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

by Joe Muto

  There was always a niggling voice in the back of my head, whispering that I’d betrayed my progressive roots. I did my best to pacify that voice. Small things, to be sure, but symbolically important enough that I could feel I hadn’t completely gone over to the dark side.

  For example, I’d marched in the giant protest the weekend before the 2004 Republican National Convention convened at Madison Square Garden. It was on a Sunday, and I’d just pulled an all-nighter at work. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bed, any bed, and sleep the day away. But I forced myself to take the subway down to the staging area, walking the entire route in the August heat. It was not, as I’d feared, entirely a hippies-and-bongos affair (though that element was present in very large numbers) but a gathering of hundreds of thousands of average, peaceful people, people who, I realized mid-march, would probably peacefully beat me to death with their BUSH LIED/SOLDIERS DIED placards if they knew who I worked for.

  I found small but satisfying ways to rebel on the job, too. In bold defiance of my directive, I’d include late-night Bush jokes on the list I submitted to the Fox & Friends producers. They never used any of them, but I hoped that they at least felt a twinge of shame when they passed them over in their rush to get to the hilarious Leno jokes about Bill Clinton chasing bimbos.

  And sometimes when a producer asked for a file footage montage of President Bush, I’d make sure to include at least one shot that made him look unpresidential: tripping on the steps as he dismounted his helicopter, grinning like a goofball after making a bad joke, and—my favorite—taking a walk while inexplicably holding hands with the Saudi crown prince. It wasn’t the most mature thing I’d ever done on the job, but it was so oddly gratifying. And I never got caught . . . except once.

  The producer called me from the control room immediately after one of my videos rolled, a quick shot showing the leader of the free world taking a lover’s stroll with an elderly Middle Easterner in full robes and turban.

  The producer was laughing, fortunately. He was amused. I think he knew exactly what I was trying to do.

  “Muto, do me a favor and make the Bush video a little less colorful next time,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I have no idea how that shot got in there.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better pray Roger wasn’t watching, or the next phone call you get is going to be from him. And trust me on this—he won’t be laughing.”

  April 11, 2012—12:37 P.M.

  I was back at my desk on the seventeenth floor, significantly calmed down. It seemed I might actually be okay. The incriminating iPad was safe with Rufus. There’d been no News Corp. storm troopers waiting at my desk for me. Even Tim Wolfe, the producer in the desk next to mine, didn’t seem suspicious that my lunch break had lasted about three times longer than normal.

  Could I actually be getting away with this?

  CHAPTER 8

  Crime Does Pay, But Not Particularly Well

  On my first day as a crime fighter, I showed up in an outfit guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of lawbreakers everywhere: khaki pants, a baggy, ill-fitting button-down shirt, and a cheap tie.

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I did, after spending several hours prowling the men’s accessories department of the Burlington Coat Factory on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan. Ties were cheap there, most less than ten dollars a pop, and I picked out six new ones to supplement the one or two I already had in the closet at home.

  My rationale: Even though it had been made explicitly clear to me that my new gig—the video production assistant for Fox’s new weekend crime show—was not a promotion, I figured that maybe if I dressed the part, I could will a promotion into being. So the faded jeans and open-collar shirts I’d favored as a newsroom PA were out; it was dress pants and ties for me from now on.

  “Who’s that handsome young go-getter in the sharp polyester tie?” an executive would probably say. “How is it possible we’re still only paying him twelve dollars and seventy-four cents an hour? Give him a raise immediately, and put him in charge of his own show!”

  It was January 2006. I’d been at Fox a year and a half, and I felt I was a rising star, my ego—and pride at being recognized for my talent—easily supplanting whatever misgivings I had about advancing at a company I wasn’t sure I wanted to be working for in the first place.

  Before I reported to my show’s home base on the seventeenth floor, I swung by the newsroom to show off my new duds to Camie.

  She was highly amused.

