a reporter that's what you want you know I want to start conversations I hope what I report reveals things in a new light and people can argue with it it can confirm their assumptions challenge their assumptions so I'm thrilled about that as to the reviews there have been a lot of positive reviews the Janet Maslin review and the Times was not a positive review I mean I'm fine with negative reviews I think negative reviews serve a place I am interested that as was reported by Gawker a close personal friend of hers Peter Boyer who was personally hired by Roger Ailes is written about very critically in my book I do a lot of hard reporting about his relationship with Ailes and his coverage of Ailes as a journalist before he was hired so but that's a question for the New York Times to answer about whether she should have disclosed her friendship whether they talked about the review and hopefully the Times will address it but that's a question for the Times as for the pushback I think it's so interesting that the coverage of my book was treated like a political campaign and I was as a reporter thrust into the unconventional position of being the story not reporting the story and in the three years I spent working on this book for a lot of that time Ailes through Serg it's mainly in conservative media portrayed me as a Soros back attack dog you know on the payroll personal payroll of George Soros one article called me Jason Blair with steroids I mean they was very much very much of an effort to define me in the eyes of Ailes' audience which actually for my purposes as a reporter was very revealing because it revealed the way Ailes operates and views media so in a certain way it confirmed all the reporting I had done about Ailes in a way maybe he didn't intend it to I mean it's an interesting phenomenon like being on clearly you were on the receiving end of a campaign to discredit you and the question is then how do you as a journalist respond I mean because part of the seems like part of the the perils and the temptation is that if you have a political campaign being waged against you which is to kind of try to reciprocate in some sort of way can you talk about talk about your thinking and how you've gone about kind of processing, parrying overlooking some of the things that have been thrown in your way the best way to respond is just by doing the journalism I do I mean my clips my bylines my work speaks for itself so Ailes created a campaign to portray me as some left-wing activist but you know I've covered the New York Times I've covered Obama administration officials aggressively so anyone who reads my work will see that I'm not that person but to your point about what to address you know it was a challenge at the one hand I did not want to get into the weeds and play at that political level because I'm not in the world of politics I'm in the world of journalism but on the other hand I couldn't let outright smears and distortions go unchecked because you know unfortunately we live in a world where you know things that wind up on Google are there for eternity so there were certain cases where I tried to shed light on the campaign because sunlight is the best disinfectant and I think people could see what Ailes was doing for what it was and I don't think it ever crossed over into the mainstream outside of the conservative echo chamber do you think it was do you think Ailes was masterminding a lot of this himself or do you think that he was outsourcing this to I think it was a mix I know there were cases where people who were doing things that he may or may not have been aware of but he was okay with it there were cases where he was directly involved so you know he has you know one of the enduring talents Ailes has demonstrated his ability to have plausible deniability he always can say I had nothing to do with it and you know Fox is not gonna release no one's gonna disclose emails from him that show he was orchestrating it so at the end of the day it will be his word against mine but my sources who were aware of those conversations told me that he was you know he was pushing this message that I was somehow a Soros activist and you could see that message then radiate out through the conservative media and I think one last point I think it's so interesting to see that if the conservative coverage of me in my book was a legitimate news story on the right why has there not been any coverage of the book now that it's out I mean there have been just a smattering of articles about it but you know Breitbart News committed more than 9000 words to covering me in the run up to the book's publication and has been silent virtually silent since it's been out so that to me shows me it's an orchestrated political campaign it's not a legitimate news story because if it was newsworthy they would continue to cover it but somebody around Ailes or Fox has said ignore this book on the right and it's working because the national review the weekly standard Breitbart News daily caller they have virtually ignored this book because obviously someone very close to Ailes does not want them to cover it so has this experience changed the way that you think about right wing media because you seem to be saying that you know that there's I think they work and I mean there is if you are on the if you are on the right you cannot challenge Fox I have had people very very qualified you know high level Republicans say if you are on the right and you have to sell a book you want to get your political ideas out there if you challenge Fox you will be banned and then you are virtually irrelevant in American conservative politics and so that is why I've always wondered why you know I'm a nonpartisan reporter I cover everyone aggressively the New York Times Fox News no different why isn't there an enterprising conservative reporter at the weekly standard or the national review who is aggressively covering Fox News and I don't I mean it's so revealing of this fact that they view Fox as the champion of their cause not as a legitimate institution that they should cover aggressively the same way they cover any other story and that to me is a testament to Ailes' power that he has virtually dominated and controlled the way conservatives get their message out to their audience why don't we just walk off question which is have you gotten any sense of what Ailes thinks of the actual book because you obviously had a great sense of his anxiety leading up to the publication of the book what word have you gotten about well I've heard that the general word around Fox is that it is not a topic to be discussed about in sort of official capacity I talked to a source who spent more than an hour with Ailes and this person said Ailes did not mention the book once and this same source had been in conversations with Ailes where he had been apoplectic about the book and said that this book is going to ruin him and define him and I was a subject of conversation so I think it's almost a case from what I've heard that he's trying to wish it into non-existence and that is just fascinating that on Fox if you almost can create a reality by just not covering something and I think it will be interesting to see if I think his audience should read this book because it reveals a consequential figure not only for Democrats but for Republicans and I think Ailes is trying to do his best to make sure conservatives don't see the book Excellent, well thank you both and thank you all