In a rich and various life, as a stage director, orchestra conductor, Presidential speechwriter, vice-president of the American Stock Exchange, art collector, and corporate executive, Gordon Stewart had always been a resolute urbanite. He managed to reach his mid-sixties without ever having owned an automobile. Then, in the autumn of 2005, with the prospect of retirement before him, Stewart began to imagine a life in the country. He found himself studying the out-of-town property listings in the Sunday Times, lingering over depictions of bucolic settings that, with their wooded acreage and shimmering ponds, seemed a world away from West End Avenue. One day, without telling his wife, he slipped off to Grand Central Terminal and boarded a Hudson Line train heading north. A little more than an hour later, Stewart arrived in Garrison, a small community in the municipality of Philipstown, comprising two villages and a scattering of hamlets along the Hudson River, about fifty miles from Manhattan, in Putnam County.
Stewart realized that he had been there before; in the nineteen-seventies, a location scout had chosen the place for a country scene in a movie that Stewart was directing. Now, as he toured the area with a real-estate agent, he was struck by how little things had changed in thirty years. There were no shopping malls, no big-box stores, no fast-food franchises. “I had this sort of eerie sensation,” Stewart recalls. “I haven’t been in a place that I’ve come back to that’s as unchanged as this. There are places in this world I cannot return to—in my lifetime, it has all changed. But this place had not changed at all.”
That seemed especially true of the area’s larger village, Cold Spring. Its Main Street, sloping uphill from the Hudson, was lined with Victorian buildings, and was intersected by roads (with names like Church Street, High Street, and Fair Street) containing rows of neatly kept nineteenth-century homes. This village-in-amber quality reflected the town’s peculiar setting, amid the rugged terrain of the Hudson Highlands.
Cold Spring had come into being as a factory town after the War of 1812, when President James Madison decided that the U.S. urgently needed to build foundries so it would never again have to import ordnance. Cold Spring, just a river landing at the time, was perfectly situated for such an enterprise; the surrounding mountains contained abundant veins of ore, and were thick with timber for fuel. A running brook provided hydropower, and the Hudson a ready transportation avenue. The West Point Foundry, named for the great fortress across the river, began operation in 1818, and by mid-century had become world renowned for its innovation and efficiency. It manufactured cannons, turned out the first steam engine, built many of the earliest locomotives, and produced much of the pipework for New York’s water system.
By the early twentieth century, though, with the advent of efficient steel production, the great ironworks factories began to close down, the West Point Foundry among them. The same geology that made Cold Spring an ideal location for an iron foundry became a barrier; bounded by the Hudson on one side and mountains on all the others, Cold Spring and its neighboring hamlets were largely secluded from suburbanization and office-park development. The nearest interstate is fifteen miles away. By the nineteen-sixties, local leaders had learned to embrace their town’s accidental antiquity, and began a campaign of preservation and restoration that culminated, in 1982, with the designation of much of the village as a National Historic District. The old buildings on Main Street were by then filled with boutiques and antique shops (fifty of them), and, increasingly, with day-tripping New Yorkers.
Cold Spring’s marketing strategy (“a timeless town,” it called itself) harmonized with the flowering environmentalist movement, which, thanks to Pete Seeger and others, held a strong claim on the Hudson Highlands. The view across the Hudson from Main Street, beyond West Point, includes Storm King Mountain, a great totem of modern environmentalism. A lawsuit had been filed in 1965 by a coalition of organizations to stop Consolidated Edison from building a hydroelectric plant encased in the face of the mountain (which had once been the practice target for the big guns produced at the foundry).The legal battle lasted for sixteen years, ending, in 1981, in Con Ed’s defeat—an outcome that had important consequences for environmental law, and a profound impact on both national politics (including the establishment of the right of citizen intervention in environmental disputes) and local affairs. Activist groups in the triumphant coalition evolved into a network of foundations with powerful influence in the Highlands, advocating against development and acquiring vast tracts of private land, much of it from Gilded Age estates, for conversion into open-space preserves. In a real sense, preservation became the new local industry.
The area’s emerging identity as a hip community in a Currier and Ives setting (the sort of place that has an active Old Road Society, dedicated to the preservation of a 6.6-mile unpaved stretch of the Old Albany Post Road) held a certain allure for people shopping for a home town unfreighted by conventional suburban vulgarities. A stream of émigrés from Brooklyn, the Village, and the Upper West Side began to arrive, and housing prices climbed. “A certain kind of creative New Yorker came here,” Richard Kroehling, a filmmaker and artist who moved to Cold Spring seven years ago, said. “It is a coveted, interesting place for people to come to, just for its natural beauty.” Although Putnam County is broadly Republican, Cold Spring and the adjoining hamlet of Garrison became progressive enclaves. The singer and songwriter Dar Williams, who moved to Cold Spring in 2003, told me, “We have a lot of people here who have to go to the city only once a week, so they have a relationship to the city, but they have a deep commitment to here. So, if the city’s the bridge to the rest of the world, there’s this infusion of worldliness that you have, and yet there’s snow shovelling, gardening, the farmers’ market, and ‘What are we gonna do about Main Street?’ There are a lot of great, active minds here. People come here to be deep about stuff, as well as ordinary.”
It was all captivating to Gordon Stewart, and he persuaded his somewhat skeptical wife, Zanne—who was the executive food editor of Gourmet—that they should acquire a weekend home in Garrison; two years later, in 2007, they moved to the country full time. Stewart eased smoothly into rural life; he filled the walls of his new home (which was set on six acres, including a pond) with his eclectic art collection—an Old Master here, a Jackson Pollock there—and converted a garage into an air-locked study, where he kept his rare Bösendorfer concert grand piano, which he played for hours at a time. He staged a production of “Death and the Maiden” at the community theatre, gaining standing in the artsy set, and undertook an informal study of his new home town. He discovered that although the area was nearly all white, there were more cultural strata than he imagined possible in so small a community (about ten thousand people inhabit the villages and hamlets of Philipstown). Locals generally regarded people as either Springers—native-born residents—or carpetbaggers, but the distinctions were much finer than that. Among the natives were some who could trace their lineage to the original land-patent holders from King William’s time, others who were heirs of the Gilded Age gentry, and still others who descended from the old foundry workforce (“the yeomanry,” Stewart called them). People who’d been around for thirty years were still considered arrivistes.
Stewart made a weekly ritual of going into Cold Spring to buy the local newspaper, the Putnam County News & Recorder, partly because it gave him a chance to study the townspeople in their natural habitat. “I liked the act of buying it, the physical act of going into different places,” he says. “There’s a little place called Pete’s Hometown Grocery, on Main Street. It would give me a reason to be in there. There’s a real us-them sense of things here. ‘What’s this guy doing here?’ Well, I’m buying the local paper. I’m certainly not going in there to buy American cheese. So I kind of liked that—it’s Wednesday, oh, good, I can go into one of these places and buy the local paper and see what kind of odd things happen here. It’s the Voltairean thing, or Faust, Part II. As you get older, you start to find a joy in something that’s small and real.”
But buying the P.C.N. & R., as the newspaper is known, was more than an anthropological exercise; it was an essential act of local citizenship. Stewart and his friends agreed that the paper was dry and gray, and displayed little instinct for a news angle, but it was that increasingly rare thing—an independently owned newspaper focussed exclusively on local events. The paper offered no editorial opinions, leaving political discussion to the Letters to the Editor page, invariably the most exciting section. The P.C.N. & R. was edited and delivered by the proprietor, Brian O’Donnell, who assembled it each week by the cut-and-paste method, involving scissors and glue. The paper didn’t look much different from the first issue of its ancestor, the Cold Spring Recorder, in 1866, its most distinct feature being its size: it was a broadsheet, in the original sense of the term, seventeen by twenty inches (forty per cent wider than the Times). Philipstown’s paper of record was one of the community’s binding ties, and a reflection of the place it served—quirky, and authentic.
One day in July, 2008, the paper carried the most interesting front-page story it had published in years: the Putnam County News & Recorder had been sold. The new proprietor, the paper reported, was Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News. His wife, Elizabeth, was to become the publisher. In Stewart’s circle, the news was not well received.
Roger Ailes didn’t know a lot about the community before he bought property in Garrison, in 2001. He had visited Cold Spring, which appealed to his traditionalist nature, and he’d long had a romance with the Hudson River. With Fox News flourishing five years after he created it, he decided to build a weekend home, “somewhere so I could get out of the city and look out at the river,” he recalls. He bought a tear-down perched high over the Hudson, added the surrounding properties (spending $6.2 million for twelve acres), and built a nine-thousand-square-foot house with a spectacular upriver view. He and Elizabeth, his third wife, who is known as Beth, began to spend an increasing amount of time in Garrison, with their young son, Zachary. They joined Our Lady of Loretto Catholic Church, in Cold Spring, and developed a social circle that included former Governor George Pataki, a Garrison neighbor.
Like the other locals, Ailes fell into the habit of reading the P.C.N. & R., and one day, in 2007, he noticed a page-one headline that he found quite alarming: “PROPOSED BUDGET SHOWS 40 PERCENT PROPERTY TAX INCREASE.”
“That was the highest number I’d ever seen anywhere in the country,” he recalls. “I said, Holy shit, this is not good.”
Ailes had begun to feel at home in the Hudson Valley—“All I ever wanted was a nice place to live, a great family, and to die peacefully in my sleep,” he told a local business gathering—but he’d come to have doubts about the political culture of the place. Apart from the proposed tax hike, which to him seemed unwarranted considering the services provided by the county, there was the outsized influence of nonprofit entities with green agendas. “The environmentalists always tell you it’s for the greater good,” he says, disdainfully. His favorite story in this regard was the case of a community fixture known as the Dockside, a slightly shabby restaurant situated at the waterfront on Main Street in Cold Spring. In 1999, the property was acquired by the Open Space Institute; the restaurant subsequently closed, and the building was demolished. A “passive use” open area, called Dockside Park, now occupies the lot. “The ‘greater good’ obviously could not be served by people sitting down there watching the river go by, having a beer or a hamburger,” Ailes says. “So now we have an entire field of dog crap. And that is what’s in the greater good, that we’re down there trying not to step in dog crap, because everybody in town walks their dog down there. Now, the dog has a pretty good view of the river from there. But the dog cannot get a beer. So I would argue that the greater good has not been served.”
Ailes, who was accustomed to having an influence on public affairs, began to look more critically at the P.C.N. & R. He was sixty-seven at the time, and had three years remaining on his Fox contract. He couldn’t be sure that there’d be another deal for him at seventy, or that he’d even want one. The idea of retiring as a small-town newspaper publisher had a certain appeal.
Ailes closed the P.C.N. & R. deal in July, 2008, but by then he and News Corp. were in negotiations over a new contract, and he was eventually given a five-year extension at Fox. Zachary was eight years old, and in school, so Beth agreed to take charge of the paper. Brian O’Donnell had produced the newspaper with a small staff of mostly part-time reporters, and they were summoned by the new proprietors to the paper’s one-room office, in the former Sunday’s barbershop, on Main Street. They could all keep their positions, Ailes said, and he laid out his basic rules of employment. “The first one was, you don’t bad-mouth your employer,” Michael Turton, one of the reporters, recalls. “The second one was, you tell both sides of the story.”
Beth Ailes, a slender woman with blond hair who is fiercely defensive on the subject of her husband, once had a career in cable news. Before marrying Ailes, in 1998, she had been the director of business programming at CNBC, and had helped him launch America’s Talking—the cable channel that eventually became MSNBC. She understood the community’s affection for the paper, and she knew that some people were not happy with the change in ownership. “There are plenty of people here who dislike Fox News, even though they’ve probably never watched it,” she told me. “The name Ailes has the same effect.”
Roger Ailes has been tormenting liberals since 1968, when he helped to devise a media strategy that put Richard Nixon in the White House. He similarly advised Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, before he undertook, in his sixties, his lasting achievement: the creation of Fox News for Rupert Murdoch. At Fox, Ailes not only has showcased what amounts to the top tier in any liberal’s idea of a rogues’ gallery—Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck—but has devised a twenty-four-hour alternative reality to what is proffered by “the lamestream media,” as the Fox News contributor Sarah Palin calls it.
Beth shares her husband’s political views, and, like him, she wanted the paper to have a role in events, but she wished to avoid a jarring transformation. She helped to write headlines, shot occasional news photographs, and reworked the look of the paper—gradually bringing a fresher, cleaner appearance to its pages.
Jarring change did come, with the arrival of the paper’s new editor, Joseph Lindsley, in March, 2009. The Aileses were about to acquire a second weekly newspaper, the bankrupt Courier, which was published on the other side of the county, and Beth needed someone with the drive to manage the editorial side of both papers. Lindsley, who was twenty-five, was recommended to the Aileses by a News Corp. executive. A conservative Catholic from Charlotte, North Carolina, he had gone through the rigorous Great Books program at Notre Dame, and had worked as an editorial assistant at News Corp.’s Weekly Standard. He was a smart, combative, burly man with a booming voice, and seemed a younger version of Ailes, bringing to his new job an intense competitiveness, an aggressive news instinct, and a willingness to provoke. At Notre Dame, he’d worked on the school newspaper, before deciding that it was too acquiescent to convention, and starting a conservative alternative campus paper. One of his first assignments at the P.C.N. & R. was to cover what was supposed to have been a routine candidates’ forum, which went awry; the mayor didn’t show up, and the venue was twice changed, prompting a procession of candidates and villagers up and down Main Street before settling into a church parish house. Lindsley wrote the story as farce, which prompted a letter to the paper from the event’s wounded moderator. Lindsley published the letter, and then added a mocking publisher’s note.
A few weeks later, readers found something they’d never before seen in the P.C.N. & R.: an editorial. Headlined “DEBT, DECISIONS, AND DESTINY,” the essay criticized the Obama Administration’s bailouts and spending programs, and, citing Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” warned, “We either see ourselves as a nation of people who want to achieve, produce, succeed, and contribute to society or else we see ourselves as a people who want to rely on the producers to create ‘free money’ and support us with grants and federal spending. There is an old rule of physics: If you have too many people riding in the wagon, and not enough people pulling the wagon, the wagon stops.”
The editorial confirmed the worst fears of those who’d most regretted the ownership change. Richard Kroehling, the filmmaker, remembers reading the editorial as he sat by his woodstove, and becoming so angry that he wrote a letter to the editor, a rebuke that portioned special scorn for “Atlas Shrugged,” that “bitter Bible of the extreme right.” The controversy spilled quickly onto Main Street. Leonora Burton, the proprietress of the Country Goose specialty shop, is the village’s unofficial herald. (“Gossip central,” her husband, Tony, says. “Radio Leonora.”) She found the new tone of the paper so upsetting that she stopped selling it in her store. “I’ve been in business too long, and I don’t want any political invasion in my store,” she says. “The headlines were just getting so gasping, I just thought, I can’t sell it anymore.”
Looking back, Beth Ailes considers the editorial’s publication as the moment when her newspaper became controversial, in the manner she has grown accustomed to as the wife of the chairman of Fox News. “That caused an outrage,” she told me.
“Yeah,” Lindsley added, with a laugh. “I kind of enjoyed it.”
Ailes skeptics in the Philipstown community began to apply a sort of cryptanalysis to their reading of the P.C.N. & R., searching for signs of creeping ideology. “People were very concerned that what had been the reliable source for what was going on was now changed to something more like Fox News,” Margaret Yonco-Haines, a Cold Spring divorce mediator, says. Where a disinterested outsider might see a more or less standard rendering of small-town news—a holiday story about the local Toys for Tots campaign, for example—discerning locals could see the hand of Roger Ailes at work. The charity toy campaign was organized by a previous Cold Spring mayor, Anthony Phillips, a former marine and a parishioner at Our Lady of Loretto, who was defeated in his last election bid by the current mayor, the liberal Seth Gallagher, a bagpipe-maker. The front-page display of a color photograph of Phillips surrounded by charity gifts suggested to some that Phillips meant to regain his office, and would have Ailes’s backing. (Phillips has indeed decided to run.)
Beth did not change the paper’s motto (“We are 145 years old but new every Wednesday”), but she did resurrect the Recorder’s original motto, “By the grace of God, free and independent,” and gave it a permanent place in the masthead. To some, that was just one of many signs of a new religiosity in the P.C.N. & R. Our Lady of Loretto Church seemed to merit more mentions than before, and G. K. Chesterton, the essayist and Christian polemicist, found new currency in its pages. During Christmas Week, the paper wished readers a “MERRY CHRISTMAS,’’ printed in huge green-and-red lettering above the banner. (“We can’t let them take that word away from us—these are traditions that have to be preserved,” Beth said.) Dar Williams stopped subscribing to the paper a year or so after the Aileses took over, but she bought one at the market last Easter, and was disconcerted to see “yet another religious procession on the front page,” a photograph of a Stations of the Cross pageant staged by a local Capuchin youth ministry. “I thought, I don’t want my buying the paper to be some sort of passive endorsement of any kind of bully pulpit,” recalls Williams, who is teasingly referred to by friends as a “pagan-slash-Quaker.” “We have bully pulpits in this country. And then we have villages and neighborhoods that show that we don’t have to be afraid of bully pulpits. We are much, much cooler than that, we are much more sophisticated than that. I don’t want to be giving power to things that build up some fear that you’re in a minority, an unpopular minority, which isn’t welcome to have some sense of community.”
Others have been offended by what they see as the paper’s turn to a hyper-patriotism, expressed through such features as an “American Spirit” series, recounting the heroism of combat- medal recipients. Last year, amid the debate over the federal government’s reach in the era of Obama, the P.C.N. & R. ran a multi-week series of excerpts from the Federalist Papers. “People are looking to history as a guide,” Beth explains. “If somebody told you that you had a certain kind of cancer, you might go to a medical book and look at it, and say, Well, what do I need to know so when I go to the doctor I’ll know what to ask? Likewise, when the country is in such a state of turmoil, and broke, and the government is taking more and more of our freedoms away, isn’t it refreshing to look back to history and look at what was written before a lot of this stuff was even imagined?”
Richard Shea, the Philipstown supervisor, says that such editorial decisions have cost the paper its warrant as an objective observer of local events. “It suddenly took on less of a home-town feel and more of a national feel,” he says. “When you start running the Federalist Papers week after week, to me that’s blatant. I don’t understand it.”
The most substantial change in the paper, however, has been its more aggressive, sometimes cheeky approach to local issues, especially those of particular interest to the paper’s proprietors. The P.C.N. & R. has pointed out that Putnam County’s property taxes are the tenth highest in the nation, partly because of the cost of public schooling. Roger Ailes is not an admirer of most contemporary public education, which he considers too inclined to favor fashionable trends over fundamentals. As the parent of a prospective student in the local system, he was chagrined to learn that students do not recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “I sort of still like the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag,” he says. “O.K., I’m a right-wing kook—that’s the kind of bullshit that they think. But that’s not true. The real problem is that not enough of those kids are graduating and going to good schools.”
Ailes’s opinion of public schooling was not elevated when a friend told him that he’d visited the local school and found one class engaged in a project presumably having to do with fragile ecosystems. “It must have been dress-up day, because they were all dressed in weird things, sitting on the floor making bird’s nests out of Popsicle sticks,” Ailes recalled. “It probably gave us the impression that they could do that on a Saturday maybe, but not during school hours.” An editorial reflecting that very opinion soon followed.
During a protracted contract dispute with the school system in 2009, some teachers began showing up at school wearing T-shirts with the words “No Respect” written on them. The paper editorialized on the subject, wondering what would have happened to students if they had shown up at school wearing shirts that said “Jesus Saves” or “We need a union for kids not teachers.” On the eve of a school-budget vote, the floating quotation in the masthead was from Mark Twain: “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” The paper’s editorial that day urged parents, before voting, to consider whether “the high cost of schooling includes, at the very least, the most rudimentary aspects of education.” To test that proposition, the paper offered parents a quiz, to be put to their children. Among the questions: On what date was the Declaration of Independence adopted? Who is considered the Father of the Constitution? Which is a federal holiday—Christmas Day or Earth Day?
On a different page, the paper published the salaries of every local school administrator and teacher. Parents learned that Gloria Colucci, the superintendent of the one-school, two-hundred-and-sixty-student Garrison Union Free School District, earned $164,000. Stephanie Impellittiere, the Garrison principal, earned $123,745. Mary Foppiano, a middle-school social-studies teacher, was paid $104,683.
Teachers protested, complaints were registered, and an emergency meeting of the PTA was called. “Most of the discussion of this meeting, which was heavily attended by teachers and by union representatives, was that this was an outrage that the paper did this, that it was inappropriate, that it was sending the wrong message,” Ari Straus, who owns an auto-racing team, and has lived in Cold Spring for eight years, recalls. “I didn’t win any friends in that group by asking why it was a problem to publicly print these salaries. I myself was a little bit surprised that my third grader’s teacher was making six figures. I was stunned.” Despite the hubbub, the proposed school budget passed handily.
“When Roger Ailes wants to take a position on something, he’ll take it through the paper,” Richard Shea, the town supervisor, says. “That’s his prerogative. It’s a tool. But it makes my job more difficult at times.”
Shea’s job includes the shepherding of a new zoning plan for Philipstown, a large-scale project that would affect most of the land in the area. The working draft of the plan is more than a hundred pages long, and includes numerous overlays designating the various restrictions that would be imposed upon property owners. Zoning was by far the most contentious issue, and the one that most vividly revealed the social and political fissures in the community. The new plan was strongly supported by the Hudson Highlands Land Trust and associated organizations, and by that portion of the community which generally favored growth restriction as a political matter; the plan was most vigorously challenged by smaller property owners, whose land was their most valuable, or only, investment, and who resisted further restrictions upon its use. “I’m a homeowner who’s pissed off, because they’re about to gravely affect my property values—they’re going to affect the usefulness of my property for years to come,” F. J. Spinelli, a local fireman, says. Spinelli and his wife, Kathleen, a schoolteacher, bought several acres in Cold Spring (they’d both grown up in Garrison) in the hope of converting some of the woodland to pasture, and building a barn. Spinelli claims that the new zoning law would disallow the building of the barn. Among the restrictions were wildlife-friendly fencing provisions, and noise limitations that could make the use of a leaf blower illegal.
Ailes says that the zoning plan was too complicated for him to understand, so he hired an attorney to interpret it for him, and for anyone else in town who had the same difficulty. The P.C.N. & R. devoted intense coverage to the issue; the paper published a four-page color-coded series of maps detailing the proposed new zoning, and gave ample voice to the complaints of the property-rights activists. At a climactic meeting of the town board last spring, four hundred citizens crowded into the school gym to debate the plan. Among them was Ailes, accompanied by his attorney. When Richard Shea declined to allow the lawyer to speak, because he was not a local citizen, Ailes took the microphone and said, “In America, you’re allowed to have an attorney represent you.” Councilwoman Nancy Montgomery, a bartender at a local restaurant, replied, “But this is Philipstown!”
No resolution came that night, but Shea agreed to meet privately with any citizen who had a complaint about the zoning plan, and, during the next several weeks, he met with some eighty people. Compromises were made, and an amended plan was sent to the county and approved without change. “I think that what we have now is a consensus,” Shea says. “It is a mirror of the national debate on things, you know? This is a compromise.”
Gordon Stewart hadn’t much concerned himself with “the Ailes problem,” as some of his friends termed it. Initially, he recalls, “there was a reaction among what I call affectionately the Cold Spring Village Commune. They wanted to do something about this.” In the autumn of 2009, Stewart was invited to a gathering at the home of Dar Williams. There, he met a group of people who considered the Ailes takeover at the P.C.N. & R. to be a present danger to the harmony of their community, and perhaps far beyond. Moreover, they meant to do something about it.
They had begun as participants in a politically oriented Listserv, sixty or so progressives who were following the changes at the local paper with growing alarm. “These ponderous tomes about liberty and things like that, there seemed to be a different attitude,” Margaret Yonco-Haines, an early member of the online group, recalls. “This was no longer just a local paper—this was actually something that’s trying to transform the area politically.” The online correspondents decided that they should begin meeting in person, to develop a plan to counter the new P.C.N. & R. They called their effort the Full Moon Project.
The prevailing view within the project was that there was more to the Aileses’ foray into local newspapering than civic-mindedness. “I think there was this assumption that this was going to be the new front, of trying to win back the country for the G.O.P. at a time when Obama had just won,” Williams says. “I mean, the timing was pretty chilling.” Many in the group recalled stories about conservative Christians seeking election to local school boards around the country, hoping to influence school curricula. A move into community media seemed a possible extension of that strategy. “I think there’s a conscious effort by the right-wing extreme to buy up these local papers,” Richard Kroehling says. “You have to have a lot of money, and who knows where the money comes from? Roger Ailes—is this his baby, or is it part of the national Republican Party? Where is the money coming from?”
The group debated a course of action. Many of them had already registered a personal protest, by cancelling their subscriptions to the paper. Kroehling couldn’t even bring himself to look at the P.C.N. & R. at the market. “I see a stack of those things there, and I see some goofy headline,” he said, “and it makes me depressed, it makes me—and I mean this literally—physically nauseated.” He thought that the project should distribute “a left-wing truth sheet,” addressing the perceived errors of the Ailes weekly. Others thought that an orchestrated letters-to-the-editor campaign would suffice. The most ambitious idea was to start an alternative newspaper, to compete with the P.C.N. & R. Whatever they did, the common view was that they had to proceed with caution; there was talk of intimidation on the part of Ailes, and dark musing about his “private army” of security men.
Stewart had been invited in because he was believed to have the resources, the media connections, and the political experience (he had helped write Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech) to assist in launching an alternative. After attending a few meetings, though, Stewart was not convinced of the crisis. “I said, I’m looking at the paper, at the thing itself, and I can’t find too much evidence of pollution and corruption of the kind that’s concerning you,” he recalls. “I said, I don’t see it in the text. I’m not actually incensed by it.” Stewart knew Ailes a little—he’d bumped into him at Michael’s, a restaurant in the city, and they’d talked on the phone several times, mostly about their shared concerns with the local school system. (Both had decided to send their children to private schools outside the district.) Ailes had apparently heard about the Full Moon Project, and in one conversation he’d asked Stewart whether he was part of the “Full Moon conspiracy.” Stewart feigned ignorance. “I wanted to say, Roger, if you only knew! To honestly think that some twenty-eight-year-old lefties sitting around with a potluck, their kids bawling on the floor, is a conspiracy, come on! This is not the Comintern. Trotsky’s dead, and his organization has dispersed. I wouldn’t know where to connect with a comrade now.”
Stewart was also pretty sure that the project was not capable of mounting a serious alternative to the P.C.N. & R. This was an opinion held by at least one other member of the group, Liz Schevtchuk Armstrong, a reporter who happened to work at the Aileses’ paper. She did not share the Aileses’ world view and had been interested in the prospect of a second newspaper in town, but she saw little evidence that the Full Moon Project knew what it took to produce one. “It turned out that a lot of people wanted to write political columns and things, but didn’t want to do any real news reporting,” she recalls. “I finally sent out an e-mail to everybody in the group after this had been going on for, like, three months of discussions all the time, and said, O.K., who actually can cover things? I know I can cover things, but who else is out there? It turned out nobody came forward to say they would cover meetings. They all wanted to write political commentary, mostly, or arts themes, or write recipes, or about concerts.”
Stewart pulled out of the project, but the exercise had given him an idea. Armstrong had been right about the difficulty and cost of putting out a real newspaper. But what about a virtual paper? He’d been involved in some online projects in the arts world, and he saw no reason that a newspaper had to have a material existence. He knew this imagined entity could be distinct from an ordinary community Web site, with random comments and links, only if it could do nearly everything that the P.C.N. & R. could do. It would have to provide original content, including thorough reporting of local news and coverage of the arts. As he contemplated a business model, Stewart realized that there were only so many advertisers in the area, and they were taking space in the P.C.N. & R. He conceived a radical alternative: an online newspaper that would follow the community-supported model of public broadcasting. An existing Web domain, .info, seemed perfectly suited to the project. Stewart would need to show that his idea could work before soliciting funding from foundations, or from his hoped-for readers, which meant that he’d have to foot the bill himself for at least a year. He figured that he could do it for less than a hundred thousand dollars, promising his wife, Zanne, that he wouldn’t touch their retirement money, or their eleven-year-old daughter’s college fund.
Stewart needed a staff who knew the area and had real-world experience. He realized that he would have to pay a regular salary if he hoped to attract any employees—the custom at the P.C.N. & R. had long been to pay its writers by the story, usually a fee of around sixty dollars. Even so, there was a limited pool of such talent, so Stewart decided to recruit the staff of the P.C.N. & R.
Swearing his new colleagues to secrecy, Stewart spent several months building his Web site, and producing mock versions of his e-paper, keeping it locked behind a password-protected wall. To give his new venture a physical presence, he rented a storefront on Main Street, across from the P.C.N. & R. offices, and covered the front of the place with drop cloths while workers painted signs declaring the existence of a new enterprise in town—Philipstown.info. Obeying his director’s instinct, Stewart planned a surprise unveiling for the Fourth of July, as the biggest parade of the year made its way down Main Street.
The Fourth of July celebration was a Rockwellian tableau of marching bands and American flags, of Boy Scouts and fire engines and a kilted corps of bagpipers led by the mayor. The event, a Cold Spring tradition called Community Day, had been revived in 2009 after a hiatus of nearly thirty years, with the enthusiastic sponsorship of the new P.C.N. & R. When Cold Spring’s mayor, Seth Gallagher, approached the Aileses for a contribution to the cost of the 2010 fireworks show, they said that they would be happy to pay the entire bill, of ten thousand dollars. The Aileses took part in the parade, driving down Main Street in Roger’s prized burgundy ’85 Cadillac Seville, situated in the procession somewhere between the veterans’ brigade and a pair of tethered llamas.
Ailes didn’t seem to notice the Philipstown.info office as he rolled down Main Street, nor did anyone at the P.C.N. & R. know of that day’s unveiling of Gordon Stewart’s e-paper. On Tuesday morning, July 6th—deadline day for the P.C.N. & R.—Joe Lindsley was surfing the Internet for any local development that the paper might have missed when he came across the names of two of his reporters, attached to something called Philipstown.info. Further inquiry revealed that half the P.C.N. & R. staff was now part of the online competition. When Ailes was informed of this, he asked, “What does this mean? Are we going to have trouble getting the paper out?”
“Absolutely not,” Lindsley replied. It helped that most of that week’s issue, including a big story about the Fourth of July festivities, and a reproduction of The Federalist No. 78, was already assembled. Lindsley and Beth recruited new staff, and the paper carried on, more or less without missing a beat. “I would just say that when we bought the paper we didn’t say to all the people who worked here, ‘You’re fired,’ knowing full well that there were people here who didn’t share our same way of looking at the world,” Beth says now. “Sometimes housecleaning is a very useful thing.” The new staff, numbering about a dozen for both the Ailes newspapers, is now offered salary and benefits. Philipstown.info offers a salary but no benefits.
Lindsley felt betrayed by his former staff. “They tried to take us down,” he says. Roger Ailes, for his part, had grown impatient with the charge that he and his wife were trying to impose a Fox News sovereignty upon an enlightened and unwilling Hudson Highlands. “There have been days when I’ve been tempted to just take a couple of Fox News trucks and park ’em on the street, so they could assume we were up there doing something,” Ailes says. “We have very studiously avoided bringing Fox News into the community. Now they act like it’s come in, because we moved there. But if they continue to push me, why, we might have to introduce it someday and just scare the hell out of them.”
