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

by Joe Muto

I thought for a few seconds.

  “Thanks for the offer, Stan, but I’m going to have to say no.”

  —

  The next day, I was in a meeting with Brigette, our head of HR, in her second-floor office.

  “I’m confused,” she was saying. “I thought you wanted this job. You interviewed for it. Stan said you seemed very eager in the interview. Why turn it down?”

  “I do want the job,” I said. “But not if it isn’t a promotion.”

  The offer was for me to be a production assistant. It was just a lateral move. If I took it, I was guaranteed at least another year—or even two—before I was eligible for a bump up to associate producer, a title I craved desperately by that point. If I stayed with The Lineup for another few months, I was virtually guaranteed to get that promotion.

  I explained this to Brigette in so many words, and she nodded along as I spoke.

  “I totally get where you’re coming from,” she said when I’d finished. “But this position just isn’t at that level.”

  “Look,” I said. “I know that O’Reilly is the big leagues and that my show right now is basically the minors. And I want to come work for O’Reilly. It’s like getting called up by the Yankees. But I’m on the verge of becoming a cleanup hitter for my current team, and you guys are asking me to join the Yankees as a batboy. I’d love to join the Yankees. But not if it means I’m taking a step backward in my career. Or even a step sideways.”

  Brigette sighed. I could tell I was losing her.

  “I know that the metaphor is tortured,” I said. “But does it make sense to you?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “But I’m a Mets fan.”

  Ouch. Swing and a miss.

  Two months passed. Sam had been so disappointed when I told him I’d turned down the job that I began to second-guess myself. Had I blown an opportunity that I’d never get another stab at? As much as it would suck to be trapped as a PA for another year or two, the position would be so high profile that it might just be worth it. And I’d at least be off the weekend shifts and get out of the increasingly toxic cycle of post-show debauchery at Langan’s that I couldn’t quite seem to tear myself away from.

  The schedule and the drinking had finally taken their toll on my personal life. Jillian and I broke up, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knew us and had witnessed the increasingly ugly fighting that marred the last few months of our relationship.

  In retrospect, I had been a terrible boyfriend. Jillian had never bought into the whole New York thing, and I grew to resent her for it, in essence choosing the city I was obsessed with over the woman I had once loved.

  With my love life in tatters, and my career seemingly at a dead end, I pondered doing the unthinkable. Something so foul and despicable that it gives me chills to this day, knowing how close I came to the brink.

  The law school brochure was actually in my hands when the call came.

  I was home on a Monday afternoon (the first day of my “weekend”), trying to figure out if any law programs were craving students who had managed only a 2.8 GPA in the world’s easiest major and who were in the midst of washing out of a cable news career. My cell phone rang.

  It was Max Greene, the executive producer of the entire weekend prime time. He was a great boss, mostly because he wasn’t afraid to climb into the trenches with his troops; he’d been a mainstay at Langan’s, heroically picking up rounds and thus earning our loyalty forever. But I hadn’t heard from him in weeks—he’d developed a reputation as a turnaround artist and had been temporarily pulled from the weekends and lent out to Geraldo’s syndicated show, which was floundering in the ratings. He’d never called me at home before, so I knew something big was up.

  Max got right to the point: “Joe, I heard that you’ve got an offer from O’Reilly.”

  I didn’t know how he’d found out. I hadn’t told anyone on my staff what I was up to.

  “Max, I interviewed with them, but I didn’t take the job. It wasn’t a promotion.”

  “I just got off the phone with HR. It’s a promotion now.”

  I was speechless.

  “Look,” Max said. “I know it’s tempting to go to O’Reilly. It’s a big deal. But if you stay with us, I’ll give you the promotion, too.”

  Two minutes after he hung up, my phone rang again. It was Stan Manskoff, offering me the job. I told him I’d have to think about it, and would have an answer for him at the end of the day.

  I called Max back. “Honestly, I’m torn,” I said.

  But I wasn’t torn. The truth is, I was scared.

