The Rise of Fox News | 6. What Hath We Wrought? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Slow Burn
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Rise of Fox News | 6. What Hath We Wrought?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Slow Burn) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.
Slow Burn episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog
Episode: The Rise of Fox News | 6. What Hath We Wrought?
Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 01:17:01
Episode Shownotes
The 2004 presidential race would be the first fully Fox News election—a contest that was framed by Fox, and fought on its terms. But the fight over Fox News was about more than just partisan politics. It also launched covert ops against reporters and let loose a secret army of
online trolls. And when a Fox producer made serious allegations against Bill O’Reilly, the network showed just how far it would go to defend its biggest star—no matter the cost. To read our full reporting on the most recent legal actions between Bill O'Reilly and Andrea Mackris, and learn more about how a non-disclosure agreement from two decades ago has kept Mackris silent, go to slate.com/foxnda. Want more from Slow Burn? Join Slate Plus to unlock full access to all seasons, including members-only bonus episodes from The Rise of Fox News. You'll also enjoy ad-free listening to all of your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now by clicking "Try Free" at the top of the Slow Burn show page on Apple Podcasts. Or, visit slate.com/slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen. Season 10 of Slow Burn was written and reported by Josh Levin. It was executive produced by Lizzie Jacobs. Slow Burn is produced by Sophie Summergrad, Joel Meyer, and Rosie Belson with help from Patrick Fort, Jacob Fenston, and Julia Russo. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. This season was edited by Susan Matthews and Hillary Frey. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director. Mix and sound design by Joe Plourde. Our theme music was composed by Alexis Cuadrado. Derreck Johnson created the artwork for this season. Episode artwork by Ivylise Simones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary
In this episode of Slow Burn, host Josh Levin examines the transformative role of Fox News during the 2004 presidential election, marked by aggressive tactics and a commitment to controlling narratives. The network utilized covert operations against perceived adversaries and supported online trolling, impacting public perception significantly. The allegations against Bill O'Reilly underscore the lengths Fox would go to protect its prominent figures. The podcast further explores how Fox's promotion of misinformation around John Kerry's military service shaped the election’s outcome, leading to a crucial shift in American political discourse.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Rise of Fox News | 6. What Hath We Wrought?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_37
Hey, it's Josh Levine, and I want to thank you for listening to this season of Slow Burn, the rise of Fox News. You can hear new episodes every week on Amazon Music, where you can find Slow Burn and all your Slate favorites.
00:00:12 Speaker_37
You can also ask Alexa to play any of your favorite Slate podcasts. The way Roger Ailes saw it, the only thing that mattered in cable news was getting people to watch.
00:00:23 Speaker_22
If you don't get the ratings, you go off the air and you're out of work, and my mother doesn't want me to be out of work. Fox was getting the ratings, and Ailes liked to brag. We're the new kids on the block.
00:00:35 Speaker_22
We are the smallest in terms of distribution of the networks and the newest, and we are doing quite well in the ratings.
00:00:43 Speaker_37
There was also this exchange, when C-SPAN's Brian Lamb asked him to talk about anything but Fox's viewership.
00:00:50 Speaker_26
Besides the ratings, when did you get a sense that things were working?
00:00:53 Speaker_22
Well, I don't know exactly when I knew it was working, but the first time we really beat CNN for an evening, I went down and announced it in the newsroom. The staff was standing on their desk cheering. I said, you know,
00:01:05 Speaker_22
These people have a lot of spirit. They want to win.
00:01:07 Speaker_37
— Fox News had plenty of wins to celebrate. First, they'd moved ahead of MSNBC, then CNN, and finally zoomed past the ratings king of cable TV, a cartoon character who lived in a pineapple under the sea.
00:01:23 Speaker_38
— SpongeBob, the remote control's broken! Get over here and fix it! — I've got a better idea!
00:01:29 Speaker_48
— We had a party in the conference room that had a SpongeBob SquarePants cake.
00:01:35 Speaker_37
Fox News producer Caroline Bruner. Do you remember being, like, excited about that moment?
00:01:40 Speaker_48
— Well, it was cake. And also, it felt like my job was safe.
00:01:46 Speaker_37
Caroline and her Fox colleagues ate that Spongebob cake in April 2003, a few weeks after the start of the Iraq War.
00:01:54 Speaker_37
A year later, during the 2004 Republican National Convention, Fox News would hit another milestone, getting more viewers than any of the traditional big three broadcast networks. Fox was number one. Fox had a great story to tell.
00:02:10 Speaker_37
— That's Brian Stelter. He's now the chief media analyst for CNN. But in 2004, he was just out of high school, and may be the only person in America who cared as much about cable news ratings as Roger Ailes did.
00:02:23 Speaker_18
— I felt like there was no one tracking the ins and outs of cable news, so I decided to do it.
00:02:32 Speaker_37
After his first semester at Towson University outside Baltimore, Brian started up a website that he called Cable Newser.
00:02:39 Speaker_18
I launched the blog anonymously because I figured if people knew I was an 18-year-old college freshman, they would never take me seriously. That plan pretty much worked.
00:02:49 Speaker_37
Thousands of industry types followed his blog religiously, not knowing it was written by a teenager. And one network in particular took a very special interest in Cable Newser.
00:03:01 Speaker_18
Fox News PR started feeding me information, and most importantly, started feeding me ratings.
00:03:06 Speaker_37
Fox gave Brian proprietary information, the daily overnight ratings, which showed how all the channels stacked up. Naturally, with Fox News number one. That data was closely guarded. Some cable news producers and hosts didn't even have it.
00:03:23 Speaker_37
But thanks to Fox, a college freshman did.
00:03:27 Speaker_18
They saw my blog as a vessel to say, we are winning. Our agenda is winning.
00:03:33 Speaker_37
Those numbers made his site a destination. And after just a few months, he felt established enough to reveal his identity to a New York Times reporter.
00:03:43 Speaker_24
Would you believe this is one of the most powerful people in television? He lives in a cramped, messy apartment and hasn't even graduated college yet.
00:03:51 Speaker_37
— After Brian went public, CNN and MSNBC started sending him data, too. But the Fox PR department made sure that he didn't stray too far.
00:04:02 Speaker_18
— Fox definitely wanted to woo me. You know, they wanted to impress me. There was definitely some cultivating going on.
00:04:11 Speaker_37
In the summer of 2004, he got invited to Fox News headquarters in New York. Fox treated the teenager like a VIP, ushering him into a conference room to meet Fox executives. And then, as if on cue, the chairman Roger Ailes came storming in.
00:04:29 Speaker_18
He was pissed about some headline on the Fox News homepage. He roared at this executive. He said, fix the godforsaken headline. I remember coming away thinking that he was trying to put on a show for me of this swashbuckling kind of leader.
00:04:44 Speaker_37
Cable Newser kept running items touting Fox's triumphs. One reader wrote in, warning Bryan that he was being manipulated by Fox News, just as the American viewers are. At the time, he shrugged off that critique.
00:04:59 Speaker_18
Now, he sees things differently. I was definitely learning on the job, and I think there were times that Fox took advantage of that.
00:05:08 Speaker_18
I don't remember exactly how I met this Fox News PR intern, but maybe she had emailed me items or sent me press releases.
00:05:16 Speaker_18
It was one of those things where, hey, the next time you're in New York, let's hang out, which for a college kid down in Baltimore, that's pretty tempting.
00:05:24 Speaker_37
Brian took her up on that offer. And they ended up going out a couple of times, including around his 20th birthday.
00:05:30 Speaker_18
— I remember going to that restaurant in Union Square. It was called Coffee Shop. We had dinner there. We rode the subway uptown. We went back to her apartment. We spent an evening on her rooftop on the Upper East Side.
00:05:43 Speaker_37
— Did you guys kiss?
00:05:45 Speaker_18
— Not that I recall. But it was flirtatious, or at least, you know, I thought I was on a date.
00:05:51 Speaker_37
— From his side, that was the whole story. But then, years later, he caught up with that Fox News intern after she'd moved on to another network.
00:06:03 Speaker_18
And I think we were talking about our old times in New York, and I might have admitted to having a crush on her at the time. And she spilled the beans. You know, she told me what happened. It turned out those nights in Manhattan weren't dates at all.
00:06:17 Speaker_18
— The intern was assigned to me to take me out, listen to everything I say, take notes, and feed information back to Ailes. And it was detailed. Like, at one point, we were at the restaurant in Union Square, and I had a phone call from a CNN PR person.
