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‘Unseemly and illegitimate’: The conflict at the center of the final presidential debate

Two words: Roger Ailes

Laurel Raymond Twitter
CREDIT: iStock
CREDIT: iStock

As the country approaches Election Day, there’s just one presidential debate left before most Americans will vote for the next leader of the country. But there’s one big problem.

For the first time ever, the honor of hosting a presidential debate will go to Chris Wallace, an anchor from Fox News. Wallace works for a network that, for years, has operated as a media front for conservative talking points. He also has a close relationship with Roger Ailes, who is now advising Trump on the debates. Fox News, meanwhile, is taking it as a branding opportunity — advertising Wallace’s debate as “finally fair and balanced,” the network’s tagline. The debate may be Wallace’s, but it’s also indisputably Fox’s.

Multiple media ethics experts told ThinkProgress that the choice raises serious ethical questions.

“Of course there’s a huge conflict of interest if Roger Ailes is advising Donald Trump”

Ailes — who helped found Fox News and who had near-complete control over the network until he was recently forced to resign over rampant sexual harassment allegations — is still officially an adviser to Rupert Murdoch, who stepped in to head the cable news network after Ailes’ departure, a spokesman for 21st century Fox told ThinkProgress.

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That means the same person who is advising Donald Trump on his debate preparations is also advising the boss of the man hosting it.

It’s perhaps a fitting cap for an election cycle during which cable news networks have put ratings over news — to the detriment of journalistic ethics and to the public.

“Of course there’s a huge conflict of interest if Roger Ailes is advising Donald Trump,” Kevin Smith, former chair of the Society of Professional journalists Ethics committee, of which he’s been a member for 23 years, told ThinkProgress over the phone. “Then if he turns around and he’s advising and consulting with the head of Fox News, Newscorp, Rupert Murdoch, then obviously that’s a huge conflict.”

Is Wallace’s word enough?

“Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,” the Society for Professional Journalists code of ethics exhorts reporters. Journalism’s effectiveness rests on the public’s trust, which relies on journalists avoiding even the appearance of conflict — or if it’s unavoidable, clearly and transparently disclosing it.

So does Chris Wallace have a conflict of interest in his upcoming role as a moderator of a presidential debate?

By all accounts, Wallace is a skilled and principled journalist. He’s widely respected. But he’s also embedded in the same network that has employed Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich — and the same network that, under the stewardship of Roger Ailes, has pushed and bolstered conservative talking points since its founding. Over the past year, Fox has become deeply embedded with the Trump campaign, giving the GOP presidential candidate free airtime and safe havens from critical coverage.

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In the past, Fox News has explained away such conflicts by pointing to a “separation” between its news and commentary sections.

But several experts in journalism ethics say it’s not that simple.

“As far as appearances go, the relationship between all of these individuals is so closely intertwined that it’s really hard to imagine that there isn’t conflict,” Professor Jane Kirtley, Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, told ThinkProgress.

Ailes’ relationship with Fox, Kirtley said, “creates at least the appearance that you’ve essentially got a political operative that is, I don’t want to say controlling news coverage, that’s too strong in this context, but is at least having an influence on news coverage.”

“It’s really hard to imagine that there isn’t conflict”

The key thing about conflicts of interest is that they don’t actually rest on bad behavior — they rest on the perception that a motivation could exist for bad behavior. Chris Wallace does not personally have to be shilling for Trump for there to be an ethical problem.

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Part of this is because it’s so hard to prove why someone does what they do: If Wallace, as a moderator, questions Clinton about her emails and Benghazi for 90 minutes straight, is he doing that because it’s in the public’s interest, or is he doing it because it benefits her opponent, whom his former boss is advising? Actual motivations are impossible to parse.

“Whatever Chris Wallace believes about the mission of the moderator, he knows who writes his checks”

Added to this is that Wallace and Ailes had a close personal and professional relationship, by Wallace’s own description.

“Roger Ailes is the best boss I’ve had in almost a half a century in journalism. I admired him tremendously professionally, and loved him personally,” Wallace told the NYT shortly after Ailes’ resignation. “I never knew a boss who transmitted a sense of mission, a team of common purpose, more than Roger did.”

Ailes’ mission, however, was to craft a network around conservative and right-wing talking points. He was extraordinarily successful at both building the network and warping the national narrative; Gabriel Sherman reports for New York Magazine that “It is not a stretch to argue that Ailes is largely responsible for, among other things, the selling of the Iraq War, the Swift-boating of John Kerry, the rise of the tea party, the sticking power of a host of Clinton scandals, and the purported illegitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency.”

