The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jane Mayer on the Revolving Door Between Fox News and the White House

Episode Date: March 5, 2019

Donald Trump has made no secret of his great admiration for Fox News -- which he praises by tweet nearly constantly -- and his disdain for other, “fake news” outlets that he regards as “enemies of the people.”  But the closeness of the relationship between Fox News and the White House is unprecedented in modern times, Jane Mayer tells David Remnick. In a recent article, Mayer, a staff writer since 1995, analyzes a symbiotic relationship that boosts both Trump’s poll numbers and Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line. “I was trying to figure out who sets the tune that everybody plays during the course of the day. If the news on Fox is all about some kind of caravan of immigrants supposedly invading America, whose idea is that? It turns out that it is this continual feedback loop,” Mayer says.  She pays particular attention to the role of Bill Shine, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and a former Fox News executive, who has helped create a revolving door where those who create the Administration’s political messaging and those who broadcast it regularly trade places. Jane also discovered that Shine was linked to the intimidation of employees who were sexually harassed at Fox News. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's certainly no secret that nearly all politicians prefer some media outlets to others. They tend to like places where the journalists ask them easier questions. And it's no secret that the president hates nearly all of the media, with one big exception. Donald Trump loves Fox News, and he tweets its praises all the time. But something big and something quite rare in modern times happened between Fox and the president during the midterm campaign. Sean Hannity, come on up. Hannity appeared at a rally not as an observer, not as a commentator,

but as a speaker on the podium for the president. By the way, all those people in the back are fake news. I did an opening monologue today, and I had no idea you were. going to invite me up here. And the one thing that has made and defined your presidency more than anything else, promises made,

promises kept. The president trusts Hannity and others on the Fox News evening lineup more than he trusts his own advisors, it seems. Jane Mayer has been reporting for us on how this unique, symbiotic relationship came about.

Jane's been a New Yorker staff writer since 1995, and she first went to the White House as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in 1984. So, Jane, you refer in a way to Fox News as state television, as if somehow Fox News has become in the United States what exists in Russia or other authoritarian and totalitarian states. You don't mean that exactly, but what do you mean? What I mean is that it has increasingly removed from the airway. at Fox News, anyone who is challenging President Trump. There's still a couple really good reporters for Fox News itself for the news side, but the opinion side, which dominates Fox News in the

morning and the evening, is dominated more and more by voices that are completely pro-Trump and coordinating with Trump. That's what it's about. I think the key word here is coordination, that there is endless amounts of coordination between Fox News and the Trump White House. How would you describe that? What are the details of that? Well, I said to try to figure out what was going on with this because Bill Shine, who used to be a president of Fox News, had been appointed to be a deputy chief of staff to Trump and director of White House communications. And so he had the prominent job in the White House over the president's message. And I was just curious, so how does that work?

And tried to kind of dig beneath the surface there. And what I found was there are layer after layer after layer of interlocking connections between the White House and 21st Century Fox. And so it goes up and down and backwards and forwards. I was trying to figure out who sets the tune, you know, that everybody plays during the course of the day. If the news on Fox is all about some kind of caravan, supposedly, of image, immigrants invading America, whose idea is that? And it turns out it just is this continual feedback loop back and forth because the most prominent and well-paid and highest-rated

opinion host on Fox is Sean Hannity. And he's on the phone virtually every night after his show he has told people with President Trump. So they coordinate that way. And we can go on through the various other layers, but there's a message coordination that I've never seen in other White Houses, and I go back to having covered Reagan, and they thought a lot about the message. They never had anyone who would carry it like this. And other people who've been studying presidencies, historians and political scientists, they say that this is new.

Well, Ben Bradley, who went on to be the great editor of the Watergate era, when he was at Newsweek was best friends with John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic Convention, Phil Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, brokered the relationship and the nomination of Lyndon Johnson as vice president to John Kennedy. Walter Lippman, the great newspaper columnist and pundit, saw his role to advise presidents at a certain point in history. What's the difference now? Well, and of course we do write that in the piece. thanks to some excellent editing. And it's true. But what we've got here is the single largest cable television network in America that is reaching Trump space every night.