  “All you need to add is an oversize blazer and you’d look like a high school freshman going to his first dance!” she squealed with delight. “I keep expecting you to pin a corsage on me.”

  My pride was stung. “You’re just jealous because I’m up on seventeen now with all the anchors, and you’re stuck down here,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, enjoy your new weekend show,” she shot back. “I’m sure your girlfriend just loves it that you’re gonna be stuck here ’til ten every Saturday night.”

  She had me there. Jillian had not reacted well to the prospect of having her weekends ruined again, barely a year after my reprieve from the dreaded overnight shift.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!” she’d fumed when I told her, a few hours after Nina had told me.

  “And it’s not even any more money? That’s insane, Joe. These people are taking advantage of you!”

  She had a point, I realized, but I certainly couldn’t let her know that.

  “Yes, but it’s more responsibility,” I explained. “It could lead to a promotion down the line.”

  “Well, I still think it’s bullshit,” she said, folding her arms.

  “Hey, we’ll still have Fridays together, baby,” I said soothingly, rubbing her arm.

  She rolled her eyes and walked away.

  Jill’s completely salient and reasonable points notwithstanding, I was enthused about the gig. I’d be helping to launch a brand-new show. I’d separated myself from the newsroom scrum, where two dozen PAs struggled in virtual anonymity, hoping to distinguish themselves and get off one of the career-dead-end newswheel shows. And as the only production assistant on the show, I’d have complete control over my domain—sole responsibility for every piece of videotape that ran during my hour.

  I settled into my desk on the seventeenth floor. For the first time since I’d started at the network a year and a half ago, I had a space that was mine and only mine. This was a huge difference from the unassigned “hot desk”–style seating in the newsroom, a long-running game of musical chairs in which you’d take whatever seat was available in the morning when you showed up, fighting your fellow PAs for the choicest workstations.

  Also different from the newsroom—there were windows! Sort of. The outer ring of the floor was taken up entirely by offices for the on-air personalities, or the “talent,” as they were known in industry parlance. The talent all had windows in their offices, floor-to-ceiling portals that let in that rarest of commodities, sunlight. And if one of them left their door propped open, one or two precious beams might even reach us!

  In practice, the talent spent very little time in their offices, and what time they did spend was mostly with the door closed, doing God knows what,34 but if we were lucky we’d get an hour or two of indirect sunlight a day. Still not great, but a huge improvement from the Morlock-like existence I’d escaped. (I’d still be spending show days, Saturdays and Sundays, slinging videotape in the newsroom, but even escaping it for 60 percent of my week felt like a small victory.)

  It was strange to be on the talent floor. I’d had limited contact with the on-air people in the newsroom—they rarely ventured down there—but now I was surrounded by them. It was absolutely surreal to sit at my desk and watch Geraldo Rivera on my TV, only to bump into him ten minutes later as he politely waited for me to finish using the vending machine. (“Do they stock that thing with mustache wax for him?” Camie asked when I ex
citedly told her about my encounter.)

  The first thing I discovered about the talent: They’re just like us! I expected diva-like behavior but saw surprisingly little. Part of this owes to the fact that most of them, aside from some of the big names (O’Reilly, Hannity, Geraldo), are virtual unknowns in the town where they live and work. Any one of these anchors, had they been in a smaller market, would have been in the top tier of local celebrities—right up there with the pro athletes and the car dealership owners who insisted on appearing in their own commercials. However, since Fox News is headquartered in Manhattan, where the attitude toward Fox News generally ranges anywhere from ambivalence to outright hostility, a huge chunk of our on-air talent could easily pull one million viewers on a daily basis, then leave the office and wander the streets of midtown in virtual anonymity.

  “That guy with the giant head looks familiar,” a person passing Gregg Jarrett or Jon Scott on the sidewalk might say to their companion. “Is he the weather guy on the CBS morning show?”

