Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets Page A

are two peas in a pod.”
    While he was producing the Limbaugh show, Ailes began exploring a new frontier: cable news. CNN had gone on the air in 1980 to considerable derision: Ted Turner, its founder, was called crazy for imagining that a station based in Atlanta could make money providing around-the-clock news from all over the world to an initially small cable audience.
    But Turner was right. Over time the cable audience grew and so did CNN’s reach and reputation. During the 1991 Gulf War, it was the only American station with journalists in Baghdad, and its war coverage became the talk of the media world. Cable appeared to be the wave of the future, and the big networks wanted a piece of the action. NBC was especially keen to explore the new terrain. It already had a struggling business channel, CNBC, which it hoped to expand. NBC president Bob Wright saw that as just the beginning, and he reached out to Roger Ailes to run the channel. Jack Welch, the outspoken, politically conservative head of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, blessed the decision. Both he and Wright had reason to be pleased by the results. When Ailes took over, CNBC’s asset value was $400 million. When he left, two years later, it had more than doubled.
    Ailes had been watching cable news from the sidelines, and he had an intuition that it should be personality-driven. He brought in Chet Collier, a Bostonian of the old school and thirteen years Ailes’s senior. He had been Ailes’s boss and mentor and drinking buddy at the Douglas show, and had promoted Ailes to the post of executive producer after Woody Fraser left. “Chet was a Kennedy liberal, but I didn’t give a damn about his politics,” says Ailes. “He was a brilliant television guy. And he could tell me the truth. A lot of times that’s crucial, to have somebody around who isn’t afraid. You need somebody with the kind of relationship that allows him to close the door and, one-on-one, tell the boss, ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’ Collier did that for me. If I did something he thought was wrong, he’d tell me straight out that I was full of shit.”
    Neil Cavuto was already at CNBC when Ailes arrived. “I was worried about how badly we were doing after five years on the air,” he says, and the arrival of Roger Ailes, known then for his partisan political activities, didn’t help much.
    “Roger wasn’t a GE executive type,” Cavuto says. “Jack Welch went way outside the petri dish when he hired him. But when I met Roger I remember thinking, this guy has elected presidents—maybe he can help us.”
    Ailes began with research. He spoke to everyone at the network and grilled them about the most minute details of their jobs. Once he knew what was happening, he began to intervene. “He’d tell the graphics guy if the writing was too small,” Cavuto recalls. “He’d call the sound guy and say that the volume was too low. Editorial meetings were opened up, and everybody, even production assistants or other junior staff, were encouraged to speak up. On the other hand, he made it clear that he was not going to put up with eye-rolling or negativity.”
    “When I got to CNBC, I found chaos and a lack of leadership,” Ailes told me. “There were executives there who spent their days playing basketball or at the track. First thing, I told people to get their feet off the goddamn desk and get to work.”
    “Roger tested people,” says Cavuto. “He called me in and said, ‘People tell me you are cocky and arrogant and you constantly interrupt—’ At which point I interrupted him and said, ‘You’re right but I’m working on it.’” Ailes laughed and said that he liked Cavuto’s work. They have been together ever since.
    He demanded that producers and reporters rethink their approach to business news. At the time, it was considered bad form for journalists to talk about ratings or network profits. “Our thought was, is this story important, not who will