00:06:36 Speaker_18
And apparently this intern is going to the bathroom and scribbling down notes. She didn't want to do this. This was not her idea. You know, this young woman who gets, you know, roped into Roger Ailes' paranoia.
00:06:49 Speaker_18
And what I found out was that this intern was hauled into Ailes' office the next morning because he wanted a full debrief about the date, or the not a date date. Everything that you're describing here seems, like, incredibly creepy.
00:07:10 Speaker_18
I was creeped out about it when I found out. PR staffers are not supposed to be sent out on pretend dates. But I guess Fox was always trying to have it both ways. Friendly, helping out with information, but at the same time, engaging in covert ops.
00:07:33 Speaker_37
This is Slow Burn Season 10, The Rise of Fox News. I'm your host, Josh Levine. By 2004, Fox was the undisputed leader in cable news, and it wanted everyone to know it.
00:07:46 Speaker_37
It had come a very long way since its debut around the 1996 election, when it tried, and ultimately failed, to look even a little bit competent.
00:07:56 Speaker_37
For Fox News, the 2000 election had been its springboard into relevance, the moment when it started to wield power and build loyalty.
00:08:06 Speaker_37
But the 2004 race would be the first fully Fox News election, a contest that was framed by Fox and fought on Fox's terms.
00:08:16 Speaker_36
As all of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth allegations continue to fill the air and dominate the campaign trail, Senator Kerry again today said that he has been honest about his military service.
00:08:30 Speaker_37
In 2004, the country was primed for a massive confrontation about George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and a cable news channel. But the fight over Fox News was about more than just partisan politics, or at least it should have been.
00:08:46 Speaker_37
Fox didn't only break journalistic rules. It also spied on reporters and let loose a secret army of online trolls.
00:08:55 Speaker_37
And when a Fox producer made serious allegations against Bill O'Reilly, the network showed just how far it would go to defend its biggest star and to stay number one, no matter the cost.
00:09:07 Speaker_37
Now, two decades later, the people who fought against Fox News are reckoning with the choices they made. And some of the people who worked at Fox have started to wonder how much they're to blame for what it's become.
00:09:19 Speaker_20
I remember saying to people, this is the worst it could ever possibly be. It's never going to get worse than this. And man, how wrong I was.
00:09:39 Speaker_37
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes. But some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to, at work, in social settings, around our family.
00:09:52 Speaker_37
Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can take the mask off. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for our emotions. Therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding ways to overcome them.
00:10:06 Speaker_37
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.
00:10:13 Speaker_37
Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge.
00:10:20 Speaker_37
BetterHelp changes the way people approach their mental health and helps them tackle life's challenges by providing accessible and affordable care. Take off the mask with BetterHelp.
00:10:30 Speaker_37
Visit BetterHelp.com slash SlowBurn today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SlowBurn.
00:10:42 Speaker_34
The 2024 election is upon us and the stakes couldn't be higher. But the outcome might not be clear till long after everyone has voted. If the race ends up being as close as it looks right now, we could be in for a repeat or worse of the year 2000.
00:10:58 Speaker_34
when the presidency came down to a recount in Florida that ended at the Supreme Court. To hear the whole story, check out Fiasco Bush v. Gore, a podcast from the co-creators of Slow Burn.
00:11:08 Speaker_34
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:11:21 Speaker_37
By 2004, Fox News was indispensable to millions of Americans. It was also despised by millions. And you could hear that fervor when C-SPAN opened up its phone lines.
00:11:32 Speaker_52
For people to say that Fox News is fair and balanced, I don't see it.
00:11:36 Speaker_53
I'm calling because Fox News has really irritated me to no end. I find myself just annoyed. I have to constantly turn away from it. They've been allowed to lie and lie and lie every day and every day forever and ever.
00:11:48 Speaker_37
The documentary Outfoxed had harnessed a whole lot of pent-up anti-fox energy. And when the movie wrapped up, that passion didn't go away.
00:11:58 Speaker_15
We were floundering because we felt like all of a sudden we had nothing to do.
00:12:03 Speaker_37
Chris Bradley was one of the newshounds, the eight women who did the research for Outfoxed. Judy Daubenmayer was another. And she says an Outfoxed producer recommended they keep the project going.
00:12:16 Speaker_23
Jim Gilliam, he suggested to us, you know, that you should start a blog. And our response was, well, what's a blog? And he trained us in that.
00:12:25 Speaker_37
Newshounds.us launched in the spring of 2004 with the motto, we watch Fox, so you don't have to.
00:12:32 Speaker_37
They were a devoted squad of volunteers transcribing segments and chiming in with their own analysis under headlines like absolutely an idiot and news you can't use.
00:12:44 Speaker_15
It took an enormous amount of time to do this. I got between two to four hours of sleep a night, but I had an obligation.
00:12:55 Speaker_37
The newshounds built a small but loyal audience. Ellen Brodsky, who became the leader of the site, noticed that they had one particularly avid reader.
00:13:05 Speaker_02
Johnny Dollar. I mean, the minute the post went up, there he was calling us liars. Oh, yes.
00:13:14 Speaker_15
We obsessed over Johnny Dollar for many a moon.
00:13:18 Speaker_37
In the comments of their site and on his own blog, the pseudonymous Johnny Dollar mocked the newshounds relentlessly and accused them of bias, dishonesty, and outright lying.
00:13:30 Speaker_02
I always thought he was a paid operative. You know, I was never able to get the full story there.
00:13:37 Speaker_37
Ellen may have been right to be suspicious. Salon later reported that Fox News had at some point begun subsidizing the man behind Johnny Dollar, a lawyer named Mark Koldis.
00:13:48 Speaker_37
Fox News told us they have no knowledge of that, and Koldis also denied that Fox subsidized his work. But the allegations about Fox's online behavior go way beyond what Johnny Dollar was doing.
00:14:00 Speaker_26
I was told by a bunch of people who had worked at Fox that they were directed to essentially argue with the internet.
00:14:07 Speaker_37
That's NPR's David Fokenflik. He reported on Fox's in-house trolling operation for a book he wrote about Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Any posting online, any comment needed to be addressed.
00:14:21 Speaker_37
David says that Fox News staffers would use as many as 100 aliases to post pro-Fox rants. And if they fell behind, they'd hear about it from the heads of Fox PR.
00:14:33 Speaker_26
Saying, why the hell haven't you gone after this thing yet? And it would be a comment, you know, 10, 20, 40 comments deep. It was meaningless. But the idea was nobody anywhere could take on Fox unchallenged.
00:14:47 Speaker_15
It was just basic vindictiveness. I'm going to squash you. We're eight ladies from around the United States. What are they going to do? You know, is it going to be Bambi meets Godzilla?
00:14:59 Speaker_23
But it didn't stop us. You know, we just kept going.
00:15:03 Speaker_37
In 2004, the newshounds were staying vigilant, scrutinizing how Fox News was covering the presidential race and what Republicans' favorite TV channel was saying about the Democratic nominee.
00:15:15 Speaker_15
— We knew they were going to come after Kerry. Anybody with half a brain knew that.
00:15:21 Speaker_37
— At the start of the primaries, John Kerry hadn't looked like a real contender. But Democrats coalesced around the Massachusetts senator, who was seen as a more viable wartime candidate than the progressive Howard Dean.
00:15:35 Speaker_43
— We deserve a president of the United States who understands how to make America stronger and safer in this world.
00:15:44 Speaker_37
— Fox News united around him, too, in the opposite way.
00:15:47 Speaker_39
— In my opinion, John Kerry's losing because his campaign is living in the past. All they want to talk about is Vietnam.
00:15:54 Speaker_29
— Did John Kerry on the slopes curse out a Secret Service agent? Is that true? — They're saying John Kerry looks French.
00:16:00 Speaker_37
— That French thing got repeated a lot, and it was considered a major insult, given that France had opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
00:16:09 Speaker_25
— Now being served in congressional cafeterias, Freedom fries, and instead of French toast, you can get freedom toast.
00:16:19 Speaker_37
Calling Kerry French was the same as calling him a coward. But his campaign had what it believed was the perfect counterattack, touting John Kerry's military service in Vietnam.
00:16:31 Speaker_37
While George W. Bush had avoided combat during the war, Kerry had volunteered to go overseas. As a lieutenant, he'd commanded a 50-foot aluminum vessel called a swift boat and been awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts.
