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

by Joe Muto

  Some mornings I’d sleep right through the alarm, and the voices on the radio would work themselves into my dreams, to often disturbing results. The average NPR news update is not something you want incorporated into your dream life on a regular basis. I don’t want to go into too many details, but let’s just say at age twenty-three, I’d had more nocturnal threesome fantasies involving foreign world leaders than was natural or healthy for someone my age.

  I probably should have just switched over to music, except one thing was holding me back—those ten minutes in the morning listening to NPR with a pillow clamped over my face actually gave me more real news, more substantial information, a better grasp of the day’s events, than my entire eight-hour shift at Fox.

  —

  I was pulled off the overnight shift in early March 2005—roughly four months after my meeting with Nelson—as suddenly and unceremoniously as I’d been placed on it. A hiring surge early in the year had flooded the newsroom with new blood, and as they covered slots in the cut-ins and overnights, my services were needed elsewhere—namely as a production assistant for the hourly shows. The duty was the same, but the rhythm was different. Instead of a handful of tapes every hour, it was an absolute deluge of tapes twice a day, once in the morning for one of the newswheel hours, and again in the afternoon for The Big Story with John Gibson. It was nominally a promotion, though it came, in typical Fox fashion, without a bump in title or money. The real benefit was that my day-to-day schedule was much more sane and normal, and my weekends were my own again for the first time in months, my head no longer shrouded in the fog of sleep deprivation.

  A lot had happened in the months that I’d been among the walking dead.

  First, John Kerry had lost. I was on duty election night. There was a festive atmosphere in the newsroom when I showed up to start work at six P.M.—not necessarily because Bush was narrowly favored to win, though that was probably contributing to the high spirits for a lot of people—but because for politics nerds and cable news jockeys, election nights were like Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. They were the culmination of months of work and anticipation, a glorious hours-long orgasm after the foreplay of the endless months of primaries, debates, and campaign ads.

  Also, the bosses had ordered pizza for everyone.

  They sent out a group e-mail when the pies arrived, triggering a stampede of perpetually perk-deprived producers, editors, and PAs toward the break room to gorge on the free food, a mass of starved humanity clamoring and grabbing and piling slices onto flimsy paper plates, two and three at a time, or snagging entire boxes to carry triumphantly back to the newsroom, and in general acting as if they’d never seen food before.

  Anchors and producers from DC had come up to New York for the occasion because the network had decided to run election coverage from NYC’s larger studios. There was a long-simmering tension between the two factions. The DC bureau produced the six P.M. Special Report show and generated the majority of the network’s political coverage, while New York did almost everything else. DC thought of themselves as an elite offshoot, a more journalistically credible team of heavyweights that outclassed the populist muckrakers and ratings chasers in Manhattan. They happened to be right; but we New Yorkers still resented them for their attitudes.

  The visiting snooty Washingtonians had taken over large chunks of our newsroom real estate. I joined a contingent of PAs who had gathered in the back corner by the vending machines to voice their displeasure.

  “Some punk kid from DC is sitting in my regular desk,” Camie was complaining as she fed a dollar bill into the machine.

  “He says his producer said he could sit there, and he’s ‘way too busy’ to move seats. Jerk-off.” She jabbed a button, and a can of Diet Pepsi clunked and clattered its way down to the slot.

  “What are you complaining about?” I said. “You’re not even supposed to be here tonight.”

  It was true. After training me on scripts, Camie had gone on to do tape for one of the newswheel hours. She was strictly daytime and hadn’t been called in for duty that night, but she’d shown up at seven P.M. and asked Siegendorf if she could just hang out, off the clock, and help where needed. It was a bold move, but I was happy to have her there, if only to have someone else with whom to bitch about the interlopers from the Beltway.

  “They act like all we do here is cover car chases and murder trials,” I said.

  Even the always polite Southerner Red Robertshaw was put off by the DCers, whom he admitted were being “a little pushy.”

