by Joe Muto
Regardless of how little attention he paid to the packets, he still needed them in front of him during the show. But instead of keeping them all in a stack and grabbing the appropriate packet when needed, he insisted that there be one and only one packet in his eyesight at all times.
That’s where I came in. There weren’t even any guests in New York City that day—everyone was coming to us via satellite—so the only reason for me to be down in the green room was for packet-switching duties. The work was mindless enough that it was usually assigned to an intern, but on the days when there wasn’t one available, it was assigned randomly to a producer.
When I got down to the green room, it was completely empty. No guests, no hair or makeup artists. Just me and a sad deli tray of bagels left over from that morning’s shows.
In retrospect, I should have realized: I was being separated from the herd.
CHAPTER 11
Stand and Deliver: Rage, Ridicule, and Sexy Ladies, Twice a Week
Jesus CHRIST, Muto,” he yelled, pounding a clenched fist on his thigh for emphasis, causing two of the more nervous producers to flinch. “Do you WANT me to lose two hundred thousand viewers in the middle of the program? Hmmm? IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?”
Now, I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on workplace relations—in fact, as the mere existence of this book proves, I’m sort of the opposite. But I’m well versed enough to know that when your boss is angrily and loudly accusing you of wanting to intentionally sabotage his television show, that’s an indication that the meeting is not going well.
I began this book with a rare instance in which I knocked it out of the park at a pitch meeting. This chapter is going to be about what happened most of the rest of the time.
In this particular case, the story that had spurred O’Reilly’s rage seemed fairly innocuous to me. A friend who worked in PR for a publishing house had sent me a book, a memoir by an aging actor, hoping to get the author on the show. The celeb’s career was nonexistent at the time, but he’d been a pretty big name in the ’70s, the star of a hit TV show. I thought he’d be a good guest and that Bill would be happy to get at least a glimmer of celebrity wattage.
I was wrong.
“Muto, this guy is what, a hundred and seventy years old?” Bill was saying. “He’s old and gray. No one’s heard a thing from him in twenty years. And you want me to put him on the show? Do you honestly think that’s going to help us? We’ll lose half the demo in the first thirty seconds. Either that or he’ll drop dead live on the air.”
Stan, who was seated across the semicircle from Bill, looked up from his BlackBerry. “Well, that actually might help the numbers, you know. If he dropped dead, I mean.” Everyone but Bill and I laughed. Stan was a cool customer, and as executive producer, he was the only one on the staff with the stature to stand up to Bill. Sometimes when Papa Bear really got on a roll against one of us, Stan tried to jump in as a human shield and absorb some of the onslaught. But Bill wasn’t having it this time.
“Look, Muto, you can’t be coming to these meetings with shit like this.”
Stan caught my eye and gave a little shrug. Sorry, I tried.
I opened my mouth to protest: “Bill, I just—”
He raised his hand to cut me off. “No, I don’t want to hear it. Use your head next time.” He swept his gaze across the rest of the semicircle. “And that goes for the rest of you. You’ve all been giving me junk lately, and I’m TIRED OF IT. I won’t have it anymore.”
Silence from the rest of the group. It was a surprisingly small staff, less than fifteen of us total, radio and TV combined, with the bulk of us being associate producers under thirty like me.
Bill took a deep breath, composing himself, rubbing his temples with a hand.
“All right. Anything else, Muto?”
I’d actually led off with the actor’s book, thinking it was my strongest pitch. I still had two more ready to go, gripped in my now profusely sweating hands. But I knew there was no way in hell he’d take them now, no matter how good they were. I’d poisoned the well.
“No, Bill. I think I’ll quit while I’m behind.”
He nodded. “Yeah, good idea.” More laughter from the other producers, mostly out of relief that it wasn’t them this time. They’d all been on the receiving end before, and they all knew they would be again. It was only a matter of time.
“Okay, Brooks,” Bill barked. “You’re up.”43
Naomi Brooks, the producer to my right, shot me a look. Thanks a lot for getting him pissed off. She knew she was screwed, too. When one of us put Bill in a foul mood, all our pitches suffered. And sure enough, Naomi struck out, whiffing on three stories that were quickly dismissed by the still-salty host. No one got a story accepted for the rest of the meeting.
After the last producer had his last pitch shot down with a dismissive “I don’t think our viewers care about that story one bit,” Bill took the opportunity to admonish the group one more time: “I don’t want you people coming in here again with stories like today’s. If you’re at all confused about what sort of stories we’re looking for, talk to Stan.”
Stan looked up from his BlackBerry again. “Who, me?” he said with mock surprise.
—
During a pitch meeting, you had to package and present a story idea for an audience of one: Bill O’Reilly. The stories he was looking for had to be ones that would, first and foremost, get him viewers. That was the number one criteria. No matter how newsworthy or journalistically sound a story was, if he thought it would cause people to change the channel, he wasn’t interested. Beyond that, he was looking for stories that supported his worldview: that American culture and society was under assault by the forces of secular liberalism, and that he, Bill O’Reilly, was the only thing standing between the secularists and the total dissolution of the nation’s moral fiber, the only journalist brave and steadfast enough to stand up for the folks.