00:16:48 Speaker_37
In a campaign ad that ran on May 3rd, 2004, two of Carey's crewmates said he was a hero.
00:16:54 Speaker_06
The decisions that he made saved our lives. When he pulled me out of the river, he risked his life to save mine.
00:17:00 Speaker_37
Those two weren't outliers. The enlisted man who'd served alongside John Kerry vouched for his bravery and campaigned for him. But they weren't the only Vietnam veterans who had strong opinions about the Democratic nominee.
00:17:14 Speaker_12
— We believe, based on our experience with him, that he is totally unfit to be the commander-in-chief.
00:17:20 Speaker_37
The day after that Kerry ad debuted, another group of men held a press conference in Washington, D.C. They called themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And they said that it was their mission to correct the record about John Kerry.
00:17:34 Speaker_12
— His lies and political cynicism, while they may be customary somewhere else, are simply things that we don't understand.
00:17:42 Speaker_37
These veterans said that Kerry's anti-war activism when he'd come home from Vietnam was a betrayal. They also said they were skeptical that he really deserved his medals. But that accusation was based on pretty much nothing.
00:17:56 Speaker_37
Only one person who'd actually served next to Kerry joined up with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and he was refuted by every other eyewitness.
00:18:06 Speaker_19
There was a very quick real-time pushback, which either resulted in the mainstream media not covering the story or in fact checks that were positive from the campaign's perspective.
00:18:19 Speaker_37
David Wade was John Kerry's national press secretary. He believed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's big press event was a total dud.
00:18:27 Speaker_19
And the buzz that we had heard was that they weren't happy, that they felt that they had not broken through in the way that they had planned to.
00:18:38 Speaker_37
— David Wade is right. The swiftboat veterans were not happy. And in the summer of 2004, the Kerry campaign leaned even harder into his military pedigree.
00:18:48 Speaker_01
— They very much want the American public to see him as the Vietnam War hero. He will be arriving with these Vietnam vets at his side.
00:18:58 Speaker_37
— In July 2004, Kerry showed up for the Democratic convention in Boston on a water taxi, accompanied by some of his old crew members.
00:19:07 Speaker_37
When Kerry accepted his party's nomination, those veterans stood with him on stage, and he greeted them and the country with military salutes.
00:19:15 Speaker_44
— I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty.
00:19:32 Speaker_37
Fox & Friends called Carey's Vietnam reunion boat ride weird and staged, which in their defense, it kind of was. But non-Fox outlets praised his performance at the convention, calling his speech strong and tough.
00:19:48 Speaker_37
By this point, the months-old claims from the Swift Boat veterans for truth had mostly been forgotten. But those allegations that Kerry had lied about his war record were still circulating in an emerging right-wing ecosystem online.
00:20:02 Speaker_37
Websites like the Drudge Report and Newsmax, the message board Free Republic, and blogs like Kerry Haters. And on cable, Fox News seemed like it might be up to something, too.
00:20:16 Speaker_15
by July of 2004. We knew it was coming. They're going to come after his war record. And we didn't see any response from the Democrats at all.
00:20:28 Speaker_37
— Chris Bradley and the other newshounds saw Fox continue to keep the story alive.
00:20:34 Speaker_37
As of the beginning of August, Hannity and Combs had done at least 15 segments on Kerry's time in Vietnam, with the conservative host Sean Hannity continually raising doubts about his service. The newshounds felt compelled to warn someone.
00:20:51 Speaker_37
They worked feverishly, trying every possible connection. They wrote to Air America's Rachel Maddow, but got no response. And when Chris reached out to the Democratic National Committee, she could only get an answering machine.
00:21:03 Speaker_15
— At that point, I gave up, and I realized the Democrats didn't care what the base had to say. The Republicans always listen to their base, right? the Democrats, it's like, we know better, and we're going to tell you what to do.
00:21:21 Speaker_37
As the newshounds stewed at home, the Kerry campaign tried to keep up the momentum from the Democratic convention. On August 4th, Kerry spoke to a crowd of 3,000 in Missouri as part of a nationwide whistle-stop tour.
00:21:35 Speaker_37
That same night, a national TV audience would see and hear something else. An ad from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
00:21:43 Speaker_33
— I served with John Kerry.
00:21:45 Speaker_05
— I served with John Kerry. — John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam. — He is lying about his record.
00:21:52 Speaker_37
— That commercial would run in just three states, as part of a small campaign. But before it ever aired as a paid spot, Fox's Hannity & Combs played a clip for its 1.5 million viewers.
00:22:05 Speaker_09
— I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury. — John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know. I was there. I saw what happened.
00:22:14 Speaker_37
— The ad sounded convincing, and Hannity said it was sure to drive the Kerry campaign crazy. Kerry's national press secretary, David Wade, says it did, once he finally saw it. Do you remember watching those ads?
00:22:30 Speaker_19
No, in part because we were on the road. I believe I didn't see them until much, much later.
00:22:36 Speaker_37
John Kerry did not repudiate the ad right away because the campaign didn't want to give the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth any more oxygen.
00:22:44 Speaker_37
But just as they had months earlier, Kerry staffers pushed back behind the scenes, offering up information to newspaper and broadcast journalists.
00:22:53 Speaker_37
While traditional outlets took their time digging into the various claims, Daily Kos, the newshounds, and the right-wing blogosphere fired shots back and forth. And The Daily Show contributed a classic Jon Stewart debunking.
00:23:08 Speaker_28
See, by served with him, they mean they were in Vietnam at the time. Kind of the same way that Snoopy served with the Red Baron.
00:23:24 Speaker_37
On Fox News, nobody was laughing about the Swift Boat veterans for truth. Hannity and Combs just kept on fanning the flames, night after night.
00:23:35 Speaker_37
Back in 2000, when Fox got the scoop that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving, the channel's reporters had broken the story and then given way to the opinion hosts. With Swift Boat, the tale was wagging the dog.
00:23:49 Speaker_37
The opinion side had instigated everything, and now the news crew was following behind.
00:23:55 Speaker_32
— One veterans group saying Kerry's claims about his service are not quite accurate.
00:24:00 Speaker_36
— John Kerry hoped the Democratic National Convention would be the last best word on his Vietnam record, but it hasn't been. Far from it. — Voters who've seen the ads have growing doubts about it.
00:24:09 Speaker_37
— That last voice was Carl Cameron, the reporter who broke the Bush DUI story. In 2004, Cameron was Fox's chief political correspondent, and he and his producer Anne McGinn were on swiftboat duty.
00:24:24 Speaker_57
Fox loved that story, loved it. The entire network was just obsessed with it for too long. There was no there there anymore.
00:24:33 Speaker_37
Anne says that she and Carl Cameron rebelled by writing a script on a different topic, something critical of George W. Bush. And she says that one of Fox's leading editorial voices, Brit Hume, challenged that approach.
00:24:47 Speaker_37
Anne, who was usually soft-spoken, decided this was the moment to stand her ground.
00:24:53 Speaker_57
And I said, Brit, listen to me. I will fuck John Kerry when he deserves to be fucked. But today, he doesn't. And I knew my stuff. And I had all my facts laid out. And Brit looked at me and said, go with what you have.
00:25:10 Speaker_37
Anne wasn't the only one at Fox News who thought the Swift Boat veterans for truth were getting too much airtime. Bill O'Reilly called their ad campaign horribly exploitative.
00:25:21 Speaker_37
And Sean Hannity's liberal co-host Alan Combs did his best to butt in and defend John Kerry. But Hannity and Combs' swift boat coverage was really the Fox ideal. Balanced, but not fair.
00:25:34 Speaker_37
On a show in early August, they did two interviews with Vietnam veterans. One was with a man Kerry had rescued. The other was with a Swift Boat veteran for truth who was not Carey's crewmate and who nevertheless called Carey a liar.
00:25:49 Speaker_37
Hannity said that his goal was to let all sides be heard and let the American people decide. Or to put it another way, he made no effort to figure out the truth. The truth did emerge, very slowly, in newspapers and on broadcast TV.
00:26:09 Speaker_10
— Today, a new report said military records contradict one of Kerry's most vocal critics, who argues Kerry never faced enemy fire while saving the life of this man.
00:26:19 Speaker_37
— It took The New York Times two weeks to publish their big debunking. The day that story ran, Hannity and Combs promoted a brand new ad from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
00:26:30 Speaker_59
— He betrayed us in the past. How could we be loyal to him now?