  I knew I was very good at what I did. And I had no doubt that I’d greatly impress O’Reilly with my skills, possibly to the point where he’d declare me his successor, or write me into his will, just like a cartoon rich guy. But in all my previous positions, I’d always been secure in the knowledge that I had at least a tiny bit of leeway to be a fuck-up and a slacker; the shows were low profile, the bosses forgiving. If I came into work hungover or late, if I screwed up a tape or missed a deadline, I knew I could ultimately get away with it. I knew I’d have no such luxury with O’Reilly. The show was as high profile as it got, and the boss was anything but forgiving. That’s what was scaring me more than anything.

  Taking this job meant, above all else, that I had to grow up.

  “Joe, you know I really want to keep you,” Max said, “but you’ve got to do what you think is best for your career.”

  I was worried he’d say that.

  April 11, 2012—3:33 P.M.

  “Muto, get in here!”

  I jumped out of my chair and trotted the short distance to Bill’s office. Five years of working for him had put me on a hair trigger, training me to pop out of my chair whenever he called, lest he get annoyed at my tardiness.

  I poked my head in. “What’s up, Bill?”

  He wordlessly held up the News Quiz folder that I’d left on his desk. I walked in and plucked it from his hand.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, and beat a hasty retreat.

  Back at my desk, I went through the pages of questions. He’d used his pen to scratch a neat check mark next to each of the five he wanted to use.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a grim-faced Stan Manskoff leave his office and walk into Bill’s, closing the door after him.

  That wasn’t a good sign. Bill, for all his standoffishness, rarely closed his door. As the network’s top star, he knew that no one could challenge or rebuke him, and he conducted the majority of his business without regard for who might overhear. Everything from dressing down a producer to calling his wife on the phone to dictate precisely what he wanted her to cook for dinner (“Some chicken, side of potatoes, maybe a vegetable . . . let’s say green beans”) was done within full earshot of whoever was sitting outside his office or happened to be walking down the hall.

  But Stan had closed the door, which meant he had something unpleasant to tell Bill.

  And I had a pretty good idea what it was.

  CHAPTER 10

  Radio Days

  You never see the truly crazy ones coming.

  Sure, some of the crazies are easy to filter out. You can hear it immediately over the phone line; they’re nervous, stuttering, halting in their speech. They can’t make a coherent point. They curse, or use a racial slur in the very first sentence out of their mouths. You know within two seconds—no fucking way you’re putting this guy on air.

  So you spin a little lie, and you hang up on them before they have a chance to protest: “Hey, buddy, I’m really sorry, but there’s another guy on the line who wants to say the exact same thing as you, and he’s been waiting twenty minutes.” Click. Or “I’m really sorry, but we’re almost out of time. We’re not taking any more callers this hour. Give us a shout another time.” Click.

  Some of the callers will heap abuse on you. Call you an asshole, demand that you put them through to Bill immediately, accuse you of being too scared to take their call on-air. Some callers are persi
stent. They call back ten minutes after your little fib-and-click routine and accuse you (accurately) of wanting to get rid of them.

  With those callers sometimes you get a little vindictive and just leave them hanging on the line indefinitely. Pretend that their angry harangue or their third callback has successfully led you to change your mind about them; they’ve shown you the error of your ways, and you’re going to put them through to Bill! He’ll take their call right after the commercial break, so just hang on the line and don’t go anywhere because he could take the call at any moment!

  And so you end up leaving some people twisting in the wind for the entire show. Two full hours some of these poor bastards sit on the line. Then the show ends, and they’re still hanging on the line, not even getting it that there’s no way they’re making it on today, and in fact Bill has already left the radio studio and headed back to his office. Getting rid of these geniuses who think that the best way to get on a radio show is to curse at the call screener is always a wonderfully cathartic way to end your day, to wield the one small bit of power you have. Sometimes you’ll get on the line to say good-bye, maybe subtly taunt them a little with a polite and cheery “Sorry you didn’t make it on air this time. Call us tomorrow!” Click.