Preparing for a debate is a massive task; it’s likely that Wallace will draw on the resources surrounding him — which are the resources of Fox News. So from multiple angles, despite Wallace’s reputation as a journalist, he’s inextricably tied to Roger Ailes and with the Fox News apparatus at large.

“Whatever Chris Wallace believes about the mission of the moderator, he knows who writes his checks” Todd Gitlin, who chairs the Ph.D program in communications at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told ThinkProgress.

“He finds himself in that position of being guilty by association,” said Smith. “Now, does Chris Wallace represent a conflict of interest? Maybe Chris Wallace as an employee of Fox News doesn’t personally, but he is clearly representing a network that has clear ties and associations with Donald Trump.”

A tangled timeline of deception

Details of this conflict are murky, and have emerged slowly but steadily thanks solely to deep reporting by several reporters and news outlets. This started on August 16th with The New York Times, which ran a story titled “Roger Ailes is advising Donald Trump ahead of presidential debates.”

Four people, who insisted on anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter, said that Ailes would be helping Trump prepare. Two of the four said that this role could extend beyond the debate. Trump, for his part, was quoted in the article saying that he would “speak with Roger,” though he stipulated that it would be informal. He denied that there would be any formal debate preparation at all.

After the report, however, Trump’s campaign vehemently denied that Ailes would be involved in any capacity. Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, told reporters point-blank that Ailes is “not advising Mr. Trump or helping with debate prep” and “has no formal or informal role in the campaign.”

A few days later, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway repeated the denial to CNN, saying that Ailes would not “to my knowledge” be helping Trump campaign and had no formal role.

Both women attempted to thread a fine needle: though they denied that Ailes was helping the campaign, they also acknowledged Trump might talk to Ailes on his own. Ailes’ association with the campaign, perhaps, was deemed unseemly — he was, after all, traveling under a cloud of his massive sexual harassment scandal. But the strength of the campaign’s denial was a little odd given that Trump himself was on the record saying he was, at least informally, talking with Ailes.

In the midst of the Trump campaign’s vehement denials, on September 2nd the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced the moderators, including Chris Wallace.

In their original report, the NYT had speculated that Ailes’s “intimate knowledge of how Fox News approaches debates” could give Trump “an important edge should one of the network’s journalists be chosen.” Now for the first time, one of the network’s journalists was — but despite the swirling reports, the Trump campaign continued to officially deny Ailes’ involvement.

The CPD, meanwhile, brushed aside concerns over hosting a debate on Fox News, even as additional reporting emerged suggesting just how deeply Ailes was entrenched in the Trump campaign. Other outlets, including CBS and CNN, reported that Ailes was helping Trump prepare.

“Even when he was running Fox News, Roger Ailes was advising Donald Trump,” Dylan Byers and Dana Bash reported for CNN Money. Their reporting backed up the Times’ assertion that following his resignation from Fox, Ailes took on an even larger role within the Trump campaign.

“In recent weeks, Ailes has become one of the most influential voices in the room as Trump prepares for his first head-to-head matchup with Hillary Clinton, on September 26. Ailes has attended at least two of Trump’s Sunday debate prep sessions in person, sources said, and talks with Trump by phone multiple times a week.”

After Trump’s disastrous first debate performance on September 26th, the final damning details came to light. According to the NYT, not only was Ailes advising Trump personally, but he also “led” a traditional “debate-prep camp.”

“There were early efforts to run a more standard form of general election debate-prep camp, led by Roger Ailes, the ousted Fox News chief, at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J.”

The evidence is pretty clear: Roger Ailes, despite the campaign’s denials, has a prominent role in Donald Trump’s debate prep. The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.

‘Unseemly and illegitimate’

Gitlin argues that the conflicts run so deep that Wallace should step aside and let someone else moderate next week’s debate.

“I think it’s unseemly and illegitimate for Wallace to proceed as moderator,” he told ThinkProgress.

Gitlin says that Wallace was an inappropriate choice for a few reasons: Not only is his association with Ailes damning, but he has also gone on the record to say he won’t fact check the candidates during the debate.

Trump, a notorious liar, has pushed against fact-checking from the media, and praised Wallace’s pledge not to fact check.

“I think it’s unseemly and illegitimate for Wallace to proceed as moderator”

Wallace “should be ruled out on two grounds,” Gitlin told ThinkProgress. “His idea of a moderator’s job is wrong, it does not serve democracy, and number two, he has some unspecified relationship with a man who is intimately involved with Trump.”

Fact checking Trump on the fly is a daunting affair — extended fact checking of a candidate that lies so brazenly could threaten to derail the entire debate. However, Wallace’s outright refusal to engage in any fact checking goes against his obligation as a journalist, Smith said.