  The DC people may have had a point, however, about the New Yorkers being relative lightweights. The usurpers did almost all the heavy lifting the entire night, leaving nothing for the home team to do except cut b-roll of victorious members of Congress—tapes that went mostly unused as the bulk of the night’s coverage focused on the biggest prize: the presidency.

  Around one A.M., Fox was the first network to declare Bush the winner of Ohio, giving him 269 electoral votes, just one shy of victory. But after getting burned in 2000, inadvertently awarding Bush the win over Gore with Florida still very much in doubt, Fox and the other networks were understandably gun-shy about calling the race, and the extremely close tallies in New Mexico and Iowa meant the winner would not be known until the morning.

  I left work at three A.M. with the victor still undetermined, though it was looking decidedly grim for John Kerry. I invited Red to walk over to Rockefeller Center with me, where NBC News was finishing up their coverage for the night.

  As a certified Bush hater, I probably should have been more bummed out. But I’d never been a huge Kerry fan, preferring Howard Dean—even after his campaign-destroying scream speech. Kerry had run a lackluster campaign and had never really made a strong case for himself outside of “I’m not Bush.” And as Mitt Romney found out in 2012, if you want to unseat an incumbent president, you have to give people a reason to vote for you—not just against the other guy. So I couldn’t get too worked up at the prospect of the Massachusetts senator losing.

  Also, a nagging voice in the back of my head was telling me that even though I’d been with Fox only for a few months at that point, I was at least partially complicit for mounting the network’s case against Kerry. I shoved that voice down and tried to enjoy the sights in front of me. Fox’s coverage was relatively bare bones, old dour white guys in a windowless studio, but NBC had gone all out, lighting up 30 Rock’s limestone facade with red and blue spotlights, and painting a fifty-foot-wide map of the United States on the famous ice-skating rink below. A team of workers had spray-painted each state red or blue throughout the night as the winners were called.

  I don’t know if I was punchy after being cooped up in the newsroom all night, or if my anguish at having to endure another four years of Bush was manifesting itself in strange ways, but I suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all, and began to geek out as only a politics nerd could.

  “Isn’t this great?” I said to Red, feeling myself get misty-eyed and swallowing a lump in my throat. “I mean, I don’t even care who wins at this point. America is just so great. We’re so fucking lucky to even be here.”

  Red eyed me skeptically.

  “Maybe you should go home and get some sleep,” he said.

  Another development in the months that I’d been on the overnights: Jim Siegendorf, executive producer in charge of all the production assistants, had been fired in late January. They’d done it very publicly, too, in the middle of the day, in the most humiliating fashion imaginable. I showed up for my three P.M. shift to find the PA pod buzzing. I’d missed the whole sordid spectacle by an hour or two.

  “Dude, I saw the whole thing go down,” Frankie, a wiry, Eminem-looking PA was telling me. “It was the most awkward shit I’ve ever seen. Siegendorf got up to go to a meeting, then came back, like, an hour later with two security guards following him. They watched him pack up all his shit, then escorted him out of the building.”

  I s
tared at Frankie in shock. “What were you doing the whole time? You were just watching this?”

  He shrugged. “I was still working, actually, the whole time. I was crashing on tape for the two P.M. I couldn’t just stop cutting. Meanwhile, Siegendorf’s ten feet away, cleaning out his desk.” He shook his head, cringing with the memory. “It was fucking awkward.”

  Word filtered down that Siegendorf had been the fall guy for our lackluster ratings during the coverage of the Southeast Asian tsunami aftermath. We’d still beaten the other networks, but just barely. Meanwhile, CNN had seen their ratings explode, and the boost in viewers and publicity had helped launch a new star, Anderson Cooper. Ailes was furious that we’d failed to capitalize more on the event, and blamed the video department for not getting more compelling footage of death and destruction onto the screen. Since Siegendorf was responsible for the production assistants, and we were responsible for picking and choosing the video, it was his head on the chopping block.