Ailes assumed that Philipstown.info was the culmination of the Full Moon Project, which, in a way, it was. “When I heard that it’d happened all at the same time, it was clear that there was some sort of malice aforethought there,” he says. “Clearly, one person was trying to create a nightmare for Beth.” Ailes decided to confront Stewart, and invited him to lunch in his private dining room at Fox News. Ailes suspected that the online paper was sponsored by the preservationist trust that stood on the other side of the zoning dispute. “He told me that he’s funding it entirely himself,” Ailes says, slightly bemused at the thought. “He’s going to get very tired of doing that.”
When I recently asked Ailes if Beth was having any fun in the business of newspapering, he paused for several seconds before answering. “Some days,” he said. “I think it’s very hard for her to have people not be nice. . . . She’s the wife of the chairman of Fox, so she gets a certain amount of crap for that. She gets asked to be on every board, and so on, and they ask her for money. But then certain people don’t treat her particularly nicely.” Beth says that she enjoys her job but notes, “The motto is, Never go to Food Town without your lipstick and makeup on, because nine times out of ten I run into people who want to go at me.”
The Aileses have come to occupy an equivocal position in their new community, where they are seen as both patrons and provocateurs. They give generously to Our Lady of Loretto Church, where Beth occasionally fills in as organist, and to several other local causes, public and private. A story told around town, even by Roger Ailes’s critics, is of a Main Street shopkeeper verging on insolvency who told his tale to Ailes and received a cash loan. “Everybody laughed at that, because they knew Ailes would never get it back,” one of the townspeople told me.
Soon after acquiring the P.C.N. & R., the Aileses bought and restored a historic building farther up Main Street for the paper’s new offices, an investment that, most agree, has enhanced the block. Beth had a small elevator installed, so that Roger wouldn’t have to walk the seventeen steps to the second floor. “My husband has a bad hip and ankle, and stairs are difficult,” she told me. “So we added this, which required the approval of HUD. It’s really nice to have when older people come.”
The paper itself is a manifest improvement over its previous version, in both style and substance; there is no shortage of local trifles (“Audubon Hosts Bird Seed Sale”), and the bigger issues most important to the community are fully engaged, however provocatively. “We were accused of hyping the zoning story,” Lindsley says. “But in the end the town supervisor, the Land Trust, and all the people who have been advocating for the zoning acknowledge that all the changes have been good. And so I think the paper has actually done its job locally on this issue.” Beth Ailes, particularly, has established an accepted presence in the town. “A lot of people know her, and there’s almost unanimous popularity,” Dar Williams says. “She’s a member of this community. She lives in this town. So you could put that on one side of the balance sheet.”
On the other side of the sheet is Roger Ailes. “We understand that because of my job, and because of Fox News, some people are just not going to like me,” he says. “That’s it. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ailes, to be sure, has brought a certain measure of suspicion to his relationship with others in his new home town. He is known to keep a close eye on the smallest doings in Philipstown—closer than one might suppose possible for a man who runs two news networks. After Richard Kroehling wrote his letter to the editor, he received a telephone call from Ailes. “I felt that he wanted to intimidate me,” Kroehling says. (Ailes wanted Kroehling to leave the Ailes name out of his letter, citing the paper’s long-standing rule against ad-hominem attacks.) Ailes worries about security, and takes precautions that cannot go unnoticed in a small town. “It strikes me that he’s got all this power, in New York and in Washington, and yet he has concentrated so much on this tiny village,” Tony Burton says. “He wants control wherever he is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s little Cold Spring, where he spends his weekends, or New York. He wants control.”
Ailes plainly wished to provide for his family a particular version of small-town America, one shaped by a nostalgic vision, which is not without irony. He regrets the sway of the local environmentalists, but it was their influence that made the area the sort of place where Roger Ailes would wish to live. Without them, the view from the Aileses’ Hudson aerie would include a Con Edison hydroelectric plant.
Ailes says, “Nobody’s ever going to run me out of any place that I don’t want to leave.” Stewart says he has no such intention. “I’ve got a great sentimental attraction to a hundred-and-forty-five-year-old broadsheet,” Stewart says. “I don’t want it to disappear.” Stewart’s online creation seems aimed at a different segment of the community from the one that the P.C.N. & R. covers. In the Calendar of Events for January 13th, Philipstown.info carried announcements for the Garrison Institute’s Zen Center for Contemplative Care and a screening of the film “Made in Dagenham.” The P.C.N. & R.’s listings for the same day included a meeting of the Putnam Valley Zoning Board of Appeals and a workshop at the local firehouse. It may be that the Aileses and Stewart, with the P.C.N. & R. and Philipstown.info, have achieved a kind of symbiosis, beneficial to the community. Many places a thousand times larger are served by only a single newspaper; Philipstown now has two, each distinctly better than what was there before. ♦