“How about if I put it in these terms. Is it a journalist’s responsibility to fact check people? Absolutely,” said Smith. “I think there are opportunities to fact-check on the fly and call candidates out on both sides, and I think they should do that.”

Even there, though, Wallace’s relationship with Fox presents a problem. The network has continued in recent weeks to push narratives favorable to Trump that have been widely debunked elsewhere, such as Trump’s false statement that he was always against the Iraq war. This puts Wallace in the uncomfortable position, as moderator, of having to contradict his colleagues or peddle falsehoods.

Not every expert contacted by ThinkProgress, however, took a firm stance against Wallace’s role in next week’s debate.

Fred Brown, another ethics expert from the Society of Professional Journalists, argued that the conflict of interest — while still present — is “less of an affront to the way a fair debate ought to be conducted” because Ailes’ connections to Trump, Fox, and Wallace “are pretty much transparent.”

“Many journalists, including some critics of the SPJ Code of Ethics, will argue that transparency diffuses conflicts of interest. I’m not convinced of that, nor were the rest of the committee that updated the SPJ code in 2014, but still, there is no lack of transparency here,” he told ThinkProgress via email.

Ailes’ relationship with Trump has certainly been widely reported in ThinkProgress, CNN, The New Republic, The New York Times and The Washington Post — just to name a few outlets. However, while reporting has helped expose some of the tangled web, the people who are actually involved — Wallace, Ailes, and Trump and his campaign — have yet to be transparent themselves about the whole affair.

“I would want to know in detail exactly what the relationships are between Roger Ailes, the Trump campaign, and Fox News.”

If Wallace doesn’t step aside, experts agreed that transparent disclosure is one of the steps he needs to take to deal with the conflict.

“I would like to see them all spell out in detail exactly what the relationships are, and that’s more than just saying ‘of course I’m above reproach, I would never be influenced by,’” said Kirtley. “I would want to know in detail exactly what the relationships are between Roger Ailes, the Trump campaign, and Fox News.”

How the debate commission got outfoxed

Wallace’s choice, despite a clear ethical morass, points to several broader issues.

One is the Commission on Presidential debates itself. Before 1988, the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group, managed the debates. The commission, which is bipartisan, took over when the League forswore the obligation because the candidates were banding together to dictate the form of the debates in secret.

“It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions,” then-League President Nancy M. Neuman said in a press release. “The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

What that left the public with, however, was more politics and more money in the process.

“The public has no leverage here. The public would be wise to realize that this is yet another way in which the political system is polluted by money. And the money I’m talking about here is network ownership money,” said Gitlin. “A political debate between candidates does not belong to a private business. No matter how blue their ribbons, [the CPD] has no business deciding what format, what personnel, is imposed upon the event.”

And — while Wallace is a particularly salient example of a conflict by association because he works at Fox News — thanks to the way all the cable news networks operate, conflicts permeate them all. CNN, after all, hired Corey Lewandowski while he was still being paid by the Trump campaign.

“The public has no leverage here…this is yet another way in which the political system is polluted by money.”

Smith pointed out that the current debates and their allocation comes down to ratings. “That’s who it’s about, it’s about who has the biggest draw,” he said. “You know, we think that network TV people are the only ones who can ask questions.”

Smith suggested that instead, debates should perhaps be handled by newspaper reporters, wire reporters, or even history and political science professors — who can be chosen from outside the network of big-cable money, and thus excised from the commentator network and ratings ploys.

“My advice for all of the debates is that simply you don’t have journalists who work for networks that have conflicts moderating these debates,” he said.

Brown, on the other hand, suggested that Fox News had to be given a debate because otherwise, conservatives— who have been fed a steady diet of propaganda about the “liberal bias” of the mainstream media — would rebel.

“I suspect the Commission on Presidential Debates when it chose him for the last debate, was looking for a way to assure political balance — or at least perceived political balance — among the people it tapped to moderate the debates,” said Brown. “If the CPD hadn’t made this small nod to the right, the uproar among the “conservative” radicals would have been much greater than any legitimate concerns the left might raise about all these links and alliances on the right.”

“Fox News was a propaganda organization from the start”

Brown suggests that Ailes aside, the fact that Wallace works for Fox News is precisely why he was chosen. But while it may assuage doubts and promote a perception of balance, it doesn’t actually balance anything at all — and shows how successfully Fox News has been in replacing objective truth with “balance” when it comes to the national news.

And that, Gitlin says, is a huge problem — for the American public, and for Chris Wallace’s debate.

“Fox News was a propaganda organization from the start,” said Gitlin. “And at the very least, a man who’s been working under the jurisdiction of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch has no business being set forward as a neutral and truth-seeking or truth-airing figure.”