  And sometimes you’ll just pick up the line, listen to them breathing for a second, and hang up without saying anything. Click. Either way is satisfying.

  It sounds cruel, toying with people like this, but it’s completely necessary. You have to be a hard-ass. You have to be ever vigilant. Sometimes you have to be kind of a dick.

  Because it’s your neck if one of these callers gets through.

  The call screening interface is deceptively simple. You have ten phone lines, each of which rings constantly, starting fifteen minutes before showtime, and continues ringing throughout the entire program. The phones are hooked up to a computer. You just need to strap on a headset, and then you can answer calls simply by clicking your mouse. After that, it’s a matter of filling in the boxes of text. Name, hometown, and whatever the caller wants to say to Bill. The host has a monitor in front of him, right next to his microphone, and his monitor mirrors your monitor exactly. He sees what you type, and that’s how he knows what caller he wants to go to next. So you’d better be specific and let him know exactly what each caller is going to say. No surprises, please.

  Of course there’s a very limited amount of space in those text boxes, so you have to be as concise as possible when you take down the POV, leaving some details on the cutting-room floor. John from Tulsa says immigrants are ruining the country. Mike from Columbus says Democrats are traitors. Anne from Coral Gables says she’s tired of homosexuals flaunting it in everyone’s faces. That’s all the information you give the host to work from. Based on these limited descriptions, each of these calls could go either way. Bill is trusting you to not put through any complete maniacs.

  And make no mistake: He can tell within two seconds if you’ve put him on the line with what he refers to as a “kook” or a “loon.” He knows the signs as well as you do—the breathlessness, the agitation, the crackpot theories spilling out all at once. He picks up the call and immediately knows he’s trapped, and he’ll politely let the kook squeeze out one or two sentences before cutting him off. Meanwhile he’s glaring daggers at you through the glass partition that separates the radio studio from the control room.

  You need to get that glare only once before you figure out that you don’t want it a second time.

  That’s why the real crazies are so dangerous. The dirty little secret of talk radio is that you can prank any show in the world—you can get past the best call screeners in the business—and all you need to do is not sound like a stuttering moron for a grand total of thirty seconds. If you can coherently give a producer your name and hometown, and then string together three or four sentences describing what you plan to say on the air, without saying anything overtly racist or blurting out the F-word, then you’re in.

  Those guys are the truly dangerous ones. You don’t even see them coming. They can be spouting off about something innocuous, then suddenly they say it.

  The worst word they could possibly say.

  The name that must not be mentioned, under any circumstances.

  The name of the enemy.

  —

  I’d started as an associate producer for The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly in January 2007. I was a salaried employee for the first time in my career, making $42,000 a year. I was excited to ditch my time card, until some back-of-the-envelope calculations revealed that, with the loss of the substantial amount of overtime I’d been pulling, I’d actually be making less money than I had previously.

  The radio show was on five days a week, noon to two P.M. (Bill had made the dubious decision to go up against Rush Limbaugh, the nation’s most popular radio personality, who had a lock on that time slot at virtually every top-tier talk station in the country. So while The Radio Factor was in every market, it was almost always on the second-rate station, or tape-delayed to a less desirable slot on the better station.) The studio was on the eighteenth floor, almost directly above the area on the seventeenth floor where my former Lineup colleagues were sitting. It was small, just two rooms separated by a thick pane of soundproof glass. On one side of the glass, an oval table with four expensive-looking microphones on swivel arms. On the other side, a massive control board with switches and sliders and levers and glowing buttons, and three workstations for producers arrayed behind it. The walls in both rooms were covered in sound-dampening foam panels, soft surfaces studded with dark gray pyramid shapes that swallowed your words. After the din and chaos of the newsroom where I’d spent much of my past two years, it was both eerie and oddly relaxing.

  The staff of The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly was small—five, counting me. When we weren’t in the eighteenth-floor radio studio, we occupied a small area just outside Bill’s seventeenth-floor office.

