Roger Ailes, Hillary Clinton and me
Isat in the makeup chair for what felt like hours. It was November 2014, two years before the presidential election. I was about to make my first and only appearance on the Fox News Sunday show “Media Buzz.”
The Fox News makeup treatment is unlike any other in journalism. It involves false lashes, layers and layers of foundation and heavy applications of come-hither lip gloss. While caking cover-up onto the dark circles under my eyes, the makeup artist gossiped about a Democratic senator who, hours after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, had been cranky about how she’d coifed his hair.
“Can you believe that?” she said. “Look up for me.” I obeyed.
Sexing up female reporters — even those from The New York Times — was part of the Fox News look as conceived by Roger Ailes, the television impresario who died Thursday at 77. He wanted women to appear a certain way while delivering the news, and as sexual harassment lawsuits last year revealed, he had specific ideas about how women should treat him off-camera, as well.
While Ailes doled out attractive female anchors in revealing outfits as eye candy, his empire thrived partly on its audience’s widespread fear of the only woman who has ever had a real shot at the presidency, the person I was there that day to discuss: Hillary Clinton.
Clinton and Ailes will always be tied together by history. In August, when Clinton learned he was advising Donald Trump’s campaign, she told ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel that she felt the election had “entered an alternative universe.” She meant the one in which Ailes played God.
Over two decades, Fox News made Clinton one of the longest-running villains on TV. Ailes would rewrite her part over the years: In the 1990s, she was a bra-burning affront to stay-athome mothers; in her Senate race, she was an entitled wife riding on her husband’s coattails; by the 2008 primary, she was Lady MacBeth, desperate to star in her own production.
In 2016, Ailes made Clinton, a centrist Democrat whose most audacious campaign promise was that she wouldn’t over-promise (“we don’t need any more of that”), seem like a cross between Saul Alinsky and Ramsay Bolton.
But Fox News also gave something to Clinton: proof of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” no longer hiding in the shadows but right there on the televisions in 90 million American households.
She didn’t talk specifically about Fox News during the 2016 campaign, and when asked about Ailes, she wouldn’t take the bait. But of all the reporters in the traveling press, her favorite might have been Fox News’ Ed Henry, who would yell questions at her with the grace of a livestock auctioneer. “Secretary Clinton! Will you take questions from the media? We haven’t heard from you in months,” he bellowed during a stop at a bike shop in Cedar Falls, Iowa. “I’ll have to ponder it,” Clinton, who had a breezy, familiar rapport with Henry, replied. “But I will put it on my list for due consideration.”
At an event in North Las Vegas, he attacked with a fusillade of questions about her private email server.
“Did you try to wipe the whole server? Answer the question,” Henry said.
“I don’t — I have no idea, that’s why I turned it over —”
“You were the official in charge of it. Did you wipe the server?”
“What? With a cloth or something?” Clinton said, rubbing the air as if she were applying Windex to an invisible mirror. That clip showed up on Fox News for months.
I’d had my own fraught relationship with the channel. As the Times beat reporter assigned to covering Clinton, I represented the hated “liberal media” to many faithful Fox News viewers (including members of my extended family in South Texas, where I grew up). To some Times readers who thought my articles were too tough on Clinton, just appearing on Fox News confirmed their suspicions that I was a Republican mole.
I had also worked in the News Corp. building a decade earlier while a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Once, after a security guard innocently mistook me for a Fox employee, I spent the rest of the day tugging my skirt down a couple inches.
He wanted women to appear a certain way while delivering the news
As a newspaper reporter, I didn’t want to look like I worked on-air for Fox News. But as an unabashed television connoisseur (including occasional closeted viewings of “The O’Reilly Factor”), I’d always appreciated the staging Ailes brought to Fox News, right down to the Marilyn Monroe treatment of beat reporters. It became cringe-inducing when we learned just how Ailes was treating female employees when he resigned from Fox News last year.
If there was any poetic justice, it was that a woman caused the downfall of Ailes in the end. But that woman was not Clinton.
In 2014, when Ailes was still in charge, it felt strange for me to be back in the News Corp. building, this time as a guest. Finally, when not an inch of my skin from the neck up hadn’t been coated in shimmering bronze powder that gave me the glow of a weekend jaunt to Palm Beach, I jokingly asked the makeup artist, “Are you gonna make me a blonde?”
“No,” she said, deadly serious. “We don’t have time.”
Amy Chozick, a reporter for The New York Times, is writing a book about covering the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton.