An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

by Joe Muto

  The pitch meetings took place on Mondays and Thursdays. At two thirty in the afternoon on those days, the troops would all line up, reluctantly, for what usually amounted to a twice-weekly exercise in futility, a half-hour parade of failure: Bill shot down 95 percent of ideas, usually peppering his rejections with ridicule. Mockery was his standard response to a pitch he didn’t like: How can you be stupid enough to present me with this dumb idea?

  But sometimes mockery simply wasn’t enough for him to display the contempt he felt for an idea, and that’s when he turned to anger, which could manifest itself explosively, without warning, especially on days when his mood was already sour, which we sensed it was that day. So we were all on edge. Me especially.

  It was the spring of 2007. I’d been on the show just a few months, having previously worked for some of Fox’s smaller, less prestigious programs. Now that I was in the big leagues, I was frustrated to find myself striking out more often than not, the boss rejecting pitch after pitch, week after week.

  To be fair, the rejections that came my way in those early months were much gentler than those that came later in my career, or those that my more seasoned coworkers received. O’Reilly seemed to have an unofficial policy of going easy on the new hires, at least until they got their feet under them a little bit. (Very sporting of him, actually, like a hunter refusing to shoot a baby deer. Though after some of the more brutal pitch meetings, a quick merciful bullet between the antlers would have been a relief.)

  It wasn’t 100 percent failure on my part. I’d managed to sneak a few minor pitches past the goalkeeper, but nothing to write home about—they were mostly B or C stories, small items that got thrown into the hopper to be discussed by the panel at the end of a longer segment, maybe getting only a minute total of screen time. I still hadn’t scored with a headlining pitch, something that would lead the show or, at the very least, get its own segment. That was the Holy Grail. Every producer in that semicircle was praying to Jesus, or Yahweh (or in my case, no one), that the big pitch would land in their lap, that they would not get mocked or yelled at but praised, held up to the other producers as a golden child, an example to which the others should all aspire.

  My marquee story that day, the pitch I was going to lead with, was something I’d stumbled upon mere minutes before the meeting. An errant blog link had led me to an article in the Navy Times, a military newspaper. The piece pointed out a major error in a recent New York Times Magazine story about women who experienced PTSD after getting deployed to war zones. It turned out that one of the women profiled in the Times piece had never been in combat—and had in fact never even set foot in Iraq.

  I printed out the article, then double-checked the Drudge Report—a conservative news-aggregating website that we all checked religiously—to see if it had picked up on the scoop yet. If Drudge had it, chances are that one of my colleagues had also seen it and would beat me to it, mentioning it in the pitch meeting before it was my turn to go, and stealing my thunder. But there was no mention of it on Drudge, and it looked like no other blogs—aside from the obscure one I had been reading—had posted it yet.

  I was pretty confident that I was sitting on a winner—mostly because it involved The New York Times. Fox News has always had a bizarre institutional animosity toward the Times. The newspaper was routinely caricatured by O’Reilly and the rest of the network as a liberal rag, a monolithic left-wing institution full of reporters and editors crawling all over themselves to destroy the Republican Party and promote a grab bag of progressive causes—atheism, homosexuality, Hollywood depravity, big government, and so on. In a way, Fox’s depiction of the Times was an exact mirror image of the left’s depiction of Fox, but that irony was lost on O’Reilly, who took delight in skewering the Times at every available opportunity. (With the exception of the admittedly frequent occasions that one of his books charted on their Best Sellers list, in which case he was happy to tout their wisdom and authority.) I was heading into the pitch meeting with a potential blockbuster.

  But as the gathering got under way, I began to lose confidence. Our fears about the boss’s ill mood had been well founded. He was impatient, snarling at pitches that didn’t get to the point fast enough. The mockery was even more vicious than usual. Producer after producer came up empty. Pitch after pitch went down in flames.

  One producer suggested that we do a segment on the trial of Scooter Libby, a former Dick Cheney aide accused of outing a covert CIA agent.