That’s a heavy burden to place on stories that most of us found during fifteen minutes of Web surfing during our lunch breaks, but there were certain guidelines I developed over my five years on the show that I noticed improved my chances of getting a pitch through.
Rule 1: Size Counts
Getting a story onto the show was a complicated threading of the needle. The story had to be small and obscure enough that Bill—who read several newspapers cover to cover and listened to the CBS News radio broadcast on his way into the office—hadn’t yet heard of it. But it also had to be big enough that he thought it was worth covering in the first place. A pitch that fell into the former category was usually met with an impatient “Yeah, yeah, we know all about it,” while a pitch from the latter might get dismissed with a curt “Too small.”
Rule 2: Delivery Is Everything
“It’s all about confidence,” Max Greene had told me before I left his weekend unit for the greener pastures of O’Reilly Land. “If you’re not confident in the story, he’ll hear it in your voice immediately, and he’ll shut you down.”
Max was right. Confidence, even if it was false, was essential for the successful pitch. If you sounded self-assured, it put Bill at ease and made him more receptive to whatever you were about to say. If you sounded nervous and halting, it made him nervous in return, and he was more likely to start asking tough questions and nitpick your story to shreds.
Concision was also important. A flood of convoluted details was not what he was looking for. He wanted a narrative that was short, simple, and able to be explained to him in a sentence or two—ensuring that it would, in turn, be easy to explain to viewers. The best pitchers would weave a story for Bill, something that was easy for him to grasp in a matter of seconds. So the best strategy for the producer was to speak in headlines, save the details for later, and always put the most sensational elements of the story at the beginning of the pitch.
I would practice in my spare time, condensing well-known stories into their essential, pitchable elements, keeping in mind to massage t
hem to fit Bill’s chosen narrative:
Adam & Eve: “Bill, a liberal feminist extremist tricked her husband into consuming drugs, and then told authorities that a talking snake told her to do it.”
The Nativity: “Bill, a ruler in the Middle East ordered the murder of thousands of infants based on the advice of some liberal astrologers.”
The Boston Tea Party: “Bill, a far-left antigovernment, anticapitalist group in Massachusetts attacked a ship belonging to a corporation they didn’t like, destroying millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise.”
The Civil Rights Movement: “Bill, radical black activists in the South are carrying out a campaign to damage the teeth of police dogs.”
A clear, concise, well-plotted pitch could put an otherwise weak story over the top, while a convoluted pitch could kill a relatively strong story in the crib. Every once in a while, the story was so good that delivery didn’t matter, but those stories were few and far between. Most stories were firmly on the bubble, and the proper framing could tilt them one way or the other.
Rule 3: Stoke the Fires of Outrage
As far as content, the most nearly surefire way to get your pitch onto the show was to stir Bill’s sense of outrage. In theory, that sounds as if it would be a relatively easy thing to do, but in reality it was quite difficult. Since he was already constantly operating at a low level of outrage twenty-four hours a day, it took a lot of additional rage inducing to move the needle even a fraction. Bill was actually inured to outrage, in the same way that I assume Hugh Hefner, after five decades of horndoggery, is immune to normal means of arousal. Just as Hef, I imagine,44 needs a half dozen nubile nineteen-year-olds covered in baby oil performing gymnastics for him to get it up, Bill needed extreme circumstances to raise his ire enough to draw him into a story.
Man rapes a teenager? Sad, but not for us.
Man—who had been let out of jail two days earlier by a mix-up in paperwork—rapes a teenager? Not bad. Call the local sheriff and find out what the hell happened. Maybe we can do something with it next week.
Man who had been let out of jail two days earlier—because a liberal judge had ordered him freed—rapes a teenager? Bingo! Lead story and Talking Points Memo tonight. We’re doing three blocks on it. And send Jesse out to ambush the judge.45
Rule 4: Establish a Villain
“So who’s the villain in this story?” It was a question Bill asked a lot. He felt that any good outrage-stoking story needed a tangible target for said outrage, a name and preferably a photo that could be splashed on-screen for the host to point to and say, This is the bad guy. This is the guy hurting you.
That’s why the aforementioned hypothetical teenager rape scenario was a slam dunk when the element of the liberal judge was added. An unelected egghead judge who was unbeholden to the people made for a perfect villain—to the point where the “Bad Judge” story became a genre in and of itself, and the stories were particularly fertile ground for us. “We’ve got another Bad Judge,” Eugene—our head booker, and the one guy who always seemed to get at least one pitch through per meeting—would say periodically. Bill would rub his hands together in anticipation: “Excellent. What is it this time?”
