by Joe Muto
So the ranks of the associate producers—the title generally given to guest bookers, writers, and segment producers—and the production assistants were actually quite mixed. The conservatives, who made up at least 50 percent, as near as I could tell, were naturally not afraid to speak their minds at the office—like Camie, the pearl-wearing ingenue who had trained me on scripts. Another 30 percent were professed moderates, or at least agnostics who claimed they didn’t care about politics either way. And the remaining 20 percent, the ones who tended to keep their mouths shut and roll their eyes whenever the discussion turned political? Well, those people didn’t tend to last very long at the company. To borrow Mitt Romney’s parlance, they’d eventually self-deport.
Except for the one idiot who wrote this book. He decided to stick around.
—
For the entire month of August, I shadowed Marybeth, taking notes. Tape was a simple process in theory:
The producer picks a video by writing a slug line in the rundown with clear, concise, and specific instructions.
You find a source tape for the video, cue it up to the right spot, and bring it to an editor in one of the tiny edit rooms lining the walls of the newsroom.
The editor operates the machinery, copying shots from the source tape to a blank tape while you watch and offer guidance.
The finished product will be a tape that’s ready for air, about forty seconds in length, with ten extra seconds of “pad,” footage that ensures the screen won’t go to black if the director accidentally runs the tape too long.
You slap a numbered sticker on the tape, type the number into the rundown, and give the tape to the tape coordinator, who will insert it into the deck in the playback room and play it at the designated time.
That’s in theory. In practice, what happens is this:
The producer asks you for a tape with a vague line in the rundown like “VO—TROOPS.”
You instant-message the producer, asking for clarification. “Do you want American troops or Iraqi troops? Do you want them training, or on patrol, or in combat? Do you want the newest stuff? Or can I use older stuff that’s better-looking?”
The producer responds: “i don’t give a shit just pick something.”
You guess the producer would probably want the newest stuff, and decide to pull something from the latest Reuters tape feed.
The Reuters tape is missing from the shelf in the tape library—it’s been checked out. In its place is an index card with a person’s last name, and a phone number scrawled in an illegible hand that you can’t decipher.
After dialing what you think is the right phone number, and getting someone who works in the mailroom and has no idea what you’re talking about, you decide to use the newsroom’s overhead paging system18 to track down whomever is using the tape you need. You despise the sound of your own voice as it’s broadcast across the entire newsroom by speakers embedded in the ceiling: “If you have the Reuters tape from the last hour, please call me . . .”
You immediately get a call from the offending PA: “Oh, you need this tape? Sorry about that. It’s just been sitting on my desk for, like, an hour. I’m not even sure I need it anymore. You can come get it if you want.”
Tape finally in hand, you bring it to a screening machine, a hulking VCR that’s inexplicably the size of a large microwave oven. It’s in real bad shape, held together by chewing gum and duct tape, buttons coming off, control wheel barely responsive.19 You search for the right portion of the video, a ninety-second snippet of a two-hour tape. You pray to the God of Production Assistants that the decrepit machine doesn’t go haywire and eat the tape, as it tended to do every third or fourth time you used it.
Tape in hand and cued up to the right spot, you find an edit room, which is occupied by a PA from the extremely video-heavy Fox Report. She has a stack of twenty-eight tapes waiting to be cut, and a frantic, hunted look in her eyes. “Can I get in here?” you ask, giving a meek, hopeful smile. “I just have one tape to cut.” The Fox Report PA showily glances at her massive stack of tapes, then to you, raising her eyebrows and giving you a dramatic are-you-fucking-kidding-me look. She shakes her head, saying, “I’m really crashing here. Can you find someone else?”
You go to the edit room next door, which is empty even though, according to the paper schedule posted on the door, it’s supposed to be occupied by an editor. You find the editor in question at an empty desk nearby, using a computer to rearrange the lineup of his fantasy football team. “Can you cut something for me?” you ask. “It’s for a cut-in. It hits in, like, fifteen minutes.” The editor sighs and looks up at you wearily. “Isn’t there anyone else on right now?” You don’t answer. He sighs again, gets up slowly, and makes his way to the edit room.
Once he’s seated at the machine, you hand him the tape and he pops it in. “I need forty seconds,” you say, watching over his shoulder. “Just troops marching around. Whatever shots are there.” The editor scans through the tape. “You’ve only got twenty-two seconds of troops,” he says. “The rest of it is just talking heads of Iraqi officials. In Arabic.” Cursing yourself for not screening the footage in its entirety, you look at the clock and decide that now is not the time to be choosy: “Just do it. I’ll call it twenty seconds even. Freeze the last shot.”20
You deliver the cut tape to playback, go back to your desk, and plug the ID number into the rundown, and mark it :20, indicating twenty seconds running time. And you still have five minutes to spare until your cut-in! Job well done.
Three minutes later, your phone rings. It’s your producer. He’s in the control room and is absolutely losing his shit. “WHAT THE FUCK? Why is that troops tape only twenty seconds? The script times out to more than thirty! We’re up after this commercial. Find a new fucking tape, stat!”
