Outfoxing CNN

Barry McCAFFREY was angrily shouting in the hallways at Fox News Channel. McCaffrey, the Gulf War general who served as President Clinton’s drug czar, had been invited to discuss America’s war on illegal drugs for the 1996 premiere of “The O’Reilly Report,” a Fox talk show hosted by Bill O’Reilly.

The general could be forgiven for expecting a softball interview; after all, the network had just launched, and practically no one was watching (the show initially drew no more than 30,000 viewers, according to one estimate). O’Reilly, best known as the former host of the syndicated tabloid “Inside Edition,” could seemingly ill afford to alienate any big-name guests. But O’Reilly began from the premise that the war on drugs had always been a miserable failure, and it was likely to remain so.

“Do you have any plan at all to turn this drug thing around?” he asked.

McCaffrey said the administration had a “national strategy” that emphasized drug prevention and treatment.

“Well, that strategy hasn’t worked in the past,” O’Reilly retorted, adding that drug use was linked to various social ills such as street crime and the spread of AIDS.

Off the air minutes later, McCaffrey was livid, ripping into the producer who booked him for the show. “Bill just wasn’t taking the standardized answers about the war on drugs,” says producer Bill Shine. “I can remember Gen. McCaffrey in the hallway screaming ‘cause he can’t believe that he got asked those questions and got treated that way. And that was on the first day” of O’Reilly’s show.

McCaffrey was the first of many guests bloodied after a rhetorical encounter with the 6-foot-4 O’Reilly, a veteran TV reporter variously described by his legion of critics as a bully, a jerk and a liar. Indeed, topping O’Reilly’s lengthy list of grievances were those persons who, for one reason or another, either declined to appear on the show or vowed never to return. The confrontations enhanced the host’s self-description as “a journalistic gunslinger” -- and eventually propelled “The O’Reilly Factor” to the top of the cable news ratings.

More important, the show became Fox News’ signature program and yielded a halo effect for the network’s entire prime-time schedule. As O’Reilly is not shy of reminding others, “The Factor” was a key factor in Fox News’ overall success. From its humble start in October 1996, Fox now frequently enjoys a 2-to-1 advantage over CNN. But paving the way for O’Reilly were critical strategic decisions that recast viewers’ perceptions of TV news. And many of those decisions came from O’Reilly’s boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes.

A large broadcasting company once hired Ailes -- a former GOP media advisor who worked with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- to evaluate talk-show hosts on its local TV stations. Ailes devised a trick to help him decide whether the hosts were any good. He would watch the shows in his hotel room with the sound turned off, closely scrutinizing each host’s gestures, facial expressions and body language when interacting with guests. “If there was nothing happening on the screen in the way the host looked or moved that made me interested enough to stand up and turn the sound up, then I knew that the host was not a great television performer,” Ailes later wrote.

To Ailes, great television meant great performances, whether from a politician or a talk-show host. People were the essence of the medium, the reason that viewers watched in the first place. That was Ailes’ guiding principle at CNBC, where as president from 1993-96 he signed such hosts as Chris Matthews, Charles Grodin and Geraldo Rivera. (It is not coincidental that all three had idiosyncratic styles and were frequent targets of parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”)

“If I have any ability, it’s probably to find talented people and set up a structure that they can work in,” Ailes says. “I look for authenticity in people. I don’t look for formats to stuff people in. I try to find authenticity and then develop a show from it.” Focusing on personalities may sound like a simple insight; after all, commercial TV has depended on stars since the late 1940s. But the Ailes approach would come to revolutionize cable news.

In the early days of CNN, Ted Turner had insisted that “news is the star.” While certain newscasters there developed cult followings, such as Headline News’ Lynne Russell, it was clear that what distinguished CNN was its roving camera, which seemed to span the globe 24 hours a day.

Ailes found such an approach misguided, at least for cable TV. “I do think you can create appointment television,” Ailes told one reporter, “but it’s the people. It may not make a difference whether or not the network looks better. In the end, you may get better ratings if you just have two people sitting in chairs, if you have the right two people.”

Before the launch of Fox News, Ailes -- whom News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch had hired in 1996 to kick-start his long-held dream of an all-news network that could take on CNN -- reviewed hundreds of tapes sent by TV journalists from all over the country. Some help in winnowing the pile came from an old boss.

“I think I listened to maybe 400 or 500 tapes before we hired the people,” says Chet Collier, who had hired Ailes as a production assistant on the syndicated “Mike Douglas Show” more than 30 years earlier.

A curmudgeonly veteran of TV syndication -- a brutally competitive backwater of broadcasting -- Collier was probably the person most responsible for Ailes’ view of television. He agreed with media philosopher Marshall McLuhan that the relatively small size of the screen necessarily made television a personal and intimate medium. “People tune in to watch somebody, or they tune them out,” Collier says.

To fill the Fox News airwaves, Collier was not necessarily looking for the best journalists. In fact, he spent little time worrying about journalistic quality at all. Collier tended to view reporters and producers with a mix of amusement and frustration; they were, in his mildly disparaging phrase, “newsies.” Like his protege Ailes, Collier was first and foremost an entertainer. “My job,” he says, “was to see that [news] was presented with the most excitement.”

That approach made some Fox staffers uncomfortable, but Collier offered no apologies for trying to engage viewers. “It was always a balance between what is the news and what is entertainment -- or entertaining,” he says. “Of course, the newsies all go crazy when you say that, ‘cause essentially you’re corrupting a great institution. But you know, you have to get people’s attention if you’re gonna get any ratings, ‘cause you don’t want to end up like MSNBC.”

