Fox News apparently has a leak.
The news and gossip Web site Gawker posted a column on Tuesday from a person who it says is a “longstanding, current employee of Fox News Channel.” The anonymous person “will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization,” the Web site said.
In media circles, the column instantly raised a question: how long will it take for Fox News to plug this leak?
Employees very rarely speak out of turn at Fox News — proof, people close to the network say, of discipline and intense loyalty to the network and its chief, Roger Ailes. When it has happened before, Fox executives have taken the matter very seriously.
In mid-2004, for instance, when a handful of former Fox News and local Fox affiliate employees spoke against the network in a documentary, “Outfoxed,” Fox News shared unflattering information from personnel files that portrayed some of them as unqualified.
A year later, when I was the editor of a blog called TVNewser, I published some complaints from anonymous Fox News employees about the spraying of an insecticide at the network’s headquarters in New York. Rumors seemed to be running rampant at the network.
I was surprised that the employees were speaking up, since it was so rare to hear from Fox employees, even on an anonymous basis. I was even more surprised, a day or two later, when Mr. Ailes addressed the newsroom about the spraying and about the leaks.
“Apparently there’s folks out there saying Fox News management is keeping people in the dark about insecticide incidences, tipsters allege,” he told the assembled employees. “Tipsters — plural, incidences — plural.”
He said that he was aware of only one complaint about the insecticide spraying, adding: “Hundreds of people have been in and out of these rooms since then, we have had no other concerns and no other complaints and somebody seems to be gunning to create some problems for the Fox News Channel from inside the Fox News Channel. We don’t know who or why yet, but obviously H.R. is here to help you and protect you, and if there’s any concerns, please see them and we will get an immediate investigation under way.”
He then told the employees that the leaks were meant to “damage us” as
a network:
The concern I have with this kind of stuff, and I know this young fellow that’s doing this Web site here I guess wants to be a journalist, but one of the problems is with just taking a single source and saying it’s ‘multiple sources,’ or taking multiple sources and saying rumor, is that if it were a terrorist attack, I would not go here to get the facts because the information is entirely unreliable. Whoever is doing this is damaging you folks and the reason why I’m concerned about it is it is not fair to you.
Fox shared Mr. Ailes’s comments with TVNewser, perhaps to make sure they were received by the rest of the staff.
More recently, Mr. Ailes suggested that employees who leak to other news organizations should find other jobs. The comments came in the wake of a Washington Post article that described a “deep split within Fox” over Glenn Beck, whose 5 p.m. program had disturbed some journalists who worked
at the network.
While speaking to the staff of Fox’s Washington bureau — in that way implying that the leaks had come from there — Mr. Ailes said, “For the first time in our 14 years we’ve had people apparently shooting in the tent, from within the tent.” Then he said, “We prefer people in the tent not dumping on other people in the tent.”
Mr. Ailes added that day: “I was brought up to defend the family. If I couldn’t defend the family I’d leave. I’d go to another family.”
Tuesday’s leak is unique in that it included a video clip from Fox’s internal system: a clip of Sean Hannity preparing to interview Mitt Romney. The purportedly anonymous employee described his or her dissatisfaction with the content of a Fox News Web site called The Fox Nation, and hinted that there would be more video to come.
The person wrote: “‘So why not just leave Fox News?’ you might ask. Good question! I’ve asked myself that same thing many times. And I am leaving. Sooner rather than later, I’m guessing. But I can’t just leave quietly, can I? Where’s the fun in that?”