  And the male anchors did all have giant heads. It must be some sort of corollary of the old maxim The camera adds ten pounds; the camera also apparently subtracts ten inches of head circumference. How else to explain how anchors who, in person, had melons that looked like they should have ropes attached to them as they float above Thirty-Fourth Street on Thanksgiving, could go on TV and look totally normal? Perversely, the rare anchor or reporter with a head that was normal size in real life went on camera looking like a pinhead from a 1920s circus sideshow.

  The female on-air personalities were, on the other hand, generally average-skulled. They made up the difference in hair size, however. The stylists would spend thirty minutes giving one of our ferocious blond pundits a massive beehive worthy of a John Waters film, using four cans of ozone-killing hair spray, all so the woman could walk into a studio and call Al Gore an asshole for believing in global warming.

  Fox News developed, over the years, a reputation for preferring blondes, and that was an accurate assessment—we had more than our fair share. But as you can see from the chart below, hair color was relatively low on the list of criteria for female talent:

  CRITERIA FOR BEING A FEMALE ON-AIR PERSONALITY AT FOX NEWS CHANNEL (IN DESCENDING ORDER OF IMPORTANCE)

  Hotness

  Ability to string two words together

  Ability to summon outrage and berate a guest at length

  Blondness

  Conservative views (or the ability to convincingly fake them)

  Journalistic credentials

  That’s not to say that our ranks were filled with bimbos. I absolutely don’t want to sell the women of Fox News Channel short. Plenty of them were hardworking, smart, dedicated journalists who just so happened to be hot. (Megyn Kelly, who is as of this writing in fall 2012 an anchor of two morning hours, would be an example of that.) And although being attractive was arguably the most important criterion the bosses kept in mind when hiring new talent, it was by no means a deal breaker. (Greta Van Susteren, though relatively plain in appearance, remains one of the biggest stars and highest-ratings getters at the network.)

  That being said, we weren’t totally devoid of bimbos, either. One former reporter springs to mind. She was literally the best-looking human being I’ve ever seen up close in real life, to the point where I temporarily lost the faculty of speech one time when she offhandedly said hello to me in an elevator. Her epic hotness eventually helped her claw her way to a relatively prominent on-air position—a surprise to at least one producer who worked with her and had acclimated himself to her looks, swearing to anyone who would listen that he was about 75 percent certain that the reporter was functionally illiterate.

  It was an undeniable fact that simply being attractive could get your foot in the door at Fox to a degree that didn’t seem to be the case at MSNBC or CNN, our competitors who placed a much lower priority on flashiness.

  And this was actually all part of Roger Ailes’s governing philosophy. He believed that in a world where all the networks were working from basically the same set of facts and chasing the same stories, the channel with the most exciting presentation would win. That’s why Fox had all the graphics that swirled and whooshed across the screen with beeping and buzzing sound effects; that’s why we had almost uniformly gorgeous female anchors and commentators, all with pouffy hair and heavy makeup, wearing short but professional skirt suits that revealed a ton of leg; that’s why the camera operators and directors conspired to work in as many wide shots as possible to show off said leg. Fox was sexy and exciting, in a way that the other networks simply could not match. That, I would argue, almost as much as the conservative politics, was what made Fox so popular with viewers. After all, right-wing talking points could only get you so far. There was no Republican position to take in the Michael Jackson trial. It was just a voyeuristic, sensationalistic, celebrity train wreck, and it garnered ratings that dwarfed most of the political stories we were following. Much of the time, I think flashy tabloid stories would actually trump political stories. If it ever came down to a choice between covering some dry scandal that made a Democrat look bad and covering an exciting car chase, Fox would pick the car chase any day of the week.

  Which brings us to the anchor of my new show. She was named Kimberly Guilfoyle, and despite her unfortunate (but oh so silky) dark brunette hair, she was being groomed as the Next Big Thing at Fox News. In regard to the aforementioned chart, she was absolutely off the scales for #1, instantly becoming one of the most beautiful women at the network. She was also quite good on #3—summoning outrage and berating guests—a helpful trait for the type of true-crime show she was going to be doing. Whether she possessed any of the other traits was still an open question, one that we, as her new staff, would have to help answer.