  Bill was not interested.

  “I don’t care about that story. Not one bit,” he said. “Our audience doesn’t care about that story. I’m not even sure Scooter Libby cares about it at this point.”

  Another producer suggested a segment on the flat tax, offering up a guest who wanted to advocate for it.

  O’Reilly scoffed: “What makes you think we would ever do a story like that on this show?” he demanded. “That might be the most boring thing anyone has ever pitched at one of these meetings. I think I fell asleep while you were talking.”

  The producers all laughed, and not entirely sycophantically. Bill’s rejections were often funny, especially when they weren’t happening to you. Those of us who still were waiting our turn couldn’t bring ourselves to laugh as hard, though. This was shaping up to be an epically bad pitch meeting. No one had gotten too severely burned just yet, but we all knew that, on a day like this, we were all just one dumb pitch away from triggering a spectacular explosion.

  And then it was my turn.

  “All right, Muto,” Bill said, turning his attention to me. “Whattaya got?”

  “Bill, the Pentagon is very angry,” I started, “because The New York Times got a major detail wrong in a story this weekend.”

  I saw him perk up immediately. As I’d suspected, the Times angle grabbed his attention.

  I laid out the rest of the pitch and watched O’Reilly’s mood change almost instantly, with him getting more and more excited until he could no longer contain himself.

  “Yes!” he yelled triumphantly, interrupting me mid-sentence and karate chopping the air in celebration. His eyes swept the rest of the group as he pointed to me: “Everyone, that is how you pitch. That is a great story.”

  I was stunned. I gazed around the semicircle at my fellow producers, soaking up the looks of envy on their faces.

  “Flarmben,” Bill said, swiveling his chair to Eugene, “get a card up there. It’s the lead segment tomorrow. I’ll do a Talking Points Memo on it, too.”

  I watched, suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of thrill that surprised me, as Eugene wrote out a blue card and rose from his chair, pinning it to The Board for the next day’s show.

  “Muto,” O’Reilly said, returning his attention to me, “that was perfect. More of that, please.”

  I was on a high the rest of the day. Compliments from Papa Bear were incredibly hard to come by, and I’d just been given a huge one. It was my first experience basking in the warm-by-comparison light of his praise.

  And to my absolute horror, I found myself enjoying it.

  —

  The fact that I even had the opportunity to be ambivalent about getting kudos from the most prominent conservative cable news host in America was something of a minor miracle.

  In the spring of 2004, in the course of about six weeks, I’d gone from a jobless, left-wing film student to a cog in the machine at the New York City headquarters of what I had always assumed was a cartoonishly evil, far-right, conservative media cabal.

  It all started when I was a few months shy of graduation at the University of Notre Dame. The university—a Midwestern Catholic school that proudly celebrates its Irish heritage by deploying as a mascot an angry-faced, presumably drunk leprechaun with raised fists—was relatively hard to get into, which I liked because it was impressive on a résumé. But like all top-tier liberal arts schools, it was secretly easy on the academic side, allowing me to breeze through four years with minimal effort and maximal mind-altering substances. />
  Helping me in minimizing my effort was the school’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, which was a perfect refuge for those of us who wanted a somewhat artistic field of study but couldn’t figure out how to tell our parents with a straight face that we’d decided to become ceramics majors.

  “You know, there’s a lot of money to be made in film and TV,” I told my father at the end of my freshman year, right after informing him that I’d be dropping all of my business classes.

  “There better be,” said my father, “because if you think we’re supporting you financially for the rest of your life, you’ve got another thing coming.”1

  My parents, Joan and Tony, were both New Yorkers who had met as members of the class of ’72 at the University of Dayton. They’d bonded over their shared working-class Italian backgrounds; both were the first in their families to go to college. After a postgraduation wedding, a move fifty miles south to the relatively-sleepy-but-still-better-than-godforsaken-Dayton city of Cincinnati, and ten years of married bliss, I came along in 1982, followed soon by a brother, Stephen, and then a sister, Theresa. (She was given the nickname Teddy shortly after birth, a play on the way my fresh-off-the-boat great-granny with her thick Italian accent pronounced the name Terry.)