But judges weren’t the only game in town. Some other good villains:
Liberal college professors
Liberal journalists
Liberal politicians
Liberal Hollywood celebrities
Anyone who resided in the state of Vermont (especially liberals)
Of course, any good villain story needed a hero as a counterpoint. In most scenarios, the hero was naturally Bill himself, the only one brave or bold enough to call out the villain; but in a pinch, a local politician or law enforcement official could be the designated hero. Some ideal hero archetypes: the gruff, plainspoken, cowboy-hat-wearing small-town sheriff; the wholesome family-values-oriented local politician; the passionate, attractive young female activist—speaking of which . . .
Rule 5: Sex Sells
This will come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but people in the TV industry think young, sexy ladies make for good television. That’s why almost every reporter and anchor on Fox is a blond sexpot dressed in a skirt that barely extends past her labia. That’s why Greta Van Susteren practically renounced her American citizenship and became an Aruban national in her pursuit of the case of missing teenage beauty Natalee Holloway. And that’s why one of the best ways to fast-track a pitch onto The O’Reilly Factor is to find something that involves a sexy lady.
My favorite of these types of stories was something we referred to as Sexy Teachers, a euphemism that sounded much better than the unfortunately more accurate Statutory Rape Teachers. In the world of cable news morality, there was a clear double standard when it came to these stories. A male teacher’s sex with underage female students was always rightfully treated as unforgivable, predatory behavior. But when it came to a female teacher seducing her male charges, the coverage took a tone of mild disdain with a strong undercurrent of winking titillation—doubly so if the teacher was hot.
Consequently, we knew never to show up for a pitch meeting with a teacher sex story unless we also had a picture of the hopefully attractive perp.
“What does the teacher look like?” Bill would ask, and we’d dutifully hand over the printouts of her mug shot, or (if we were lucky) sexy Facebook photos, or (if the Cable News Gods were truly with us that day) bikini model photo-shoot proofs. (This actually happened with a teacher named Debra Lafave, a twenty-two-year-old blond Playboy-caliber stunner who had moonlighted as a bikini model before becoming a high school English teacher and eventually making a man out of a fourteen-year-old boy.)
But the quest to get sexy ladies on the air was not limited to sex-offending educators. Bill was also constantly on the prowl for guests who were “demographically friendly,” which was a polite way of saying “fuckable.” One of his pet theories was that viewers were turned off by the average cable news expert commentator, most of whom tended to fit into the category he disparagingly called Old Gray White Men. OGWMs were virtually banished from the show, to be used only as a last resort.46 So when a producer pitched an expert who was young and beautiful, even if her credentials were otherwise suspect, or her field of expertise was of dubious newsworthiness, she was always given at least a tryout.
This focus on getting eye candy on-screen had its upsides and downsides. On one hand, it launched the careers of several talented political analysts and commentators who otherwise would probably have been dismissed as too young or too lightweight. On the other hand, it saddled The Factor with several segments that should have had no place on a “news” show, including an inane segment featuring a blond “body language expert” examining the hand gestures of a politician or public figure, and an especially unfortunate experiment—the existence of which I am not making up or even exaggerating—called Hot for Words, an etymology segment featuring a huge-breasted Russian immigrant explaining the origin of common words and phrases. Alert the Pulitzer committee!
Rule 6: Get Him on the Bandwagon
Bill rightfully prided himself on his ability to identify stories that would catch on with the viewers, and to catch them early, getting in on the ground floor and enabling him to say later that he had broken the story.47 But as much as he loved being one of the first to grab on to a story, he also hated being one of the last. If you could convince him that he was in danger of being late to the party, he’d fast-track a story to air.
“Bill, the right-wing blogs are really going crazy for this one,”48 you’d start your pitch. Or “They’ve been doing this story all day on our network.” Or, most effectively, “This story is topping Drudge right now.”
Matt Drudge, the proprietor of the Drudge Report website, despite not being on the Fox News payroll, was one of the most powerful people at the network. Every producer in the building, myself included, checked his site ten times an hour to see what stories he was pushing. It was the first thing I looked at
when I turned on my computer in the morning, before I even glanced at my e-mail, and the first thing I clicked over to after any major news development, just to see what Drudge’s take was.
Drudge is a reclusive, slightly mysterious, fedora-wearing figure who made his bones during the Monica Lewinsky scandal: He was the first to publicly report on it, posting an item revealing that Newsweek had prepared—and then spiked at the last minute—a story on the intern’s relationship with Bill Clinton. Drudge runs a website that’s both proudly low-tech, with a design gone largely unchanged since the ’90s, and wildly successful, with millions of visitors a month and a reported seven-figure revenue. His sensibility—right-leaning, populist, and biased toward muckraking and sensationalism—tended to align perfectly with Fox’s. When he promoted a story, complete with a headline putting his own gloss or spin on it, it would, like clockwork, pop up on the network, with spin intact—often within an hour or two of going up online.
Bill was uncharacteristically respectful of Drudge’s power to drive a story, so throwing his name into a pitch was a surefire way to get the boss’s attention, and usually his approval. It was not uncommon for Bill to reject a story, sometimes with extreme prejudice, on a Monday, only to turn around and embrace the exact same story on a Tuesday simply because he was told that Drudge was now pushing it.