  Kimberly’s résumé would have made a great premise for a TNT network hour-long dramedy series. Half Puerto Rican and half Irish, she had worked her way through law school as a Victoria’s Secret underwear model. She started her career as a San Francisco assistant district attorney, along the way marrying Gavin Newsom, a movie-star-handsome winery entrepreneur turned politician who was eventually elected San Francisco’s mayor. (The Lingerie Lawyer Thursdays at nine on TNT!)

  On paper, she was actually a bad match for the network. Her marriage to the archliberal Newsom—and subsequent stint as First Lady of a city that Fox hosts routinely took delight in skewering as a radical, hippie, left-wing, pot-riddled cesspool—should have disqualified her. But she’d moved to New York to do analysis for CNN and Court TV and eventually filed for divorce from His Honor, and someone on the second floor at Fox took notice.

  She was poached from the competitors and given a hefty contract and a promise to build a weekend show as a vehicle for her. The concept was that she’d function as a sort of Saturday/Sunday version of Greta Van Susteren—none of the investigative journalism chops, but about forty times the sex appeal.

  The Second Floor saw it as a can’t-miss proposition.

  —

  “Does anyone have any other comments about the show so far? Anything they think is really working?” the executive asked. “Or anything they think”—she looked around the room dramatically—“is not working?”

  The staffers of The Lineup with Kimberly Guilfoyle shifted awkwardly in our seats. A month after the show’s debut, it was clear that a lot of things weren’t working, but no one wanted to say so in front of Suzanne Scott, a company vice president and a powerful programming executive who was only a level or two removed from Roger Ailes.

  Even though she half scared the shit out of me, I had to admit she was an impressive figure. She’d started with the network as a personal assistant to one of the anchors and had quickly worked her way up through the ranks from there, eventually rising to become the senior producer for Greta Van Susteren’s show, before corporate noticed her and brought her into the fold. She was intense, as you’d expect someone with her ladder-climbing ability to be, and more than a bit icy
. She was also taking special interest in our show, since her background with Greta meant she was an expert on the crime beat.

  Our production team was disconcertingly small. I was the youngest, and also the only guy. In addition to me, there were two bookers in charge of recruiting guests to come on the show; a line producer, who was responsible for keeping track of the time while we were on air; a senior producer, who was ostensibly in charge of the whole endeavor but, as near as I could tell, did absolutely nothing all day; and finally, the brains behind the whole operation, Lizzie, the producer.

  Lizzie was a short, profane, raucously funny New Jersey broad. She was ultracompetent and very good at her job, and had zero patience for anyone who wasn’t—which, as far as she was concerned, was everyone around her. In the weeks leading up to our first show, I watched Lizzie’s frustration grow as she bristled at what she saw as the constant meddling from Suzanne and the other executives, who had started second-guessing her on every single detail.

  And the details were endless. Decisions had to be hammered out for every show element: graphics, music, animation, an opening title sequence, ideas for “signature” segments (i.e., “Kimberly’s Court,” during which the host was supposed to give her own verdict on one of the criminal cases in the news that week); the list went on and on.

  But the details that gave Lizzie the biggest headache, the details that everyone—from the executives on down to the makeup and wardrobe department—agonized over, were all related to the personal appearance of our beautiful host. How should Kimberly be lit? Did we want soft, Barbara Walters–style lighting, or should we go for a more dramatic and mysterious setup? And what should she wear? Something professional like she’d wear in court? Or something a little sexier, to get our money’s worth—like a miniskirt and a blazer without a shirt underneath, revealing a tasteful amount of cleavage? (“We should put her in robes, like Judge Judy,” I half joked at one of the early production meetings, only to be met with cold you’re not being helpful stares.)