  There was an unseemly amount of jubilation in the PA pod following Siegendorf’s sacking. I hadn’t loved the guy myself, but I thought he’d gotten a raw deal, especially for someone who’d been with the network almost from its founding. Also, even though video was technically ultimately his responsibility, it wasn’t his fault that CNN was eating our lunch. They had more than eighty people on the ground in the region, and were able to dig up all the best video and keep it exclusively for themselves. Meanwhile, we had sent fewer than a dozen producers and correspondents, and were almost entirely reliant on whatever footage the wire services fed us.

  On the plus side, they’d replaced Siegendorf with his deputy, Nina, who was universally beloved and wise enough to realize that a man of my talents was being wasted on the overnights. When she told me that I was being switched to daytime for good—no more evenings, no more weekend overnights—I almost cried with relief.

  My girlfriend, Jillian, when I told her the good news, actually did cry a little. She was thoroughly tired by that point of spending her Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching me snore in her bed ’til four P.M., poking at me occasionally to get me to wake up and pay attention to her.

  —

  “Are you ready for this?” I asked the video editor. “It’s going to get really loud.”

  He looked up from his edit rig, turning his head to glance back at me over his shoulder.

  “Do your worst,” he said.

  “Okay. You asked for it.”

  I clicked PLAY on the computer, and the iconic guitar riff filled the edit room, rattling the small pair of speakers arranged on either side of the monitor.

  “This is too good!” I yelled. “We’ve got to share this with everyone.” I reached over and flung the edit room door wide open. Heads started turning as the music spilled out into the newsroom.

  Then the singing kicked in—that familiar high pitch, alternating between smooth as silk and rough as a cat’s tongue, somehow both masculine and feminine at the same time.

  Michael fucking Jackson.

  I took my baby on a Saturday bang. . . .

  Nina bounded over, poking her head into the room.

  “Muto, what’s going on in here?” she shouted.

  “It’s verdict day! I’m getting everyone psyched up,” I shouted back, clapping along with the music.

  If you’re thinkin’ ’bout my baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.

  “Do you think you can ‘psych people up’ without deafening the entire newsroom?” Nina asked.

  “You got it, boss lady,” I said, easing the speaker volume down a few notches.

  “That’s better,” she said, retreating to check in with the PAs in the other edit rooms on either side of mine.

  She needn’t have bothered, though. It was June 13, 2005. We’d just gotten word that the verdict in the Michael Jackson molestation trial would be revealed within the hour, and the entire Fox News operation had ground to a screeching halt. In fact, it felt like the entire world had ground to a screeching halt, as every news channel—even the networks—had switched over to live coverage, blowing out their regular programming for wall-to-wall Jacko coverage.

  Fox had been following every contour of the increasingly bizarre proceedings for months, breathlessly reporting each new development in the testimony and documenting every one of the pop star’s courthouse entrances and exits. Michael, always the showman, did his part to make the lengthy trial a spectacle: showing up every day in a different faux-military, Dracula-by-way-of-Sgt.-Pepper outfit; entertaining fans outside the courthouse by dancing on the roof of his SUV while holding an umbrella, like a demented Gene Kelly; and constantly expressing indignance that anyone would dare find anything untoward about a world-famous fortysomething multimillionaire having pornography-and-alcohol-soaked sleepovers with thirteen-year-old boys.

  In short, it had been an entertaining clusterfuck, and I was sad to see it go. We all were—not that you’d know it from the carnival atmosphere of the newsroom that day. I wasn’t the only one playing DJ with Michael’s back catalogue.

  Not to be flippant about child molestation, of course. It’s a horrible thing, and on the small chance that there is actually a hell, I’m sure there’s a particularly nasty circle of it reserved for those who hurt kids. But working in the news tends to coarsen you, and gallows humor becomes a coping mechanism. I was just shy of one year on the job, and I’d already been subjected to hours of raw footage from Al Qaeda beheading videos, suicide bombings in Israel, insurgent attacks on U.S. troops. I’d seen the heartbreaking Southeast Asian tsunami aftermath, with bodies laid out in horrifyingly long rows, and absolute devastation filling every inch of the frame. I’d endured the seemingly never-ending, simultaneous death watches for Pope John Paul II and Terri Schiavo, the woman in a vegetative state whose case became a macabre tug-of-war between pro-life congressmen and a husband who wanted her to die with dignity. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining; I knew I’d signed up for this stuff. Mayhem and misery were practically in the job description. My point is simply that sometimes the only way to cope with all the awfulness of the world is to laugh at it. You just had to joke about all the horrible things. It was either that or break down crying. It was utterly absurd that an eccentric pop star standing accused of doing unspeakable things to children could ever be considered a lighthearted romp of a story, but compared to the other things we’d been dealing with lately, it sort of was. Hence, the semi-party taking place in the newsroom.