The desire to make the news entertaining pushed Fox News toward bright studio lighting, colorful graphics and attention-grabbing sound effects such as the “swoosh” that accompanied screen wipes. But the emphasis was always on finding stars, and before long the network had found a big one.

A few months after Fox News launched, a frustrated O’Reilly paid a visit to Ailes. “The O’Reilly Report” was airing in the 6 p.m. slot and was having trouble breaking out in the ratings. O’Reilly told Ailes he felt the show should be doing much better. “Bill, I think I made the mistake,” Ailes said. “I think I put you in the wrong time period.” Ailes reasoned that most viewers at 6 p.m. were still learning the day’s headlines. They were not ready to hear political opinion, particularly strong opinion like O’Reilly’s, which tended toward the stridently populist.

In the early ‘90s, when he was at “Inside Edition,” O’Reilly was inspired by the success of Rush Limbaugh, who at the time was doing a syndicated TV show (briefly produced by Ailes).

O’Reilly pitched the executives at King World (which distributed “Inside Edition”) a show that resembled an edgy, opinionated version of ABC’s “Nightline.” After they passed, O’Reilly, who had a long history of tangles with management at ABC News and the numerous stations where he worked, quit the show.

Ailes had met O’Reilly several times before, once booking him as a guest on a show Ailes hosted for America’s Talking, the small cable network he started while running CNBC. America’s Talking eventually morphed into MSNBC after NBC partnered with Microsoft in late 1995 and Ailes decided to leave the network. “During that interview I realized, ‘This is a guy with solid journalistic credentials. He’s been out on the street for 23 years pounding down stories, but he also has strong opinions and is appealing in a kind of likable Irishman way.’ So that stuck in my mind.”

Emphasizing opinion

When O’Reilly approached Ailes about his show idea, he was invited to Fox News for an interview. O’Reilly was clear about the type of show he wanted to do. “Every newspaper in the country has an op-ed page and an editorial page, but broadcasters are afraid to do that,” O’Reilly says. “I think people will be interested to hear opinion, especially after you get the news and you want to know what people think about it. So we took those Sunday morning shows, which do give some opinion -- not much, but some -- and jazzed it up to the nth degree.”

When it became clear that “The O’Reilly Report” was not catching on at 6 p.m., Ailes switched the program to 8 p.m. O’Reilly stopped booking authors and entertainers and focused almost entirely on politics. The result was a unique format in cable news.

“The show was a little softer in the beginning than it is now,” O’Reilly says. “We kind of did 50-50 hard news and features, because at 6 o’clock your audience is a little bit older.”

The program’s name was also changed, to “The O’Reilly Factor.” At the time, nearly all of the Fox shows were called “reports.” Ailes and O’Reilly both believed that the 8 p.m. show needed a more distinctive name, though each insists he came up with the “Factor” moniker first.

“We fight over that every day,” Ailes says.

O’Reilly had little doubt that the show would work. “I’m not a big kind of doubt guy,” he says -- an understatement if there ever was one. He writes virtually all the copy and structures the one-hour show like a magazine, with six segments illuminated by plenty of graphics. “The Factor” kicks off with a “Talking Points” memo in which the host offers his take on a top news story. The “Most Ridiculous Item of the Day” is a rant that uses a news tidbit as a launching pad. The program concludes with viewer mail, usually divided more or less evenly between O’Reilly worshippers and haters.

But it was the confrontations that really made “The Factor” take off. O’Reilly does gladiatorial battle every night in his self-proclaimed “No Spin Zone,” and viewers turn up to see which miscreant will be tossed to the lions. Actress and liberal activist Susan Sarandon, a frequent O’Reilly punching bag, appeared on “The Factor,” for example, to debate the police shooting of unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo. O’Reilly argued that aggressive policing in New York, where the shooting occurred, had led to a drop in violent crime. The tension grew as Sarandon insisted that O’Reilly was viewing the problem through the blinkered perspective of a white man.

“I don’t see black neighborhoods terrorized,” O’Reilly interjected.

“Well, you should go to a black neighborhood,” the actress said.

“I have, many, many times,” he replied.

After O’Reilly dismissed her, Sarandon ripped the microphone from her blouse and angrily asked the producers, “What’s his problem?”

In these battles, the host became a stand-in for the regular guy fed up with liberal experts. The Fox News website points out that O’Reilly “continues to live on Long Island where his best friends are guys with whom he attended first grade.”

That’s a valuable image for a “journalistic gunslinger,” even if his former classmates are unlikely to match his $6-million-a-year salary.

In 2000, as the presidential race headed toward a chaotic post-election showdown, O’Reilly published his bestselling “The O’Reilly Factor” and became a cable news phenomenon. He is trouncing CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now” and MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” in the 8 p.m.time slot. In fact, in March, Fox News had more total viewers in prime time than CNN, MSNBC and CNBC combined. Meanwhile, there are signs that O’Reilly may be evolving into a more complicated pundit than his critics realize: He recently made news once again by questioning U.S. policy in Iraq, contending, “The Bush administration must come to grips with the true character of Iraq and begin to change strategy.”

Chet Collier had nothing to worry about. Fox News would not end up like MSNBC.

This article is adapted from the book “Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN,” just published by Portfolio. Collins is now a Times staff writer.