  There was Stan Manskoff, the executive producer, who was actually important enough to have his own office next to Bill’s. He was there for adult supervision but was mostly checked out of the proceedings, occupying his time with the sundry TV-related issues that cropped up throughout the day. Stan was responsible for the entire empire, overseeing radio, television, and the website. He was the steady hand at the tiller of the USS O’Reilly, the practical second in command to the volatile Captain Bill. Stan was a details man by nature, sweating the small stuff that the Big Guy couldn’t be bothered with. He was a reluctant hatchet man when necessary, carrying out deeds that were too distasteful or unpleasant for Bill to dirty his hands over. And he was the main go-between for Bill and the Second Floor, the broker for a relationship that was tense even on good days, and downright apocalyptic on bad ones. It was probably the most stressful job this side of Fallujah, and to this day I have no idea how Stan was able to survive every day without guzzling a bottle of Pepto to deal with the grapefruit-size ulcer from which he undoubtedly suffered.

  He was the same age as my parents, graduating college in ’72. But unlike my parents, who’d attended a sleepy Midwestern Catholic college that had barely been touched by the 1960s counterculture (my mother swears—unconvincingly, if you ask me—to this day that she never once attended a party where someone was smoking pot), Stan had spent his university years behaving like—to coin one of Bill’s favorite phrases—a “far-left loon,” protesting U.S. military actions, occupying various administrative buildings, and (I’m guessing, based mostly on a contemporary picture showing him with long, straggly hair and a beard) ingesting copious amounts of marijuana. I loved the guy immediately.

  Manskoff had built an impressive career as a producer at ABC News, which is where he’d met O’Reilly, who was a correspondent for that network in the late ’80s. Years later, when Bill was already established at Fox News and needed a heavyweight presence to run his burgeoning empire, he tapped Stan, luring him away from his cushy network gig with what was rumored among the st
aff to be a huge pile of money. If Stan had any misgivings about betraying his radical leftist past to come work for a TV host who could only be described as a living caricature of The Man, he kept them to himself. (Though I did catch him occasionally emitting some world-weary, Danny-Glover-in-Lethal-Weapon-I’m-too-old-for-this-shit type of mumbling when he thought no one was listening.)

  Next in line on the radio crew was Sam Martinez, associate producer, head call screener, and the guy who’d recruited me. At twenty-six, he was one year older than I was and had a year and a half of O’Reilly experience under his belt. He was happy to have me aboard but also warily guarded his turf from my encroachment, taking umbrage at any indication that I was on the verge of usurping him. His worries were unfounded. I knew my place, and I had no intention of trying to overtake him; I was perfectly fine with my status as the little brother. But like any good little brother, I sometimes took delight in tormenting my work sibling and his insecurity about his place in the hierarchy.

  “Hey, Sam, when you were out sick yesterday, Bill told me that he liked the way I screened calls better than the way you do it,” I’d lie.

  “What? Bullshit!” he’d say. “You’re totally full of shit, Muto.” Then, quietly: “He didn’t actually tell you that, right?”

  I’d let him dangle for a few minutes before confessing. When I did, he’d grumble and begin planning his payback, to be sprung on me at a later date.

  Sam’s unease was surprising. Anyone could see that his position on the staff was secure. He was by far the hardest-working producer on the O’Reilly team, and conceivably in the entire building. He also had one of the most impressive personal stories I’d ever heard. He was born in California, the grandson of Mexican immigrants. His father died tragically when Sam was only six years old, leaving his mother suddenly alone with three young kids to support. Sam grew up and worked his way through Arizona State, turning down scholarships from more prestigious schools so he could stay close to home and help on weekends in the restaurant that his mother owned and had built from the ground up. After graduation, he came to New York with barely a dime in his pocket, staying at the YMCA until he could find an affordable apartment. He’d overcome so many hardships to get to his position that it sometimes made me ashamed of my easy, comfortable, white-bread, middle-class upbringing.