Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets

Bob Turner, who was the head of Multimedia Entertainment (and later became a Republican congressman from Manhattan).
    Limbaugh’s TV show was taped before an audience and ran five days a week for half an hour. Like the radio show, it consisted of Limbaugh riffing off the news. “Everybody marvels at Jon Stewart’s show,” says Limbaugh. “That’s what my show was. That’s what Roger and I did—find news clips and make fun of people who weren’t used to being laughed at. We combined the comedy with dead serious political and cultural discussion.”
    Limbaugh believes that the TV show, which ran four years, provided a template for the Fox News evening format, although he concedes that Ailes probably doesn’t agree. “Our premise of conservatism, unabashed and unafraid, was established once and for all on mainstream television. We showed it could be done,” he says.
    Ailes was Limbaugh’s executive producer and he was also his mentor. Limbaugh, who was a decade younger and comparatively new on the national scene, leaned on his producer’s sophistication in the ways of Washington and the New York media. When President George H. W. Bush invited them to the White House for a sleepover, it was Ailes who told him it was all right to call his mom from the Lincoln Bedroom.
    The media were, of course, interested in the pajama party at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Limbaugh cleared an invitation from
The Today Show
with Ailes, who gave him some media advice. “Roger told me that he had detected in me a common fault that newcomers to TV make when being interviewed by mainstream journalists. He said, ‘Rush, they don’t care what you think. Don’t try to persuade them of anything. Don’t try to change their mind. They are not asking you questions to learn anything. So don’t look at this as an opportunity to enlighten them. Whatever they ask, just say whatever you want to say.’”
    Ailes sometimes took a more direct approach in protecting his friend and star. They got wind that
Time
magazine was planning a cover story portraying Limbaugh and Howard Stern as similar figures. Ailes figured this would hurt the show and make it less attractive to potential advertisers. “Roger got in gear and called
Time
magazine. I sat in his office during the call,” Limbaugh recalls. “He told them that if they persisted in this, we on the TV show would do features on all the reporters working on the story. That we would hire investigators to look into their backgrounds, find out how many DUIs they had, run a story demonstrating the similarities of these reporters to Al Goldstein [the publisher of
Screw
magazine]. It was a virtuoso performance. I was laughing my ass off. And I think it worked to an extent because when the story came out, it was basically harmless. That’s the thing—when you have Roger Ailes on your side, you do not lose.”
    Limbaugh eventually left the show because he didn’t like the meetings and collaboration that go with television, but he and Ailes have remained close friends, an alliance that has helped shape the tone and direction of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Limbaugh—despite the fact that he is boycotting New York State because of what he regards as its confiscatory taxation policy—visits Ailes at his Putnam County mountaintop home from time to time; Ailes is a regular at Limbaugh’s Palm Beach estate for the Spring Fling, a long weekend that brings Limbaugh cronies and political friends together for golf (which Ailes can’t play), drinking (which Ailes no longer does), and conversations about the state of the world and the country. “Politically, Roger and I are brothers,” Limbaugh says. “Trust me when I tell you there is never any strategy session, in the sense that we never coordinate content. There has never been a time where we even discussed mutual programming to achieve an objective. That never happens. It doesn’t really have to. Ideologically and culturally, we