00:26:35 Speaker_37
But the Swift Boat ads didn't just get played and replayed on Fox News. CNN and MSNBC publicized them, too, following Fox's lead.
00:26:45 Speaker_37
In August, polls found that more than half of voters had seen or heard of the Swift Boat campaign, and that Kerry's support among veterans had dropped sharply. That was the state of the presidential race with two and a half months to go.
00:27:00 Speaker_37
But another story about a candidate's military record was about to drop.
00:27:06 Speaker_08
60 Minutes has obtained government documents that indicate Mr. Bush may have received preferential treatment in the Guard after not fulfilling his commitments.
00:27:15 Speaker_37
Those documents, obtained by CBS's Dan Rather, questioned George W. Bush's military service. And they turned out not to be authentic. Conservatives argued that liberal bias had compelled the network to run a bogus story.
00:27:30 Speaker_37
But CBS did a huge, self-lacerating investigation. And Dan Rather lost one of the most coveted jobs in TV news.
00:27:39 Speaker_08
It was a mistake. CBS News deeply regrets it. Also, I want to say personally and directly, I'm sorry.
00:27:47 Speaker_37
Fox did not acknowledge spreading false accusations about John Kerry's military service. Years later, Sean Hannity bragged about the role he'd played during the campaign.
00:27:57 Speaker_29
— I'm very proud of the fact that we put the swiftbow of Vets for Truth on first, before anybody else.
00:28:04 Speaker_29
Isn't this good for America that there are alternative media sources to do the mainstream media's job, because they have failed in informing people about the candidates?
00:28:15 Speaker_19
Sean Hannity, in particular, would continue to run the same voices, repeating the same lies, no matter how much it had been discredited.
00:28:24 Speaker_37
John Kerry's national press secretary, David Wade.
00:28:27 Speaker_19
It was creating an alternative reality where people who had failed to find any facts to bolster their claims were given a megaphone. There was no recognition that there aren't two sides to a lie.
00:28:46 Speaker_37
We'll be back in a minute.
00:28:55 Speaker_47
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes.
00:29:07 Speaker_47
And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how does that translate into the polling? We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election.
00:29:18 Speaker_47
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
00:29:31 Speaker_50
How you doing? We've had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last minute candidate swap.
00:29:41 Speaker_61
I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting. In an election that seems as close as this one does, any one of these little factors can matter so much.
00:29:50 Speaker_50
But after all that, here we are, at the end of the road. Or maybe it's just the beginning. And what next has got you covered?
00:29:58 Speaker_50
Every step of the way, for November 5th and the aftermath, we'll have all the deep insights and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from Slate. So don't miss out. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
00:30:16 Speaker_37
In the summer and fall of 2004, Bill O'Reilly was the king of cable news, the host of its highest-rated show and a subject of media fascination.
00:30:25 Speaker_05
— Is he a patriot, a blowhard, a braggart, a bully? Well, it turns out there's a lot more to him than any of that.
00:30:33 Speaker_37
— A little less than two months before Election Day, O'Reilly chose to share his platform with another TV star, a man he called the darling of the television critics, Jon Stewart.
00:30:45 Speaker_42
— You know what's really frightening?
00:30:50 Speaker_33
You actually have an influence on this presidential election.
00:30:53 Speaker_37
— Bill O'Reilly wasn't the only one who thought so. Rolling Stone would call Stewart the most trusted name in news. But O'Reilly was the only person who said this.
00:31:03 Speaker_31
— I mean, you've got stone slackers watching your dopey show every night, and they can vote. You can't stop them. — What am I, a Cheech and Chong movie? Stone slackers?
00:31:11 Speaker_37
— Three weeks later, O'Reilly came on Stewart's The Daily Show to promote a new book, The O'Reilly Factor for Kids. And he started out by addressing the slackers in the studio audience.
00:31:23 Speaker_31
— Is there anything you would like to say to them? — You know I was stoned when I said that.
00:31:30 Speaker_37
From there, Stewart praised O'Reilly, and he wasn't being sarcastic.
00:31:34 Speaker_28
— I enjoy your program, by the way. I think your opinions are always very interesting, and not the typical punditry opinions, but it surprises me that you still support this administration.
00:31:46 Speaker_31
— But I've said it a thousand times. Why are you missing that I'm an independent and haven't made up my mind yet?
00:31:52 Speaker_37
O'Reilly's claim in 2001 that he was a registered Independent when he was actually a registered Republican was one of the lies Al Franken had called out. But Jon Stewart gave O'Reilly the benefit of the doubt.
00:32:04 Speaker_28
— As I talk to you, I can truly believe that you're undecided, and I would never have believed that before you walked in.
00:32:11 Speaker_27
— That's because you're a pinhead. — That's the O'Reilly I love! I am going to shut my own mic off!
00:32:21 Speaker_37
— That was October 7, 2004. Eight days later, Stewart would make his strongest statement yet about the destructive influence of cable news. His target was not Bill O'Reilly or anyone else from Fox News.
00:32:36 Speaker_37
He was setting his sights on CNN's long-running partisan debate show.
00:32:41 Speaker_40
— Today, on Crossfire,
00:32:47 Speaker_21
— John had a real bee in his bonnet about the show. It really, really bothered him. — Ben Carlin was The Daily Show's executive producer. — It was more about yelling at each other than trying to come up with any kind of productive solutions.
00:32:58 Speaker_38
— The question is not whether it's okay to burn the flag. It's not unconscionable.
00:33:04 Speaker_37
— Stewart was very open about his loathing of Crossfire, including in this interview on NPR's Fresh Air.
00:33:11 Speaker_28
For instance, on Crossfire, I'm not sure what those guys are doing there other than egging their own side on. And if anything, I think that puts out misinformation.
00:33:20 Speaker_37
— In 2004, Crossfire had a rotating team of pundits, including Democratic consultant Paul Begala and right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson. And Stewart decided it was about time he paid them a visit.
00:33:33 Speaker_17
and he began to talk about, you know, how he was going to confront these two guys. — That's Chris Regan. He was a writer on The Daily Show.
00:33:40 Speaker_17
— And as much as John ever took advice from me, which I can say is next to never, I was sort of saying, maybe we should be careful about becoming this story.
00:33:50 Speaker_37
— Ben Carlin says he strategized with Stewart in the car on the way to the CNN taping, and he remembers the plan differently.
00:33:58 Speaker_21
At no point was there any discussion about going super hard after them. The kind of idea was, like, let's engage them in the kind of conversation that they should be having on this show. Modeling good behavior. Exactly.
00:34:11 Speaker_20
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Crossfire Johnstown. Thank you.
00:34:14 Speaker_28
Thank you very much. Very kind of you to say.
00:34:19 Speaker_21
And then something just kind of turned.
00:34:22 Speaker_28
I made a special effort to come on the show today because I have privately amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows mentioned this show as being bad.
00:34:37 Speaker_28
And I wanted to, I felt that that wasn't fair and I should come here and tell you that I don't, it's not so much that it's bad as it's hurting America.
00:34:46 Speaker_21
I'm watching from the green room, and I'm kind of standing with a producer, and they were all really giddy, because a lot of those people were big fans of John. And I don't think they had seen this John.
00:34:55 Speaker_28
Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys.
00:34:57 Speaker_21
Yeah. Stop.
00:35:01 Speaker_28
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop hurting America.
00:35:05 Speaker_37
Stewart called both hosts partisan hacks and said that Crossfire was an insult to journalism. Tucker Carlson was unmoved.
00:35:13 Speaker_35
— I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. Let me ask you a question on the news.
00:35:19 Speaker_28
— No, this is theater. I mean, it's obvious.
00:35:21 Speaker_35
How old are you?
00:35:22 Speaker_28
— And you wear a bow tie.
00:35:24 Speaker_27
— Yeah, I do.
00:35:26 Speaker_37
— Once the crowd stopped applauding, Carlson pushed back, scolding Stewart for lobbying softball questions when he got the rare opportunity to interview John Kerry.
00:35:37 Speaker_28
and I'll tell you why I know it.
00:35:38 Speaker_35
You have John Kerry on your show, and you sniff his throne, and you're accusing us of partisan hackery? Absolutely.
00:35:43 Speaker_27
You've got to be kidding me! You're on CNN! The show that leads into me is Puppets Making Crank Phone Call. What is wrong with you?
00:35:54 Speaker_21
It was awkward. I mean, it's like watching, like, a wedding speech go bad. I would just kind of, like, exchange tight smiles with the woman in the headset next to me.
