Giuliani, chief of Fox News approach new turf

In 1996, when Mr. Ailes joined with Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News, Mr. Giuliani intervened as mayor after Time Warner cable refused to carry the new station in the city.

Time Warner, which had 1.1 million subscribers in the city, said it had room for only one more news station, which it had just awarded to MSNBC.

Fox accused Time Warner of trying to protect CNN, which Time Warner was buying. On Sept. 20, 1996, Mr. Ailes called Mr. Giuliani to ask for help. A flurry of meetings followed, but Time Warner did not budge. Three weeks later, the Giuliani administration said it would broadcast Fox News on a municipally run station set aside for educational and government content, citing the benefits of diverse news sources and protecting the 600 jobs Fox had created in the city.

“We looked into it, and the mayor decided, this is something the city had a vested interest in and that we should pursue it, and on that level I agreed with him,” Fran Reiter, a deputy mayor under Mr. Giuliani, said in an interview. “I really believe that the mayor believed what Time Warner was doing was wrong.”

But a federal judge blocked Mr. Giuliani’s plan, calling it “special advocacy” to “reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint.” The companies came to terms the next year.

Time Warner executives found the pressure from the Giuliani administration to be “extraordinary,” Richard Aurelio, a former head of Time Warner’s city cable operation, said in an interview.

“To have politicians getting into the act of making those judgments was, to me, outrageous,” Mr. Aurelio said. “Never before had any politician ever done anything of that kind.”

The episode undermined Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Richard D. Parsons, the president of Time Warner, with whom Mr. Giuliani had once worked at a law firm and who had been one of Mr. Giuliani’s most prominent black supporters. Through a spokesman, Mr. Parsons, now Time Warner’s chairman, said he was not available to be interviewed.

Under Mr. Ailes, Fox News grew to claim the largest audience in cable news. Now he is about to introduce a new channel for the Murdoch empire, focusing on financial news. The acquisition of Dow Jones and its marquee financial brands is part of a Murdoch-Ailes strategy to conquer a new frontier in business news.

Mr. Ailes has at various times been described as tightly controlling coverage, even suggesting particular jokes for his anchors to deliver. But a spokeswoman said his influence had grown more diffuse since he took over several other Fox divisions.

Mr. Hume, the managing editor of Fox’s Washington coverage who is the anchor of a daily political program, said Mr. Ailes was involved in twice-a-day meetings to discuss stories, but had never done anything to favor any candidate.

Since the beginning of this year, Mr. Giuliani has appeared for 115 minutes in interviews on Fox. More than half of those minutes, 78, were spent with Mr. Hannity, co-host of the “Hannity & Colmes” talk show. Mr. Hannity, a conservative who has spoken of his admiration for Mr. Giuliani, makes his own decisions about bookings, a spokeswoman said.

Mr. Giuliani’s on-air time was 25 percent greater than that of his Republican competitor Mitt Romney, and nearly double that of Senator John McCain of Arizona. Fred Thompson, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy, came in second to Mr. Giuliani with 101 minutes of Fox interviews.

Aides to Mr. Ailes said he and Mr. Giuliani spoke and saw each other only infrequently these days, though the two sat together in April at the correspondents’ dinner and have shared key moments over the years.

Mr. Ailes attended Mr. Giuliani’s 2003 wedding and was invited to the Yankees’ World Series celebrations at City Hall. Mr. Giuliani sent a personal note to Mr. Ailes when his son was born in 2000; two years earlier, he had presided over Mr. Ailes’s wedding.

The ceremony was held at City Hall and was followed by a cocktail reception for 200 in the rotunda.

“Thanks for making our families feel so special,” Mr. Ailes wrote later in a note thanking Mr. Giuliani. “We appreciate everything you did to make it such a tremendous day, but most of all thank you for your friendship.”

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