Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets

job—and that you don’t lie to him.
    Ailes wanted Smith because of his informality. “I came up in the era when the newscaster told you what was happening and what to think about it,” Ailes told me. “Fox changed that some. It’s very important to get the anchors on an even field with the audience. Never let your talent talk down to people.”
    A lot of people at Fox think of Smith as a liberal, partly because he tends to wear his heart on his sleeve, especially on issues with a racial component. A good ol’ boy from Holly Springs, Mississippi, who attended private segregated academies, he is, like a lot of Southerners of his generation, sensitive to the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. In his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, he was visibly infuriated by the failures of government, including the Bush administration, to relieve the suffering of the victims. “When I got down there and saw what was happening, I got in touch with Roger and he said, ‘Bring in the cavalry. The government is lying? Get the word out!’ You don’t expect people in the United States to be living in third-world conditions.”
    Another crucial time in the cable day is 4:00 p.m., when the markets close. Ailes gave the job to Neil Cavuto, one of the original CNBC jailbreakers.
    “I left money on the table when I came to Fox,” Cavuto says. “A lot of us did. This is an easy place to come to these days; we’re like the Yankees in a good season. We pay better than the competition. But back then we didn’t. Many, many of the people who left to go with Roger took pay cuts. Nobody’s sorry.”
    Shortly after making the move, Cavuto was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was fearful about breaking the news to his boss. “A lot of television executives would have wanted to get rid of me,” he says.
    Ailes asked how the disease might affect Cavuto’s performance.
    “It could cause me to lose my train of thought on the air,” Cavuto said.
    “Hell, you already do that,” said Ailes.
    “And I could lose the use of my legs.”
    “So what? If you do, we’ll build you a ramp.”
    Cavuto is now in his sixteenth year in the 4:00 p.m. slot, and he is senior vice president of Fox Business Network. “I feel toward Roger like I do toward my own father,” he told me. “He’s somebody I can always count on.”
    This is a very widespread sentiment at Fox News, but it comes with a price. In Ailes’s world, loyalty is rewarded, disloyalty punished. It is a point he made early, and emphatically, in the case of another financial journalist, Jim Cramer.
    Cramer was a hot commodity when Ailes and Murdoch lured him to Fox News in 1999. A onetime president of the
Harvard Crimson
, he was a successful hedge fund manager and a well-known writer and commentator who appeared as a talking head on various network shows, including ABC’s
Good Morning America
and CNBC’s
Squawk Box.
    Cramer saw right away that Ailes could teach him how to be effective on television. “Life with Roger was an education,” he says. “I learned more about TV from him than anyone else. He invented the lightning round. He taught me that the only guests worth having on a business show are CEOs—take anybody lesser and it lowers your credibility. And he showed me the power of repetition. I once told him that I had said on the air three times how much I liked Apple stock. He laughed and said, ‘Jim, after eighteen times, and only after eighteen times, will some Americans have heard it.’”
    Another lesson was on the importance of longevity. “We were at a broadcast dinner and Ailes said, ‘I’m going to introduce you to the most influential TV personalities in the room.’ He took me over to meet Gene Rayburn, the game show host who had been on the air forever. ‘People like him, they want him in their homes,’ Roger said. He knew politics but these old show-business people, like Rayburn and Bob Hope and Judy Garland, were his real heroes.”
    A few years earlier, in