  Neither of my parents was overtly political. I don’t remember having any political conversations as a child—unless you count the time I was six years old and I told my mom I was sad that Ronald Reagan was leaving office because he had been the president the whole time I was alive—but if you asked him, my dad would readily cop to being a conservative. He was fond of quoting the maxim “If a young man isn’t a liberal, he has no heart; if an old man isn’t a conservative, he has no brain,” a quote that is often attributed to Winston Churchill (and should, by the transitive property, be attributed to gin).

  My mother was more a moderate; she’d voted for Clinton, twice, a fact she enjoyed needling my father with. But she also voted for George W. Bush twice, a fact she enjoyed needling me with. She was an equal-opportunity needler.

  I had political opinions at a very young age—conservative ones, oddly enough. I remember being ten years old and lying in bed, listening to conservative talk radio. A local talk show host named Bill Cunningham lulled me to sleep most nights with complaints about Slick Willie Clinton and his shrewish wife. The political conversion for me came in high school, when I noticed that a wonderfully crusty history teacher whom I loved had the odd habit of giving himself the sign of the cross every time he mentioned FDR’s name.2 When I looked into this Roosevelt fellow, it was like a gateway drug into Democratic politics. With my newfound knowledge (and the help of a few real gateway drugs), I completely changed my ideology over the course of a semester. By the time the Lewinsky scandal rolled around, I was totally on Slick Willie’s side.

  The relative ease of my first two decades of life lulled me into a false sense of complacency: My idyllic Midwest upbringing had been marred only by an unfortunate bed-wetting stint that lasted well into middle school, and an equally unfortunate obsession with Star Wars that peaked a few years before that series’ late-’90s resurgence in popularity.3 I coasted on autopilot through college, earning mediocre grades in an easy major and paying very little attention to what I considered bourgeois concerns like “my future” and “a career” and “making a living.”

  I’m an artiste, I reasoned, mistaking the mild notoriety that my twice-monthly column in the student paper had garnered me for something resembling a career plan. The job opportunities will come to me, I delusionally told myself, assuming that the article I wrote complaining about how the members of the football team were the only ones on campus getting laid would obviously grab some big-timey magazine editor’s attention. Job seeking just didn’t appeal to me; I was much more interested in my humanitarian work, spending my senior year heroically attempting to rid South Bend, Indiana, of drugs by doing them all myself. (I later listed this on my résumé as “Community Anti-Drug Initiative.”)

  In retrospect, I was probably a pretty typical college senior, but for someone like me, whose life had always had an inexorable forward motion, I found myself terrifyingly unsure about my next step as I approached graduation. The expected job opportunity had not, as I’d naively assumed, materialized out of the ether. And none of the employment listings I browsed online seemed to be seeking pot-addled, would-be campus radicals who were good at writing eight-hundred-word, dick-joke-filled newspaper columns every two weeks.

  I started sending out résumés frantically. I had a vague idea that I wanted to be in New York City, doing something with writing, film, television, or journalism, so I hit up all the big media companies that I thought I might want to work for: CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Time magazine, the New York Times, Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, and, just for good measure, Martha Stewart Living. I even e-mailed a résumé to Lorne Michaels’s production company, offering to clean toilets and empty wastebaskets if it would get me onto the set of Saturday Night Live.4

  It was not my finest hour.

  After a few months of dispatches, I had gotten zero responses, and my résumés and cover letters were getting increasingly desperate.

  Finally, the answer came to me in the unlikeliest of places—a tropical-themed, northern Indiana dueling-piano bar called Rum Runners.

  It was graduation week, and the Notre Dame senior class was celebrating our entry into adulthood and maturity by guzzling cheap margaritas straight from the pitcher and heckling two middle-aged guys with ponytails as they pounded out classic rock songs on grand pianos.

  It was there, under an indoor tiki hut, that I bumped into the man who would change my life: Rufus Banks.

  Rufus and I were friendly, but we mostly ran with different crowds. I had first noticed him freshman year, when we had a genetics class together. The survey class was easy, and the teacher was a notorious grade inflator, making it a magnet for athletes, slackers, and arts and letters students trying to check off a science requirement, and earning the course the accurate (if predictable) nickname Genes for Jocks. Rufus didn’t stand out in the massive lecture hall until Halloween, when he showed up in class dressed as a mime: face paint, white gloves, black turtleneck, and beret. Out of two hundred kids in the room, he was the only one in costume. Immediately realizing this fact upon entering the room, he shrugged, walked down the middle aisle of the stadium-style seating, and sat directly in the front row, calmly ignoring the stares and snickers from much of the class, as well as some light sassing and “Oh, shit, look at that dude” style commentary coming from the football player contingent in the back of the room.

  I instantly admired how fearless he was about drawing attention to himself, a unique quality for a freshman at a school where conformity was expected. It was a quality that had apparently stuck with him over the four years of college, considering that he was proudly wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt at the piano bar that night.

  We were making the typical “I can’t believe this is all over/what are you doing after graduation” small talk when I had to ask him to repeat himself.

  “You’re trying to get a job with who?” I yelled in his ear, struggling to be heard as the piano men banged away on a raucous duet of “Bennie and the Jets.”

  “Fox News Channel!” he yelled back in my ear. “The website. I interned for them last summer. I’m waiting to hear back to see if they’ll take me full-time.”

  “What about their politics?” I asked. “Don’t they bother you? They’re pretty right-wing.”

  He shrugged. “Nah. It’s mostly a bunch of computer nerds, like you’d expect to be working at any website. Why don’t you apply, too? You can do it for a few months just to get established in New York, then find something else.”

  The next afternoon, I sat at my computer, the smell of the previous night’s booze still sour on my breath. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I struggled with some pretty severely mixed feelings. On one hand, I was reassured that Rufus had suggested the company
was not—as I, and most other liberals assumed—a top-to-bottom den of slavering right-wingers. To hear him describe it, Fox was a few powerful ideologues surrounded by professionals who just wanted to do their jobs. On the other hand, that sounded suspiciously close to the rationale offered by everyone throughout history who’d ever worked for organizations with questionable goals. (“I’m just keeping my head down and doing my job! I can’t control what my bosses do” is something I’m sure multiple Nazi storm troopers said after the fact.)

  In the end, I erred on the side of potential gainful employment. While I was fairly turned off by the idea of working for an organization as conservative as Fox, I was even more turned off by the prospect of kicking off my adult life by moving into my parents’ basement. I decided to bite the bullet and apply.

  Anyway, what were the odds I’d even get a response? No one else had responded to my increasingly desperate entreaties. And the Fox application process was relatively low-tech and not exactly confidence-inspiring: While other media organizations had required complicated online forms and usernames and passwords, Fox just wanted me to toss an e-mail to resumes@foxnews.com. Chances were I’d just be casting my information into the electronic equivalent of a black pit.

  With that in mind, I did something a bit different with the cover letter. I don’t know if it was desperation, or if I had stopped giving a shit, or even if I was subconsciously trying to sabotage my application, but I decided to throw out the rote, generic form letter I’d been sending that had gotten me zero responses so far.

  Here’s what I sent instead:

  Subject: Award-winning5 writer seeks entry-level NEWS-WRITING POSITION;

  willing to work crappy hours for peanuts . . .

  Dear Hiring Manager,

  Okay, so imagine that you’ve gone through four years of college and have mercifully graduated. You’re blessed . . . nay . . . cursed, really, with this amazing writing ability, but you’ve given little thought to what you actually want to do with your worthless life once you leave the comforting, womblike bubble that is existence at an American university.