NYT - Mr. Ailes was the media consultant to Mr. Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign in 1989. Mr. Giuliani, as mayor, officiated at Mr. Ailes’s wedding and intervened on his behalf when Mr. Ailes’s company, Fox News Channel, was blocked from securing a cable station in the city. This year, they were tablemates at the White House correspondents dinner, which Mr. Giuliani attended as a guest of Fox’s parent company, the News Corporation.
Now these allies and friends find themselves on largely uncharted political turf. Mr. Giuliani, 63, is a leading Republican candidate for president. Mr. Ailes, 67, is head of Fox News, the pre-eminent media outlet for likely voters in a Republican primary.
Whether their friendship would ever affect coverage — Fox insists that it has not and will not — it is nonetheless the sort of relationship that other campaigns have noted, though none wanted to speak publicly for fear of offending the station.
So far this year, one political journal found, Mr. Giuliani has logged more time on Fox interview programs than any other candidate. Most of the time has been spent with Sean Hannity, an acknowledged admirer of the former mayor, according to the data compiled by the journal, known as The Hotline.
Fox executives say Mr. Giuliani’s appearances have been driven by his news value and by his status as a front-runner, not by his relationship with Mr. Ailes.
“I can’t remember his ever saying anything, one way or the other, about our coverage of the Giuliani campaign,” Brit Hume, the anchor who coordinates much of Fox’s political coverage, said of Mr. Ailes. “And I am under no injunctions, restrictions, encouragements or directions of any kind as to how that campaign should be covered.”
Yet the relationship between Mr. Ailes and Mr. Giuliani is of the sort that led Mr. Ailes to grouse about CNN during the Clinton administration. Rick Kaplan, the president of CNN at the time, and President Clinton were established friends. Mr. Ailes, asserting the cable channel’s coverage of the president was altogether too warm, called it the “Clinton News Network.”
Mr. Ailes declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Mr. Giuliani, whose campaign would not answer specific questions about the relationship.
But aides to both men acknowledge that they have been friends for more than 20 years. After meeting at dinner parties in the 1980s, where they discovered a shared respect for Ronald Reagan, they developed into the kind of friends who lend one another help, trade accolades and attend each other’s weddings.
They grew close enough that when Mr. Ailes was hospitalized in 1998, Mr. Giuliani showed up at his bedside bearing gifts: a book about New York landmarks and an issue of Wine Spectator.
Today they see each other infrequently, according to aides, who said Mr. Ailes did not offer Mr. Giuliani any sort of political advice.
In 2002, Mr. Ailes was criticized for having offered advice to President Bush months before in the form of a note that suggested how to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Critics contended that Mr. Ailes, as a news executive, had crossed a line. Mr. Ailes said he was only expressing his outrage over the attacks on his country.
“I did not give up my American citizenship to take this job,” he said at the time.
For much of his career, Mr. Ailes’s job was to counsel politicians. He worked as the media consultant to three presidents: Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Reagan and the current president’s father, George H. W. Bush.
Few, if any, presidents have taken office with a close friend at the helm of a network news division, said Thomas E. Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard, and author of “Out of Order,” a book about the relationship between the news media and politics. But the value of television appearances to politicians, he said, has never been in doubt.
“It gets to be circular,” Mr. Patterson said. “The more coverage you get, the easier it is to stay up in the polls. You stay up in the polls, you get more coverage. It’s a cycle that the second- and third-tier candidates just tear their hair out about.”
When Mr. Ailes and Mr. Giuliani met, Mr. Giuliani had recently finished a tour as associate attorney general .
“I had found myself at several dinners with Roger, including at his house, and each time we would wind up talking about how much we liked Ronald Reagan, and how much we agreed with his policies,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his book, “Leadership.”
The two joined forces in the 1989 mayoral campaign, when, Mr. Giuliani later said, Mr. Ailes helped him overcome his stiffness in front of cameras so as to “connect with people” rather than launch into a “dissertation.”
“Roger explained that every time a candidate is given a microphone, he’s getting $100,000 worth of publicity,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his book.........
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