00:36:03 Speaker_35
I do think you're more fun on your show, just my opinion.
00:36:05 Speaker_27
Okay, next, Jon Stewart goes, one out of six fans... You know what's interesting, though?
00:36:08 Speaker_35
You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show. Now you're getting into it. I like that. Okay, we'll be right back.
00:36:17 Speaker_21
Tucker Carlson is, like, literally the definition of a dick. That's a true statement. But as, like, a comedy person, you want to take someone down on the merits of their shittiness, not just by, like, an ad hominem attack.
00:36:30 Speaker_35
This is Guide to Democracy in Action. From the left, I am Paul Begala. And from the right, I'm Tucker Carlson. Have a great weekend. See you Monday.
00:36:40 Speaker_37
In case you didn't catch that, Stewart ends the segment by saying, oh, that went great. What was your conversation with John on the ride away from the studio?
00:36:50 Speaker_21
That went terribly. Like, you know, that's not how we wanted to present our argument against this. That's not how he wanted to present himself. He felt like it was like a missed opportunity.
00:37:01 Speaker_37
Daily Show writer Chris Regan remembers the staff getting together the next day to watch.
00:37:07 Speaker_17
I could see Angry John coming through there, and I'd seen Angry John in person. And, you know, seeing Angry John was certainly enough to make me uncomfortable.
00:37:17 Speaker_37
So at least some people inside the Daily Show bubble saw Jon Stewart's crossfire appearance as a big angry failure. But the Daily Show's fans, they thought it was incredible.
00:37:30 Speaker_17
Oh, people were very excited by it.
00:37:32 Speaker_37
Someone had finally, you know, talked back to these two boobs. That rapturous response didn't come from people actually tuning in to Crossfire. This TV episode went viral online before YouTube even existed.
00:37:45 Speaker_21
The ensuing reaction took all of us massively by surprise. In a weird way, it was also a little disappointing because that wasn't what we do really, really well, which is these kind of smart, funny, informed critiques.
00:38:01 Speaker_21
And this was just much more raw emotion.
00:38:04 Speaker_37
— That raw emotion resonated everywhere, including inside CNN. Just a few months after Jon Stewart went on Crossfire, the network's president pulled the show off the air.
00:38:15 Speaker_28
— I had no idea that if you wanted a show canceled, all you had to do was say it out loud.
00:38:26 Speaker_37
I'm reminded of what a Daily Show producer told us about why they went after CNN as hard and sometimes harder than Fox. That CNN was supposed to be the gold standard, that it had a self-proclaimed mission to keep its viewers informed.
00:38:41 Speaker_37
That's why the Daily Show gave CNN what that producer called pinches of love. And those pinches were actually effective, because CNN cared what its critics thought.
00:38:52 Speaker_37
But Fox News was just gonna keep on being Fox News, so The Daily Show didn't try to change it or Bill O'Reilly. Instead, Stewart just mocked them, sometimes right to O'Reilly's face.
00:39:04 Speaker_30
— No spin zone. — No spin zone? — No one's allowed to spin, lie, equivocate, anything like that. — So no one comes on? — That's right. It's me.
00:39:11 Speaker_37
— Bill O'Reilly actually came up when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire. It went by so quickly that hardly anyone noticed. A quick back-and-forth after a commercial break.
00:39:23 Speaker_35
We're talking to John Stewart, who was just lecturing us on our moral inferiority. John, you're bumming us out. Tell us, what do you think of the Bill O'Reilly vibrator story?
00:39:29 Speaker_28
I'm sorry? I don't. Oh, OK. What do you think? Where's your moral outrage on this?
00:39:34 Speaker_35
I don't have any. I know.
00:39:37 Speaker_37
The Bill O'Reilly vibrator story was a crude gloss on a story that had broken two days earlier.
00:39:43 Speaker_41
— Bill O'Reilly, the highly-opinionated Fox News star commentator, is in the news himself tonight.
00:39:49 Speaker_37
He's in a very public lawsuit with a producer who has filed detailed allegations of sexual harassment— — It was actually O'Reilly who'd gone public first, filing a lawsuit against that producer, Andrea Makris, claiming she was trying to extort him.
00:40:07 Speaker_37
Makris then filed her own suit the same day. She alleged that O'Reilly, her boss, had harassed her in person and initiated phone sex against her wishes while using a vibrator on himself.
00:40:20 Speaker_56
Her complaint alleges that in one phone conversation, O'Reilly fantasized he would basically be in the shower. I would take that little loofah thing and kind of soap up your back. The rest, too graphic to air.
00:40:32 Speaker_37
O'Reilly did get incredibly graphic. And there were tapes. Although those recordings were never made public, Makris' legal complaint did have a three-paragraph transcript.
00:40:44 Speaker_37
That excerpt included O'Reilly referring to a loofah, mistakenly, as the falafel thing. That one word would become shorthand for the entire case.
00:40:55 Speaker_37
The legal website The Smoking Gun, which published the complaint online, would call it the O'Reilly Falafel Suit. And Conan O'Brien made a joke of it, doing a sketch where an O'Reilly impersonator reenacted the harassing phone call.
00:41:09 Speaker_07
That was the tone of a lot of the coverage, making fun of Bill O'Reilly and giggling about falafel.
00:41:25 Speaker_37
But Andrea Macris got plenty of attention too, much of it extremely negative. In the Washington Post, columnist Richard Cohen blamed Macris for going out to dinner with O'Reilly and for not complaining about him to HR.
00:41:38 Speaker_37
Cohen wrote that Macris had either skipped classes in common sense or was playing O'Reilly like the proverbial violin. That idea, that maybe Macris was the villain, lined up with the story Bill O'Reilly told his Fox News audience.
00:41:54 Speaker_33
This is the single most evil thing I have ever experienced, and I've seen a lot.
00:41:59 Speaker_60
The goal of all of this was to depict her as this promiscuous woman who was trying to shake O'Reilly down.
00:42:08 Speaker_37
Emily Steele is a journalist for The New York Times. She started reporting on O'Reilly, Fox News, and sexual harassment years later.
00:42:15 Speaker_60
They adopted this very aggressive strategy that almost was like a warning of what could happen to other women, that we're going to protect this star, we're not going to protect you.
00:42:31 Speaker_37
In her complaint, Macris said that O'Reilly had already threatened her, saying, In fact, Fox's PR chief worked his contacts in the newsroom, trying to poke holes in Macris' story.
00:42:48 Speaker_37
And O'Reilly hired a private investigator to dig up information about her.
00:42:53 Speaker_60
And soon after that, that's when all of these unflattering stories appeared in the tabloids.
00:43:00 Speaker_37
Fox's corporate sibling, the New York Post, ran pieces with the headlines, Lunatic O'Reilly Gal Went Nuts in a Bar, and Boozy Boast, Gal Said She'd Ruin O'Reilly.
00:43:12 Speaker_37
And what signal does it send to women who might be thinking about coming forward with allegations like this?
00:43:18 Speaker_60
Oh, it's terrifying. It makes people think, why would I say anything?
00:43:29 Speaker_37
Inside Fox, sexual harassment wasn't really talked about openly. But O'Reilly's other bad behavior was. Was it a known thing that O'Reilly would... Had a temper?
00:43:41 Speaker_45
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:43:44 Speaker_37
Randy Lubranich saw that temper up close. As a young Fox News producer in the New York bureau, she sometimes worked next to the O'Reilly Factor team.
00:43:54 Speaker_45
And Bill was on a usual tear, and he kicked a garbage can, which came across the aisle and flew, like, really close to my head. And at the top of my lungs, with the entire newsroom to hear me, I said, I don't give a good God fuck who you are.
00:44:11 Speaker_45
You are not going to kick a garbage can at my head." He looked at me and he just said, sit down, and went back to yelling at his staff.
00:44:20 Speaker_37
That's not the only story we heard about Bill O'Reilly's rage. Another woman who worked in the New York newsroom told us that O'Reilly yelled at her to shut up so intensely that her boss had to intervene.
00:44:32 Speaker_37
When Randy had her O'Reilly moment, she didn't go to Human Resources. But a third New York producer did make a complaint to HR and to Fox News executives about his behavior, which in her case did not include sexual harassment.
00:44:46 Speaker_37
She reached a settlement with Fox News and O'Reilly in July 2002. She also signed a non-disclosure agreement, which meant her allegations did not get aired publicly. So Andrea Makris was O'Reilly's first known accuser.