It's not just a single evening of brokering a convention or a visit behind the scenes with the president, as Ben Bradley did, or going horseback riding with them or whatever they did. This is like a daily operation where you're seeing the... the President of the United States criticizing all the rest of the media and shutting down the press briefings for the rest of the media and favoring one channel to the exclusion of the others, which is carrying his message without any mediation a lot of the time. And so it's become an arm of the White House. That's what's really different. The interesting thing in your piece is that the relationship was not always like this. Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump talk constantly now, but they've had an uneasy relationship over the years. And the same goes for Fox News. During the campaign, Donald Trump even boycotted Fox News or said he was going to, whatever that meant. What's the history of this relationship and how did it evolve?

Yeah, it was interesting. There's much more than I knew before getting into this, a kind of a rocky start to this romance. Basically, Rupert Murdoch has, as someone who's been in New York, owner of the New York Post, had known Trump for decades, going back to when he bought the New York Post. They were introduced to each other by Roy Cohen. And they had a kind of a symbiotic business relationship from the start. Trump could get publicity for his celebrity sort of antics and Rupert Murdoch could sell papers. But isn't it true that Rupert Murdoch considered Donald Trump a sleazy businessman? That is what I'm told by people who know Murdo well. They thought he was sort of a shady casino operator and kind of a con artist. So when you finally get to the point of 2016 and Trump is running for real for the White House, Rupert Murdoch was very tough on him. His newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, described it as a catastrophe for the Republican Party.

and for the country to have Trump running. And Rupert Murdoch personally tweeted against Trump on the issue of immigration, telling the world that Trump was wrong about immigration. So what interested me was how do you get from there to the point where every night almost, and I've been watching an awful lot of Fox, almost every night, the hosts that are reaching a huge swath of America are trashing immigrants and scaring people about immigration. And you've got this, you know, Fox is, the chairman of the company is Rupert Murdoch,

and immigrant himself from Australia who thinks immigration is a good thing. And so I was curious, you know, how does he square that? And I interviewed a lot of people, and one of them on the record, Greta Van Sustern, who used to be a host of a show at CNN and then at Fox and MSNBC. So she's seen them all. She said, don't kid yourself about Rupert Murdoch in immigration. What he cares about is the bottom line. and they are minting money by whipping up fear.

Now, one of the central figures in all of this, as you said, is Bill Shine, who's a former co-president of Fox News, currently White House Director of Communications and Deputy Chief of Staff. Now, you lay out a great length Bill Shine's history at Fox and his relationship with Roger Ailes, who was the kind of mind and executive for so many years behind Fox News and then was forced out on charges of. sexual harassment. What was the relationship between Shine and Ayles and what was their argument when it had to do with Trump? Well, so, so Shine was the deputy to Roger Ailes. He'd come into Fox basically as the producer for Sean Hannity. He and Sean Hannity are our best friends. Their

families are very, very close. And he kind of rode Hannity's coattails and worked his way up at Fox. And he became he became Els's guy. His critics say he was an enabler, a gopher, somebody who covered up the endless numbers of sexual harassment accusations that were lodged against Roger Ailes. Shine has said, he refused to talk to us, he's not talking to anybody, really, in the press. But he had said through a spokesman that he didn't know anything about the sexual harassment charges against Ailes. And there's, I have a document. Is that possibly true? It's, you know, if it is possibly true, I mean, almost anything's possibly true.

It is true that Roger Ailes was a very secretive, paranoid man who probably tried to hide his secrets from his coworkers. But it kind of stretches credulity in many ways because, among other things, I have a document, which is Bill Schein signing a $3.15 million agreement with one of the women. who was sexually harassed by Roger Ailes. This is the booker named Lori Lund. Her name is Lori Loon, and you have to wonder, what did Bill Schein think was going on that they were paying this woman $3.15 million to stay quiet and go away.

Jane, you have one source that said that Shine would do this. He would talk to the women with a kind of velvet glove approach saying, don't worry about it, these allegations of sexual misconduct. And if that didn't work, he'd warn her that it would ruin her. career. That's the quote in the story, and I have to say that's only one quote I heard like this. There were so many people and so many women I talked to who have in the past worked at Fox who said there was almost like a routine, a system. You would complain to your supervisor. Then you would complain on up the structure till Bill Shine, who would kind of tell you, oh, it's no big deal. Just forget about it. And then eventually it would become, you know, it's not going to be good for you to make a big fuss over this. they would even call the agents sometimes.

