Charlie Leduff - Sh*tshow!: The Country’s Collapsing ... And the Ratings Are Great

Detroit

US Guys

Work and Other Sins

Id arrived full of piss and tonic, ready to pitch Roger Ailes my idea for a national TV news segment called The Americans, but the morguelike atmosphere dampened my enthusiasm. The Fox News offices in Manhattan were a warren of cubicles with shitty fluorescent lighting and drab, yellowing paint. People were cowed and hollow-eyed behind their cheap modular desks, tap-tap-tapping numbly on their keyboards. Bill OReilly scuttled through the lobby, scowling and distracted. He looked like hell without makeup, saggy bottomed, squeezed like an old dishrag.

Papa Bear! I shouted to him, fist in the air, fight-the-power-like.

He threw a sour, dismissive wave and shambled on toward the elevator bank. There he went: No Spin Bill, carrying the weight of the countrys number one cable news show on those seductive, sloping shoulders. Give em hell, Papa Bear!

Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, had a nice office, his door kept sentinel by a young bombshell with black stockings and skirt and a tight sweater, put together like the bevy of other young bombshells with black stockings and ample cleavage who populated this Fox News mother ship, tap-tap-tapping. Who created this Plasticine paradise? Who was the genius who came up with the concept to marry family values with unquenched geriatric libido?

I was escorted into Ailess inner sanctum, chaperoned by two senior Fox executives.

This Ailes, by the look of things, he knew how. A large, understated office. A window facing uptown. A couch. A private toilet. A desk with absolutely no paper on it. Nothing. No schedules. No contracts. No tissue. No disposable cup. No lint.

Its all done right here, said The Rog, pinched and slightly rotund, tapping his pale, bald skull with an index finger. The map of the kingdom was carried in his head.

Roger is a genius, explained one of the executives who brought me to meet the Exalted. He built this from scratch and he keeps the recipe to himself.

My stars dont like it, Rog said, but I go by instinct. How are my stars? They dont like the new schedule?

Stars, I thought. He called his commentators stars.

Well, Im a local TV reporter for your Fox station in Detroit, I said.

I know, he responded, pointing to his magical skull. You wrote a book.

Yes, well, like I said in the book, Mr. Ailes, Detroit is not its own little freak show. The whole country is bankrupt and on high boil. Its a shitshow out there. What Id like to do is a series of dispatches for your local television group [Fox directly owned eighteen local stations in Americas biggest markets, usually one with an NFL team]. Go across America with a camera, show whats really going on between L.A. and New York. Get in touch with the real people. Theyre missing from your airwaves, you know. And the elections coming sooner than you think.

Rog looked at his executives and asked: Can we control him?

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I asked him just like that because Rog was no shrinking violet. He was battle-tested. Hed been around the barracks with that upper-plate smile, crooked and dangerous, his eyes glazed, unhealthy, and bulbous. You just knew you could talk to Rog, the man who created the Richard Nixon Show and then went on to create bullshit right-wing TV news. Rog was the man who realized there was a tremendous audience of people out there who were tired of the decades of bullshit left-wing news they were being fed. So Rog was a genius.

Now, I was proposing something down-up and right down the middle, something showcasing everyday people who were trying to get by as the country and their way of life disintegrated around them.

I dont want you going off and doing stories on Rupert Murdochs charities, he said gravely.

What the wizard was telling me was that he didnt want stories that would cost him money or advertisers or instigate phone calls from the country club or from The Boss himself. These were the same concerns of liberal media executives. In the end, news isnt really about keeping the public informed or holding the powerful to account. Its about cash money. The First Amendment is a fine thing, but the Founding Fathers didnt think to leave the media a revenue stream. Thats why the industry pushes as many stories as it does about doped-up starlets, foil-hat crackpots, and cats, so many catsrunaway cats, talking cats, ghost cats, cats on the toilet, amputee cats in wheelchairs. Money made the twenty-four-hour news cycle spin round. Id learned that much in my years as a newspaperman.

And frankly, what did I care about Ruperts charities? I mean, Im no collaborator, no corporate lap dog. Im not a tool or an organ or a megaphone for the ruling class. I dont do drinks or retreats or White House Correspondents Dinners. Proximity to power does nothing for me. I dont even call myself a journalist. Reporter, straight up. But I cant imagine anything as arcane as Ruperts charities. Ill leave that to the chattering chimps and op-ed writers. I just wanted to get into the dirt of American life.

All right, he said straight from his famous gut. Well give it a shot.

To his credit, Rog was straight up about it. There was no turn around and let me get a look at you. No feeling up my pectorals or biceps. No invitation to a boozy luncheon at a high-end hotel. None of the alleged harassment that three years later would lead to Ailess ouster from the network he had built. Its much easier to get hired in TV newsespecially if you have a limited intellectual skill setif youre primped and powdered and physically possessed. Bad hair and yellow teeth dont get you very far. But Rog saw beyond it. Ailes said yes to me and the show, and I owe him much gratitude for that.

What you have in your hands is a chronology of those stories charting three years I traveled the country as a TV reporter for a segment on The Americans that aired across the country; three years of significant change to the American political, racial, and economic landscape. From the obvious and not-so-obvious effects of the new globalism to the growing strife between black and white, between the people and a government they feel has abandoned and cheated them. I did my damnedest to get up close and personal, to understand people and their very real anxieties and desperation. The American dream was slipping away, I knew that. Mortgaged down the river. But what, besides social media, part-time work, and prescription medication, was replacing it?