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ALSO BY CHARLIE LEDUFF Detroit US Guys Work and Other Sins PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2018 by Charles LeDuff Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Portions of this book appeared in different form in Mother Jones, The New York Times, and Vice News. ISBN 9780525522027 (hardcover) ISBN 9780525522034 (ebook) Version_1 Ma Contents Also by Charlie LeDuff Title Page Copyright Dedication 2013 Red, White & Rog 2014 Black Gold The Blue, the Gray & the Green No Color but the Red of Blood The White Man’s Last Stand How Green Was the Red Woman’s Valley A Sea of Brown Gray Donkeys/Burros Grises Red Teeth White Is the New Black St. Louis Blues Fade to Black Brown Out 2015 Ebony & Ivory Yellowhammer Red Meat Silver Bullet Red Summer in White City Don à l’Orange Knights in White Satin My Blue Hell Brass Balls 2016 Yellow Water And the White Horse You Rode In On Die Whitey Die Trail Mix: The Mad Dash to Oblivion in New Brown Shoes 2017 Tighty Whities About the Author 2013 Red, White & Rog NEW YORK CITY (AUTUMN 2013)— I’d 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 O’Reilly 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 country’s 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 Ailes’s 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. It’s 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. 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 don’t like it, Rog said, but I go by instinct. How are my stars? They don’t like the new schedule? Stars, I thought. He called his commentators stars. Well, I’m 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. It’s a shitshow out there. What I’d like to do is a series of dispatches for your local television group [Fox directly owned eighteen local stations in America’s biggest markets, usually one with an NFL team]. Go across America with a camera, show what’s really going on between L.A. and New York. Get in touch with the real people. They’re missing from your airwaves, you know. And the election’s 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. He’d 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 don’t want you going off and doing stories on Rupert Murdoch’s charities, he said gravely. What the wizard was telling me was that he didn’t 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 isn’t really about keeping the public informed or holding the powerful to account. It’s about cash money. The First Amendment is a fine thing, but the Founding Fathers didn’t think to leave the media a revenue stream. That’s why the industry pushes as many stories as it does about doped-

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A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy's ranch to Donald Trump's unstoppable campaign for President--at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff was there In the