Well, it seems quite incredible that the White House then, that Donald Trump then, would take the risk of appointing Shine Director of Communications and Deputy Chief of Staff knowing that this was going on at Fox News. How can that help him? Well, I mean, I mean, and even beyond that, this behavior of Bill Shines and Roger Ill's was the subject of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney, New York, which was looking into payoffs by Fox to silence the women and efforts to intimidate the women. Actually, there was a grand jury impaneled looking into this. And Bill Schein was called in front of it. He voluntarily testified to the prosecutors. How did this happen that he wound up in the White House? Sean Hannity put him there. Sean Hannity introduced him to President Trump, arranged a private dinner, and pushed very hard to. to get him into the White House. So Sean Hannity has managed to get his best friend,

a former president of Fox News, in the position that's incredibly useful to reporters, which is Director of Communications. It's just he's got a lock on it. I believe you say that the Washington Post refers to Sean Hannity as the, is it the deputy chief of staff? The shadow chief of staff. Yeah. And people said, you know, he might as well have a desk in the White House. he virtually does. Now, what does Hannity get out of that? Hannity has spectacular ratings, tremendous pay package, huge power, the thrill of pushing the country in the direction.

He wants to take it along with the president where they work it out and speak every night about it. I mean, it's, you know, what doesn't he get out of it? Jane, you seem to imply, and you say it straight out in a way, that the president United States is getting a great deal of his information from Fox, maybe even more than the information he's getting from his own intelligence agencies. Well, this is what his own advisors tell me in reporting on this piece, which is that a number of them suggested that if you want to try to reach President Trump, the best thing to do is get

on Fox News. So even though he's got his advisors right there around him in the Oval Office, that he respects the people that he sees on television. And so there was, there's a, there's a Senate aide, for instance, who's interviewed in the Dory, who talks about how a very prominent Republican senator whose name I know, but I'm not allowed to say in the middle of this story because he didn't want to be identified. But when he wants to reach President Trump, he calls up Fox News, asks one of the friendly hosts to put him on, he goes on, makes his points. And he says, by the time that he's getting his makeup off in the green room afterwards, the phone is ringing. And it's President Trump who wants to talk to him and hear what he's got to say and is congratulating him.

But why would he trust the television, Fox News, over the CIA and the rest of the intelligence agencies? Well, two things really. One, it's familiar to him. It's the world he came out of. He especially likes Fox and Friends, which is the morning show, because he used to be a regular guest starting in 2011. So this is the world that he came out. I remember he's not a career politician. But there's another thing.

What he's hearing on Fox News is happy news for him. It's people telling him what he wants to hear. And what he's hearing from others is independent information, verified information, that often conflicts with what he wants to think or say. So it's unwelcome, I gather. Now, Jen, you've got some startling things in this story. one of them is that a Fox News.com reporter had the Stormy Daniels story solid before the election. What happened?

So this was really interesting to me because you begin to see how Fox eventually, after Rupert Murdoch began to make his peace with Trump, begins to really take the side of Trump before the election and helped him a lot, I think, in the election. And one of the most important things that I hadn't known was that they had the Stormy Daniels story. A young reporter named Diana Falzone had it. And she had been working on it since March 2016 by October 2016. So right before the election, she was trying very hard to get this on the air. And she'd seen emails back and forth between Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohn, and the people representing Stormy Daniels, the porn actress with whom Trump has. has had allegedly had an affair.

And she'd seen the contract between them for hush money. And she also realized that a certain point, it appears, that there was a catch-and-kill thing going on with the National Enquirer, where they were silencing the woman by buying her story and killing it. And so she was, this young reporter for Fox was pushing this, trying to get this in print or on the air or on Fox website. And she kept getting kind of the runaround. Finally, she reached the top editor for the website, a man named Ken LaCourt.

And according to what she told her colleagues, and I've checked this with them, she said that his answer was, good reporting. He complimented it, kiddo. But he said, you know, Rupert Murdoch wants Donald Trump to win. So just set it aside. So just died. Killed the story in a sense. They killed it. They shelved it.

Yeah. And according to somebody who was working with her, who I interview on it. on the record in the story, a man named Nick Ritchie. He said, she had it. She had it called. She did her homework. And he said, you know, I like Trump, he said, but Fox is culpable here. They killed that story to get Trump elected. He says he thinks it did sway the election. I think a lot of people could say, you know, it was just one more thing. But if you think back there, what was going on right in that period, the candidates were neck and neck and Trump really needed the Christian right, and there'd already been other allegations about him and women.