00:45:01 Speaker_37
But while everyone chuckled about falafel, Emily Steele says there was another line in Makris' complaint that everyone missed.
00:45:09 Speaker_60
Andrea Makris alleged that she wasn't the only one that this had happened to. It's on the seventh page of the lawsuit. Continued sex discrimination and sexual harassment against plaintiff Andrea Makris and other female employees.
00:45:24 Speaker_37
Four words, and other female employees.
00:45:27 Speaker_60
Exactly.
00:45:31 Speaker_37
13 years later, Emily Steele and her New York Times colleague Michael Schmidt would follow up on that claim, that O'Reilly was harassing other female employees. But in 2004, no reporter picked up that breadcrumb.
00:45:46 Speaker_37
Andrea Makris was sometimes mocked and often attacked. At best, she was seen as a one-off victim. And so, she was on her own, trying to tell her side of the story, both in the pages of her complaint and in interviews. Here she is on CNN.
00:46:02 Speaker_49
— How is it ever appropriate for an employee to ever speak, never think that they can speak to an employee the way he spoke to me, bottom line.
00:46:09 Speaker_37
— She was talking to one of the few journalists who took her allegations seriously. Aaron Brown, the CNN anchor that Fox News had mocked by saying he looked like a dentist.
00:46:20 Speaker_11
— You're taking on an extraordinarily powerful person, and I can tell you from firsthand experience, a company that plays hardball, to the extreme. Are you scared?
00:46:32 Speaker_49
— I'm aware of the threat. I'm not threatened. I know that I'm right.
00:46:37 Speaker_37
— Despite the confidence she was projecting, Macris acknowledged that going public with her allegations had blown up her life.
00:46:45 Speaker_49
— My career is over. I've worked extremely hard since about 17 years old. I take my career very seriously. I absolutely loved what I was doing. Everybody who works with me knows that. I had no intention of this ever happening.
00:47:00 Speaker_37
The case played out in public for two weeks. And then, suddenly, on October 28, 2004, it was over.
00:47:09 Speaker_32
— Before we get to the Talking Points memo, I have something very important to tell you. All litigation has ceased in that case that has made me the object of media scorn from coast to coast.
00:47:20 Speaker_60
O'Reilly ultimately agreed to pay her about $9 million. And the shocking thing about that was that they both agreed to issue a public statement that no wrongdoing whatsoever had occurred.
00:47:35 Speaker_32
Today, lawyers issued a statement saying there was no wrongdoing in the case whatsoever by anyone. Obviously, the words no wrongdoing are the key.
00:47:43 Speaker_37
That 2004 sexual harassment settlement was not the last for Bill O'Reilly. or for the channel that defended him.
00:47:51 Speaker_60
It created a playbook for how O'Reilly and Fox News would respond when people came forward with these allegations against him. And after that, there were a number of settlements, but all of those were private, and so nobody knew.
00:48:05 Speaker_37
Emily Steele and Michael Schmidt shared the Pulitzer Prize for their stories uncovering those settlements. There were at least six payouts, totaling about $45 million. To put that amount into context, at its peak, O'Reilly earned $25 million per year.
00:48:21 Speaker_37
And during one two-year stretch, the O'Reilly factor generated $450 million in advertising revenue. O'Reilly and Fox were both raking it in, so they stuck together.
00:48:34 Speaker_37
And from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, no one was pressuring them to do anything differently.
00:48:42 Speaker_60
You do wonder, with this first lawsuit, if the story had been framed differently or if Fox had reacted or responded differently, would other women not have been victimized?
00:48:57 Speaker_37
All of the settlements that Emily reported on mandated that the women never speak out about what was done to them. O'Reilly was also required not to speak about his interactions with Andrea Macris.
00:49:08 Speaker_37
But after that settlement, he continued to prosper, and she struggled.
00:49:13 Speaker_60
It's hard to understate how powerful and influential he was and how much his career just soared. And she just lived this life where she never worked in TV news again. She struggled from PTSD.
00:49:29 Speaker_60
She spent years going to a therapist just trying to figure out how to make a new life.
00:49:43 Speaker_37
Because of her non-disclosure agreement, Macris couldn't speak with Emily about Fox News or Bill O'Reilly. But three years ago, Macris decided that she couldn't stay silent any longer, that she was going to tell her full story.
00:49:57 Speaker_49
17 years and counting outside of my profession where I belong. I never wanted the money. I wanted my day in court. I wanted my career. I wanted my voice.
00:50:08 Speaker_37
That's Andrea Macris in a podcast she recorded with The Daily Beast in 2021.
00:50:12 Speaker_49
I'm at the point that no matter what chaos this might bring me, I have to take the risk to live my fullest life without fear. Even if I have to pay a breach, it's less than the cost of the past 17 years.
00:50:22 Speaker_49
And my act of breaking it is almost an act of self-defense.
00:50:26 Speaker_37
It's clear that Makris felt unburdened by her decision to speak out. But that sense of freedom would be short-lived. In the three years since she did that interview, Andrea Makris hasn't spoken publicly again.
00:50:40 Speaker_37
My colleague Molly Olmsted and I recently discovered why. After Makris spoke to the Daily Beast, an arbitration panel asserted she had broken her NDA and ordered her to pay $100,000 in legal fees for the breach.
00:50:55 Speaker_37
They also ruled that the NDA is still enforceable today, even though Makris argued that she only agreed to it under duress. She says she signed the document in tears, feeling pressure from her lawyers.
00:51:09 Speaker_37
Amazingly, those same lawyers would go on to represent Bill O'Reilly.
00:51:14 Speaker_37
Additionally, the agreement required Macris to turn over her recordings of O'Reilly's harassing phone calls, and promised that if other copies ever surfaced, she would deny that they were real. In other words, the NDA legally obligates her to lie.
00:51:33 Speaker_37
O'Reilly got fired by Fox News in 2017 after Emily Steele and Michael Schmitt's reporting led advertisers to abandon his show. O'Reilly now writes books and hosts a web series called No Spin News.
00:51:48 Speaker_37
While he didn't respond to our interview request, he did make a recent guest appearance on The Daily Show. — Please welcome back to the program Bill O'Reilly, sir!
00:51:59 Speaker_37
When the former Fox News host visited Jon Stewart, who's back hosting The Daily Show in advance of the 2024 election, O'Reilly celebrated their shared history.
00:52:08 Speaker_42
— But if you watch, if you Google, we are able to disagree without hating each other. Now, I truly hate him, but I don't show it.
00:52:22 Speaker_37
— Stewart asked O'Reilly if he believed that America was in a unique time of polarization. He did not ask about his history of paying settlements to women who've accused him of sexual harassment, or tell O'Reilly that he'd hurt America.
00:52:35 Speaker_28
— Bill O'Reilly, we're going to take a quick break.
00:52:37 Speaker_37
— We'll be back in a minute. The race between George W. Bush and John Kerry felt like more than a presidential election.
00:52:58 Speaker_37
It was the culmination of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern American history, years marked by terrorism and war, and growing divisions in the nation's politics and media.
00:53:10 Speaker_37
Election Night 2004 would be a referendum on all of that, and the anti-Fox crowd was feeling optimistic, including the crew from Air America Radio.
00:53:20 Speaker_51
Do you realize that when Kerry wins tonight, and he will, that starting January 20th, we get to change the world?
00:53:28 Speaker_37
The vibes were strong inside the John Kerry campaign, too.
00:53:32 Speaker_00
They are seeing the kinds of things come in that, in fact, we are seeing. They feel good about it, but they felt good about it for the past week.
00:53:41 Speaker_37
The staff of The Daily Show was also getting ready for a very big night. You know, it's exciting to do a live television show, and the audience is very excited.
00:53:49 Speaker_37
Elliott Kalin was on set in New York, working behind the scenes on The Daily Show's 2004 election special.
00:53:57 Speaker_27
Prelude to a recount, featuring Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the too-close-to-call dancers.
00:54:11 Speaker_03
Going into the election, I was like, all these people are watching our show, young people love it, and George W. Bush is objectively a bad president. Maybe people are realizing this.
00:54:20 Speaker_40
Good evening. With polls closed in six states, it is already a busy night.
00:54:26 Speaker_37
The Fox News Channel's third-ever presidential election would, like in 2000, feature Brit Hume in the anchor chair. And whenever a state got called, the Fox News whiz-bang was ready to do its thing.
00:54:40 Speaker_40
But I think it would add a little pizzazz to our conversations if I prefaced my remarks to you by saying...