You jump up from your desk, fly to the shelf with all the tapes that had been cut for previous shows, and grab the first one you see that’s labeled TROOPS and has a running time of :40. You catch a glimpse of the closest TV, which shows they’re back from commercial, which means that the tape currently in your hands is supposed to be on the air in about fifteen seconds.
It’s time for a Death Run. You sprint, full speed, toward playback. Other PAs see or hear you coming and step out of the way. “TAPE’S COMING!” you scream to the playback operator as you run.
You burst into the playback room, hand the operator the tape, and watch as she feeds it into the deck, barely three seconds before the director’s voice on the intercom tells her to play it.
You watch as the tape plays, troops patrolling on-screen for a full nine seconds before the anchor finishes reading and the shot cuts back to his face.
When you get back to your desk, there’s an instant message from the producer: “Guess we didn’t need the full forty seconds after all. Thanks anyway. [winking smiley face]”
Of course none of that needed to happen. There was no reason why Fox, which, by the time I joined, had been in business for nearly a decade and had been number one in the ratings for more than two years, should still have been running such a rinky-dink operation, with broken-down tape machines, control rooms that smelled like a sewer whenever it rained more than half an inch, chronic intentional understaffing, and a workforce composed of barely trained, underpaid children like myself. But that was the business model, and the ratings were good enough—and the on-air product was just this side of mistake-free enough—that there was no incentive for the bosses to change it.
—
I never did find out if the Meat Loaf Story was true or not.
Oh, sure, everyone said it was true. There were even a few people—some of the video editors, a few of the older PAs—who swore they had seen it go down. They had been on duty that day and had seen the whole thing play out while watching one of the always-on TVs in the newsroom. Or they had pulled the tape after the fact, going to the vault where all the air checks were kept, bringing it back to the newsroom, huddling around a screener, five or six of the
m at a time, laughing their asses off.
The story went like this:
The PA was new, but not that new. Anyway, everyone agreed that he had been around at least long enough to have known better. He’s covering the eleven A.M. hour. The news item is a brief one, just a twenty-second read by the anchor. It’s about Meat Loaf, the singer. You know—fat guy, long hair, gothic clothes, Rocky Horror—that dude. He’s in the hospital, the bulletin says—he’d fallen off a stage, or gotten dehydrated or food poisoning or something like that. Either way, he’s in the hospital, so the producer sticks a quick item about it into the rundown. No more than a twenty-second read, sandwiched between other short trivial entertainment updates. It should go real quick, bing-bang-boom: weekend box-office grosses, latest celebrity wedding, Meat Loaf hospitalized, American Idol results, then straight into commercial break.
The producer, naturally, wants video of Meat Loaf to go with the story. He could have asked for a fullscreen, just a photo with the guy’s name under it, but moving video is always better. If it’s going to be up on-screen for twenty seconds, that’s an eternity to have a still picture with no motion. This is supposed to be a dynamic broadcast, right? So, yeah, video is better. The producer checks the wires, and there’s no new video, nothing good like Meat Loaf collapsing on stage, or paparazzi swarming as he’s wheeled into the hospital on a gurney (that would have been so perfect, right?). But you work with what you have, so file footage it is. He makes a slug line in the rundown:
VO—Meat Loaf—File
The PA, by most accounts a go-getter, is actually running ahead of schedule. He’s paired with a partner for the hour, and together they divide up the rundown, putting their initials in the rundown next to the tapes that they’re going to be responsible for. His initials go in next to the Meat Loaf tape. He heads to the edit room, an editor cuts the tape, the PA slaps a numbered sticker on it, a corresponding sticker on the box, and plugs the digits into the rundown. The tape coordinator comes to get the cassette, sticks it on her little cart in the playback room where it sits, waiting to get played in the next hour. Everything is going just fine.
Cut to an hour later. The show is under way. The entertainment update segment starts. They get to the Meat Loaf story. The anchor starts reading: “Singer Meat Loaf was hospitalized today. The legendary rocker . . .”
The director in the control room yells, “ROLL TAPE!”
The tape starts rolling, and what plays on the big screen in the control room, what plays on the hundreds of tiny TVs in the newsroom, what plays in the millions of living rooms across America, is file footage . . .
Of meat loaf.
The food.
It’s absolute pandemonium in the control room. The senior producer is fucking flipping out: “Kill the b-roll! Back to the anchor! Now! Do it! Do it! Do it!”
But the director is on the fucking floor, laughing, just howling, and he refuses to drop the video! “No fuckin’ way,” he says. “This is too goddamn good.”
So the anchor, consummate professional that he is—even though he can clearly see in the monitor facing him, the tiny screen hanging right under the camera lens, that someone completely fucked up the video—keeps reading, giving details about Meat Loaf being dehydrated or breaking his leg or whatever; and all the while, America is looking at generic video of a smiling housewife slicing up a scrumptious-looking loaf of beef and serving it to her family.
Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the script ends. The director grudgingly gives the order to switch back to the anchor.
“That, um, obviously was not the right video,” the anchor says. “Our apologies to Mr. Loaf.”
The PA actually doesn’t catch as much hell as he should have, because everyone, with the exception of the senior producer, thought it was so fucking funny. It turns out the poor dumb kid didn’t even realize there was a singer named Meat Loaf—an embarrassing lapse in pop culture knowledge, sure, but maybe not an unforgivable mistake for someone who wasn’t even a glimmer in his dad’s eye when Bat Out of Hell was released.
What was unforgivable was that he hadn’t bothered to read the script. He just saw the slug line that said MEAT LOAF and immediately started searching for dinner footage. If he had even so much as glanced at the script, it would have been immediately obvious that the producer wasn’t looking for food.
That story was repeated to me so many times by so many different people while I was training, that as contrived and sit-commy as it sounded, I couldn’t help but believe it was true. At the very least, I took the message to heart: Keep your head out of your ass.
—
Of course there were plenty of on-air mistakes. Luckily, the viewers at home never noticed the vast majority of them. For every single blatantly obvious Meat Loaf incident, there were fifty subtle errors that made air, with the audience none the wiser.
My favorite of these was the story of an unfortunate video editor named Kevin, tasked with producing a video to illustrate a segment on the business of Internet pornography for the pervy four P.M. financial show. The job was simple—take X-rated images off the Internet, blur the naughty parts, and string them together with nice, slow dissolves between the pictures. Kevin dutifully went through the images that one of the show’s producers had assembled for him—he actually thought they were relatively tame—and covered up all the bare breasts and butts he came across, using a special editing rig that created video effects like blurs, pixelations, and shapes of all colors, effects that were mostly used to obscure the faces of the innocent and the genitals of the guilty.
The completed tape aired during the segment, and no one thought anything more of it.
A few days later, Kevin’s boss, the head of all the video editors, called Kevin into his office. Another editor had been going through the old footage and noticed something on the tape that Kevin had cut. Kevin’s boss played the tape for him, and paused it on a picture of two women posing seductively, their naked breasts pixelated.
“Do you notice anything, Kevin?”
“Looks fine to me,” Kevin said. “What’s the problem?”
“This,” the boss said, pointing to the very much un-blurred, very much erect penis in the background of the shot. By some fluke, no one had noticed it—not the producer who’d picked out the picture, not Kevin while he was editing it, and, miraculously, not anyone in the control room when it played live to a million viewers.
“Let’s just keep this one between us,” the boss said. “I don’t think we need to stir up the Cavuto people by telling them you put a boner on their air.” None of the higher-ups ever found out.
An image hiding in the background of a shot was the culprit another time when I got into a heated argument with a Fox Report PA. She claimed that the video she’d cut of the aftermath of a suicide bombing21 in Israel showed nothing but crime scene technicians cleaning up debris and placing it into garbage bags. I begged to differ, and grabbed an editor to zoom into one of the shots, which very clearly showed an Israel Defense soldier picking up the severed leg of the bomber.
Clearly, the displaying of aroused members or dismembered limbs was generally frowned upon for a basic cable channel. But Fox had some other less obvious rules about what we couldn’t show on air.
“You can’t use tape of the Twin Towers going down,” Marybeth told me. “The bosses think it upsets people.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So what do we use when the producer wants nine-eleven footage?”
“They like that shot of the people running down the street with the dust cloud behind them.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “There’s nothing too upsetting about terrified people fleeing for their lives.”
Another rule: If we were producing tape of same-sex weddings to illustrate a gay marriage segment, we had to cut away before the couple kissed.
“We showed two guys kissing once, and people at home completely freaked out,” Marybeth explained. “Hundreds of calls to the switchboard, thousa
nds of angry e-mails.”
Yet another rule—and this one was by no means unique to Fox—if the segment was a discussion about something negative or controversial, we had to be extra careful with the generic b-roll we used to illustrate it. Specifically, we couldn’t show any faces, on the off-chance that someone featured in the footage was sitting at home watching and somehow objected to being associated with whatever the topic was.
This most often cropped up in relation to health stories. You’d see producers request videos like “PEOPLE SMOKING—NO FACES” or “EATING FAST FOOD—NO FACES” or “KIDS PLAYING—NO FACES” or, my personal favorite, “FAT PEOPLE—NO FACES” (and its spin-off, “FAT KIDS—NO FACES”).
Every so often, Siegendorf would send a camera crew out to expand our no-face footage library. The tapes would come back filled with hours of nothing but obese people walking the streets of Manhattan, secretly shot at a distance, from behind or from the neck down. We’d study those tapes, searching for the perfect shots to use, hypnotized by the jiggling guts spilling out from under too-tight T-shirts, the lumpy asses inexplicably shoved into stretch pants, the unfortunate hefty victims completely unaware that their bulk was condemned to be anonymously ambling across a cable news screen in perpetuity.
—
The Fox News business model is as follows: Hire gullible twenty-two-year-olds straight out of college, pay them next to nothing, give them minimal training, and set them loose with little to no adult supervision. You’ll have high turnover, and many, many on-air mistakes, but you’re saving enough money that it’s probably worth your while.
I was a direct beneficiary of this business model.
In the fall of 2004, when I was just a few months removed from senior year of college keg stands, there was no rational reason why I should have been given absolute control over videotape for the two-minute news cut-ins that aired during our most important prime-time shows. Yet there I was.