And put it this way, Ken LaCourt, the editor there, thought that it would hurt him in the election. So killed the story, according to Diana Fallsone, let's just say, for fairness, Ken LaCourt has denied that's ever saying that. He agrees he killed the story, but he claims he didn't say that. Another piece of information that you've got that's remarkable to me, you focus on the Justice Department's attempt to block AT&T from purchasing CNN's parent company, Time Warner. How did this play out within the Trump White House? Describe the scene. What happened? So this is a scene that takes place in the Oval Office in the late summer of 2017. And Gary Cohn is there with the White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly.

Gary Cohn, the economic advisor to President Trump at that time. That's right. He was the president's top economic advisor in the White House. And Trump is just really exasperated with Coney, says to Kelly, who's just become his chief of stuff, I've told him 50 times to block that deal. I want him to call the Justice Department and get them to file suit. It's time to block that deal. We know that Trump was opposed to this deal because it was very good for CNN, basically. He's made that much. clear in public statements, but he promised the public that he was not going to intervene. He said publicly he wouldn't get involved in this case. It would be very improper for a president to try to put his thumb on the scale of justice in such a situation to help a friend and hurt a foe. But what we found out is that, in fact, he ordered his top economic advisor to do just that. Now, he was acting also in the interest of Rupert, Murdoch, why would that be?

Well, because Rupert Murdoch was the rival to Time Warner, which owns CNN. Rupert Murdoch's company doesn't want to see Time Warner become more powerful by allying itself with a huge company like AT&T. And as I recall, Rupert Murdoch himself bid for Time Warner and Time Warner rejected it. Exactly right. In 2014. So he knew how valuable this merger would be. And it was going to make one of his changes.

chief rivals much more powerful. And so he wanted to see it blocked as well, I would assume. But I've got to say Murdoch's people declined to speak on the record to us about it. Jane, maybe this sounds very airy, but it seems to me an essential question. What is this interplay between Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the White House, run by Donald Trump, mean for our democracy? What does it mean about the future of the Trump presidency? Well, I mean, what interested me a lot about it is that both President Trump and Fox News have a very particular business model and political model in the case of Trump, which is by driving up fear in a narrow base and kind of intensifying the engagement of their base, they succeed.

That's how Fox gets a very devoted viewership, and it's how Trump, holds on to his political base. But what it means for the rest of us that I think is worrisome is that that model requires them to whip people up into a state of upset, fear, sort of being inflamed. It's an emotional state that, you know, it may make tons of money for Fox and it may help Trump get reelected. But it's not the usual model, which is building a broad coalition in politics and trying to govern in the interests of everyone. So it can be, I think, a very detrimental model to the rest of the country. Rupert Murdoch is not a young man. He's in his late 80s. It's known that his children are not

wild about certain aspects, certainly, of Fox News, except for the aspect that it makes billions of dollars a year in profit. What do you expect will happen to Fox News when Rupert Murdoch is gone? Well, it's a great question. I don't have this. answer. I think it's going to hang on Lachlan Murdoch probably. He's the son, the oldest son of Rupert who is going to take charge of the new Fox after

the deal with Disney. He's going to be the top person overseeing Fox News with his father. And he shares his dad's politics. I think he's quite conservative. But it's unclear, I have heard that people at Fox

seem to think that maybe he'll make it slightly more center right. James Murdoch, who's much more of a political independent, is not going to be involved. He has sort of opted out of all of this. And so it's very much in Lachlan Murdoch's hands, I would think. And the thing is, it makes so much money like this for them. You know, I'm just not sure they're going to want to do anything that in any way hurts the golden goose. How would the Trump presidency and the future of Fox News link to each other?

How do you expect to see the campaign covered? Well, I mean, one thing that is a danger for Trump is that the Fox base viewership needs to be enraged in order to keep the business model working. But it's not necessarily great for Trump to only reach those people. He can get cornered by his own allies. And it's happened before. It happened on the budget deals where he wound up in an effort. to sort of please Fox and the Fox base and the hosts, he wound up doing things that really hurt his own popularity. And so drove down his power, really. And that could happen again in the campaign.

He may find it hard to broaden the base the way he needs to to get reelected if he's only narrowcasting his message to the most extreme people who are just watching Fox. It's a remarkable piece of reporting. Jane Mayer, thank you so much. Thanks, David. You can find Jane Mayer's reporting on Fox News in the Trump administration at New Yorker.com. I reached her in Washington. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening.

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