00:54:50 Speaker_37
The biggest change for Fox News in 2004 was that George W. Bush's cousin, John Ellis, would not be running the decision desk.
00:54:59 Speaker_37
This time, in a show of transparency, Fox actually had a camera on its backroom decision team, a bunch of data analysts with none of their relatives on the ballot, staring at computer monitors and proceeding with caution.
00:55:12 Speaker_04
— Our decision desk obviously isn't going to call it until they have a much higher level of certainty.
00:55:18 Speaker_37
— After the 2000 election debacle, everything was moving slowly, all across television news. But as the night dragged on, and more states went for Bush, Air America Radio was getting concerned.
00:55:30 Speaker_49
— Am I in a Democratic bubble or something? — What's the matter? — The whole country is red!
00:55:36 Speaker_51
— No, that's okay. The whole country is always going to be red. No one lives there.
00:55:41 Speaker_37
And then, at 12.40 a.m. Eastern time, Fox News was once again the first network to make a momentous call.
00:55:49 Speaker_40
Fox News is now projecting that President Bush will win the state of Ohio.
00:55:56 Speaker_03
It sucked. That was the night that taught me that satire is ineffective and we were actually not making a difference as a show. Our show has no impact.
00:56:04 Speaker_28
It looks very red and then there's some blue there at the top where many of us will most likely spend the next four years. I would imagine huddled, huddled together and in fact weeping.
00:56:18 Speaker_27
My question is, you know, what do we do now?
00:56:27 Speaker_37
Fox's critics and antagonists had tried all different strategies in the lead-up to the election, calling out Fox News and emulating it, being explicitly partisan and striving to be apolitical. Nothing had worked.
00:56:42 Speaker_37
And now George W. Bush's Republican Party and Roger Ailes' Fox News were even more entrenched.
00:56:49 Speaker_22
The reason Fox News wins is very simple. We have some very fine journalists who've done an excellent job and they come in every day and try to be fair. That simple.
00:57:00 Speaker_37
Around 8 million viewers watched Fox News on November 2nd, 2004. It's most ever in prime time, and an audience closer in size to the broadcast network CBS than Fox's cable rival, CNN. There was no denying it. Fox News had won the election.
00:57:19 Speaker_37
But Roger Ailes said that Fox was still the underdog, fighting against the media establishment, that his team would always be the scrappy kids with their nose up against the glass.
00:57:31 Speaker_22
I do believe Fox News makes a tremendous contribution to journalism. We see it in how they try to copy it, how they try to attack. And, you know, if we weren't making any impact, they'd ignore us.
00:57:45 Speaker_37
There are plenty of ways to assess the impact of Fox News. On partisanship in media. On the temperature of the country. On relationships within families.
00:57:56 Speaker_37
But in the months we've been working on this series, one small fact stuck with me from a journal article about media consumption and the Iraq War.
00:58:05 Speaker_37
That study found that Fox News viewers were the most likely to be misinformed about how the war was going, to believe there was a clear link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction.
00:58:19 Speaker_37
Fox viewers were also the only group that were less informed the more they watched. So that's one consequence of the rise of Fox News.
00:58:30 Speaker_37
And by 2004, Fox was fully risen, on top for three straight years, having crushed its challengers and bullied its critics. Chronologically, 2004 is where we're finishing our series.
00:58:45 Speaker_37
But for the people we've been following in these six episodes, that wasn't the end. And their final chapters say a lot about where Fox News was then and what it's become now.
00:58:57 Speaker_55
The ratings were so strong that no one in their right mind should have taken me off the show. It was just so dumb. E.D.
00:59:06 Speaker_37
Hill was the reason the morning show Fox & Friends was called Fox & Friends. She was the fox, reading the news and chatting it up with Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy. The three of them helped establish what Fox News was.
00:59:20 Speaker_37
Feisty, rule-breaking, and crowd-pleasing. But then, in 2006, with very little public explanation, Edie got replaced by Gretchen Carlson. After Fox & Friends, Edie ended up getting moved to an off-the-radar afternoon show called America's Pulse.
00:59:38 Speaker_37
Nothing she did there got any real attention until one day in June 2008.
00:59:43 Speaker_55
We had a segment and it was about how close a relationship the Obamas had because they were always making these little gestures towards each other.
00:59:54 Speaker_37
That segment started with a tease from the host.
00:59:57 Speaker_54
A fist bump, a pound, a terrorist fist jab. The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.
01:00:05 Speaker_37
ED interviewed a body language expert who said the Obamas' fist bump indicated that they were happily married.
01:00:12 Speaker_01
And it's a connection that they have together. It's something just personal between the two of them, like, I'm proud of you.
01:00:18 Speaker_55
We had this long discussion afterwards because it was such a fluff piece for the Obamas that we felt we had to come back the next week and balance it out. And so that was it.
01:00:29 Speaker_37
That was not it. Within a few hours, Media Matters had posted the video online. In an instant, that terrorist fist jab moment was everywhere, including MSNBC's Morning Joe.
01:00:42 Speaker_34
— Could they even be jihadists, perhaps? — What's wrong with you?
01:00:47 Speaker_07
— That's what one person suggested on Fox News.
01:00:50 Speaker_42
— Oh, God.
01:00:50 Speaker_55
— That, you know, got picked up and glommed onto and didn't reflect the segment that I did, but it did what they wanted it to do.
01:01:00 Speaker_37
— Edie doesn't defend what she said on the air, but she does want to defend herself.
01:01:06 Speaker_55
Anyone who knows me knows I would never do something that cheap. Like, if I'm going to say something negative, I'll say something negative. And I'm mad at myself for not catching it, too.
01:01:16 Speaker_37
Edie did not invent the phrase terrorist fist jab. She was quoting a comment from a right-wing website, but that attribution had gotten trimmed out of her script.
01:01:26 Speaker_37
Her real mistake, basically, was not going with the old Fox News staple, the phrase, some people say. As in, some people say that John Kerry looks French. But this wasn't some people saying terrorist fist jab. It was E.D.
01:01:42 Speaker_37
Hill saying it, at a time when Fox was getting more attention for how it talked about race.
01:01:48 Speaker_58
We already know that Fox is not a news network. They are a propaganda machine. But their racist attacks have gone way too far.
01:01:56 Speaker_37
That's the rapper Nas outside Fox News headquarters at a rally led by the group Color of Change.
01:02:02 Speaker_37
The kind of racist attacks he was talking about included a Fox contributor joking about assassinating Barack Obama, an on-screen graphic referring to Michelle Obama as Barack's baby mama, and Edie Hill saying terrorist fist jab.
01:02:18 Speaker_37
All of which happened on Fox News in a single month.
01:02:22 Speaker_14
We're not engaged in politics. It's not about left-right. This is about lies that are used to racially divide.
01:02:27 Speaker_37
That's James Rucker, the co-founder of Color of Change. You heard from James in our last episode. He was one of the leaders of the progressive group MoveOn.
01:02:36 Speaker_37
By 2008, he was helping to lead a new kind of anti-Fox movement, one that didn't see politics and race as separate issues.
01:02:45 Speaker_13
There was some really good strategy around not necessarily putting Fox out of business, but tarnishing the brand and kind of shrinking the power of Fox News.
01:02:56 Speaker_37
Color of Change would have success driving away some Fox advertisers. And in Edie Hill's case, while she apologized on the air, it wasn't enough to save her show or her career at Fox News.
01:03:09 Speaker_55
Without a doubt, it was a convenient excuse
01:03:13 Speaker_37
Edie is probably right that saying terrorist fist jab wasn't the real reason for her downfall at Fox. After all, the person who joked about assassinating Obama didn't lose her position as a contributor.
01:03:26 Speaker_37
Edie says that her departure has a longer backstory, one that she's never talked about publicly. It starts with her getting pulled off of Fox & Friends after a threat from Roger Ailes.
01:03:38 Speaker_55
one of his close people called me in and said, you need to be nicer to Roger. And I said, I am very nice to Roger. I like Roger a lot. I think I'm just fine with Roger.
01:03:52 Speaker_37
Being nicer to Roger did not mean being nicer to Roger. She was being told by an intermediary that she needed to play along with the Fox News chairman's sexual overtures. And she refused.
01:04:07 Speaker_37
She says that's why she got replaced on Fox & Friends very abruptly, told on a Friday that she'd just done her last morning show. And she says it's why Fox News let her go after she said terrorist fist jab.