  As the news choppers tailed Jackson’s caravan of SUVs winding its way toward the courthouse, a small group of PAs and editors—with no work to do, thanks to the live coverage—had gathered in my edit room.32 We were discussing the best song to play after the reading of the verdict. The consensus was that “Man in the Mirror” was a properly somber, introspective choice in the case of a guilty judgment—though at least one wag in the room33 suggested we go more for dark comedy and play either “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” or “Beat It.”

  We had more trouble deciding on a song in the case of an acquittal. Was it right, we debated, to pick something celebratory? Why didn’t Jackson’s repertoire include any tunes that would properly express our ambivalence, the fact that we were extremely disappointed in him and yet somehow also relieved that a man who had provided us with so many years of entertainment—batshit though he may be—would not have to rot away in prison, slowly and sadly getting even stranger looking after being permanently cut off from his supply of white pancake makeup and wigs that looked like they came from an Asian ladies’ beauty supply shop?

  Cameras weren’t allowed into the courtroom, but there was a live audio feed. As the jury forewoman read off the counts—all of them “not guilty”—the newsroom was completely silent, save the sounds of the juror’s voice and the occasional gasp from a producer. Cameras outside the courthouse captured the assembled fans cheering and celebrating; a crazed-looking elderly woman released doves from a cage, one by one, as each “not guilt
y” rang out.

  When the juror finished reading, I opened the playlist on my computer and cranked the volume on the song that I’d decided was the only one appropriate for the situation, wherein a very rich, famous, and powerful man potentially got away with a horrible crime.

  You’ve been hit by, you’ve been struck by, a smooth criminal! Jacko sang, as I told my editor to cut a video of the crazy dove lady.

  My producer would be wanting that.

  —

  With the move to daytime, I felt like a new man. There’s something invigorating about working a regular nine-to-five, something that had been lacking with the evening and overnight shifts. Getting up every morning, fighting your roommate for the shower, elbowing your way onto an already overcrowded subway car, pushing through a caffeine-deprived mob to get to the coffee shop counter—the mere act of getting to your desk became an accomplishment in and of itself, a tiny triumph to start the day.

  Most important, my career felt like it was back on track. And I was thinking of it as a career now, not just a job. I’d pledged from the beginning that I would stay at Fox only long enough to eventually hop somewhere else, but somewhat to my chagrin, I wasn’t feeling any motivation to leave. Sure, I wasn’t making any money—but would I really get paid more somewhere else? And certainly I was sometimes disagreeing with the network’s content, occasionally watching segments on our air that made me grit my teeth in anger—or, more likely, shake my head with bemusement. But if I went to CNN or MSNBC, would I really agree with everything said on those channels?

  Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, my decision to stay baffles me. I don’t know if it was overrationalization or Stockholm syndrome–style brainwashing or what, but in the course of about a year, I’d gone from a die-hard liberal crusader to a cog in the wheel of the most powerful name in conservative media, and I was perfectly okay with that fact. I think the most likely explanation was that I was simply comfortable. The job was challenging, and occasionally stressful, but unlike many of my friends who’d graduated from the Notre Dame film and television program, I was actually working in the industry. True, it wasn’t quite what I envisioned my career would be—but how many of my fellow graduates could honestly say they were getting their work in front of millions of people on a daily basis? Not many, I was willing to bet. But I was! (Anonymously, to be sure, since none of the Fox News programs had credits at the end, but still . . . )