01:04:20 Speaker_55
About two years later, I saw this same person at an event, and this was after Fox had not renewed my contract. And he said, now I bet you wish you were a nicer to Roger.
01:04:33 Speaker_37
What did you do?
01:04:35 Speaker_55
Uh, nothing. Am I going to go into Roger and say, okay, how do you want me to be nicer to you? How do you want me to be more friendly? No, I'm not going to have that conversation. But it definitely hurt me being taken off like that.
01:04:49 Speaker_55
And it made me mad that they did it that way. It made me mad that Roger did it that way.
01:04:55 Speaker_37
Why do you feel comfortable saying this publicly now?
01:04:59 Speaker_55
Well, I don't think that people really asked, you know, and Roger's passed away.
01:05:08 Speaker_37
E.D. Hill's replacement on Fox & Friends, Gretchen Carlson, filed a lawsuit against Roger Ailes in July 2016.
01:05:14 Speaker_37
Carlson said that Ailes sabotaged her career because she refused to sexual advances and complained about severe and pervasive sexual harassment. Carlson's complaint would ultimately unleash at least 20 more and force Ailes to resign.
01:05:31 Speaker_37
The chairman of Fox News died less than a year later, in May 2017. The Fox News producers we interviewed for this series all left the network while Ailes was still in charge. The Washington, D.C.
01:05:52 Speaker_37
news crew in particular had seen Fox flourish, going from a place that was fighting for attention to a cable TV goliath.
01:06:01 Speaker_37
They'd also watched their co-workers change, from journalists like them with traditional news backgrounds to people who just wanted to work for Fox. But Jim Mills, Caroline Bruner, and Dan McGinn didn't march out of Fox News in protest.
01:06:16 Speaker_16
So I left 10 years of Fox to work for a Republican presidential candidate, Fred Thompson.
01:06:23 Speaker_48
What got me to leave in 2007, I'm not loving my work at Fox. Like, there was just nothing for me. And I thought, well, OK, I'll move to New Zealand. And so I did.
01:06:32 Speaker_57
I left on a very high note with my head held high and reputation, I think, very much intact.
01:06:38 Speaker_37
Out of the producers we spoke with, Anne McGinn is the one who felt most conflicted about her work while she was still at Fox. As far back as 2000, she'd been worried about its Republican tilt.
01:06:49 Speaker_37
She'd been shocked when a correspondent she worked with said pro-abortion on management's orders. And she was appalled by Fox's Swiftboat coverage and how hard she'd had to fight to get fair coverage on the air.
01:07:03 Speaker_37
But in this trio of DC producers, Anne is the one who stayed the longest until 2012.
01:07:10 Speaker_57
In the first few years after I left, I had my reasons for working there. I had learned so much, and in many ways, the work there helped in my next career. How could I be ashamed of it? Since 2016, and especially since January 6th, I am ashamed of it.
01:07:35 Speaker_57
I'm ashamed.
01:07:35 Speaker_37
— The partisanship. The race-baiting. Donald Trump calling in to Fox & Friends week after week to spread the lie that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. The rise of Glenn Beck. The rise of Tucker Carlson.
01:07:54 Speaker_37
For the producers on the news side of Fox News, none of that was defensible. But it also wasn't enough to make them question the work they'd done when they were at Fox.
01:08:04 Speaker_37
The legitimate reporting that they believed made fair and balanced into more than just an empty catchphrase. But the lies that Fox spread about the 2020 election, and the violence that followed, that broke the spell for all of them.
01:08:20 Speaker_16
— Ten years at Fox, most of that time, that Capitol building is where I went to work. And I just knew every nook and cranny of that place. And to look up and see those, I don't even call them people, those bastards, I was, January 6th was a bad day.
01:08:42 Speaker_48
That kind of opened the door to discussions that we had about what kind of role did we play in making shit like that happen.
01:08:53 Speaker_37
— Those discussions have been happening on WhatsApp, in a small group led by Ian McCaleb. He worked at Fox News from 2002 to 2008, as a producer covering the Justice Department and the Pentagon.
01:09:04 Speaker_20
— The initial topic was, these are all people who love and respect each other and want to stay in touch. The follow-on, I think, over a few months of discussion was, oh, wait a minute, maybe we are sort of analyzing what it was we came from.
01:09:21 Speaker_20
It's a loaded phrase, but what hath we wrought?
01:09:26 Speaker_37
What hath we wrought is what they call that WhatsApp group. It's a question that all of them have been struggling to answer.
01:09:35 Speaker_16
It's like a group therapy session. You know, what was then? What did we do? Did I have anything to do with creating that audience? And I have to say, I did. I mean, I was there at the very beginning. We didn't have 100,000 viewers.
01:09:55 Speaker_16
So I've got some of that on my hands.
01:09:59 Speaker_48
I know I did contribute to the legitimacy of Fox in the beginning because I fought so hard to make it legitimate, right? Like, I was constantly defending it.
01:10:08 Speaker_37
That's the perverse thing, right? The harder you worked, the more legitimate you helped make it.
01:10:13 Speaker_48
Yeah, 100%. And I think I can look back and see some of the coverage that was at the time. I was probably a little desensitized to it, but now I'm truly horrified by stuff because I will say it just got worse.
01:10:32 Speaker_57
When I try to talk to family members or friends about Fox viewership, I say, look at me. I worked at that place for 13 years and I'm telling you that is not news that you are watching. You just, you need to pretend it doesn't exist.
01:10:50 Speaker_57
You need to turn it off.
01:11:05 Speaker_37
To read our full reporting on the most recent legal actions between Bill O'Reilly and Andrea Macris, and learn more about how a non-disclosure agreement from two decades ago has kept Macris silent, go to slate.com slash Fox NDA.
01:11:22 Speaker_37
Also, former Fox News executive vice president John Moody sent us comment after the publication of our fourth episode, Beacon of Truth.
01:11:30 Speaker_37
Moody says that our description of his editorial notes sounds more or less accurate, and he says the allegation from ex-Fox producer Caroline Bruner that he attempted to give her his hotel room key is inaccurate.
01:11:45 Speaker_37
We couldn't make Slow Burn without support from our members, and I strongly urge you to sign up for Slate Plus today. You'll get all kinds of perks, including ad-free listening and member-exclusive episodes of Slow Burn.
01:11:58 Speaker_37
In this week's Plus episode, you'll hear more from Emily Steele on how she and her New York Times colleagues brought to light Fox News' culture of sexual harassment.
01:12:07 Speaker_60
Is it about sex? Is it about power? Is it about intimidation? Like, what is actually going on here?
01:12:13 Speaker_37
Join now by clicking Try Free at the top of the Slow Burn show page on Apple Podcasts. Or visit slate.com slash slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen.
01:12:31 Speaker_37
This season of Slowburn was written and reported by me, Josh Levine, an executive produced by Lizzie Jacobs. Slowburn is produced by Sophie Sommergrad, Joel Meyer, and Rosie Belson, with help from Patrick Fort, Jacob Finston, and Julia Russo.
01:12:46 Speaker_37
Derek John is Slowburn's executive producer. The season was edited by Susan Matthews and Hilary Fry. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Mix and sound design by Joe Plourd. Our theme music was composed by Alexis Quadrato.
01:13:00 Speaker_37
Derek Johnson created the artwork for this season. We had production help from Emily Gaddick, Chris Sinclair, Emily Vaughn, Kate Mishkin, Maddie Masiello, and Nick Pittman.
01:13:10 Speaker_37
And special thanks to Rachel Strom, Roger McDonald, and the Marion Stokes Collection at Internet Archive, the Dart Center on Trauma at Columbia University, especially Kate Porterfield and Crystal Groh.
01:13:21 Speaker_37
Also, Donegal Young, Margie Reedy Larkin, Justin Krebs, Brian Rosenwald, Nadia Raymond, Katie Simon, Megan Dietry, Emily John, Jesse Shapiro, Jessica Seidman, Henry, Ruby, and Mangesh Hatikudur, and to Slates, Evan Chung, Molly Olmsted.
01:13:38 Speaker_37
Madeleine Ducharme, Forrest Wickman, Cristina Cotarucci, Greg Lavallee, Ben Richmond, Seth Brown, Katie Rayford, Caitlin Schneider, Alexandra Cole, Emily Hodgkins, Ivy-Lise Simonis, Joshua Metcalf, Heidi Strom Moon, and Alicia Montgomery, Slate's VP of Audio.
01:13:56 Speaker_37
Thanks for listening.