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

by Joe Muto

  Rule 7: Fit It to the Narrative

  Certain stories barely even needed pitching—they fit into Bill’s repertoire that had been established and had been successful on multiple prior occasions. I’ve already mentioned Bad Judge stories, and Sexy Teacher stories, but the ur-example, the ultimate ongoing narrative and the one perhaps most closely associated with O’Reilly, is the “War on Christmas.”

  By the time I joined the show, the War on Christmas had been going for a few years, the first shots having been fired in 2004, when Macy’s had the temerity to ditch the phrase “Merry Christmas” in its advertising and in-store displays, in favor of the more inclusive “Happy Holidays.” This, of course, represented an unconscionable attack on Christianity, and Bill, along with the FNC five P.M. host John Gibson and numerous right-wing Christian groups, launched a salvo against Macy’s, accusing it of caving to secular forces of political correctness. The following year Macy’s, apparently deciding that making a few Jews visiting their store uncomfortable was preferable to poking the hornet’s nest of outrage-prone American Christendom, announced that they’d bring back “Merry Christmas.” But Sears, Kmart, and Walmart hadn’t been paying attention, and hence became that year’s targets. They, too, caved the following year. Then Best Buy stepped in to take their place and was also summarily smacked down. And so on.

  By the time I came on board The Factor, the War was all but won, with every major corporation cowed into compliance, terrified to attempt a holiday advertising campaign that didn’t incorporate the word Christmas. O’Reilly declared victory, then continued fighting just for the thrill of it, opening a new, more localized front, railing against states, cities, and municipalities that refused to acknowledge the reason for the season, or seemed poised to strip Christ from Christmas.

  “These things come earlier and earlier every year,” Eugene would say when he announced his first War on Christmas pitch of the season, sometimes as early as mid-September. The details would change from story to story, until every incident eventually blurred together into a sort of bizarre Yuletide Mad Libs:

  A well-meaning, but liberal (governor/mayor/city council/atheist activist) would try to get (a manger scene/a tree/Christmas lights/Santa Claus/any mention of Jesus) removed from (City Hall/the public park/a school), because they say (it offends non-Christians/it violates the Constitution/there’s not enough money in the budget for it). The controversy leads to a backlash from the (community/Catholic Church/parents of the schoolchildren), and eventually (an outraged public hearing/angry protests/death threats).

  I suspect that even Bill knew how silly the War on Christmas narrative was, but the canard was simply too fertile for him to abandon entirely. (The liberal watchdog group Media Matters calculated that in the month of December 2011, The Factor spent almost forty-two minutes talking about the War on Christmas, compared to just over thirteen minutes of screen time devoted to the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Personally, as a lapsed Catholic, I never took offense that corporations were trying to make the holidays more generic and secular; rather, I found it offensive that the whole premise of the War on Christmas narrative was that any attempt to include non-Christians was inherently offensive.

  Of course, I kept all that to myself. If anyone else on the Factor staff (which was roughly 50 percent Jewish) found Bill’s blithe dismissal of the non-Jesusy religions insulting, they also wisely kept it to themselves.

  Rule 8: When All Else Fails, Appeal to His Ego

  In college, while trolling eBay for funny things to hang on the wall above the bar in the off-campus house I shared with six other guys, I came across a small light-up sign advertising Colt 45. The sign featured the suave actor Billy Dee Williams nattily dressed in a white dinner jacket with a red bow tie, cracking open a tall can of the foul malt liquor, while a smiling Phylicia Rashad look-alike, with big hair and a dress with shoulder pads so tall they almost reached her earlobes, stood behind him, caressing his shoulder and gazing lovingly at his face. The text on the sign read THE POWER OF COLT 45: IT WORKS EVERY TIME!

  I mention this because I thought of that sign, and that slogan, whenever I came across a pitch that fit Rule 8—aka the Billy Dee Williams Rule. If someone on another network mentioned Bill’s name, all a producer needed to do was to show that clip at the pitch meeting and it meant almost automatic inclusion in the show. If the mention was complimentary, great. If it was an insult, even better!

  To draw from some recent examples of pitches that were accepted without a second thought, there’s the tale of a savvy racehorse owner who named one of his colts The Factor, ensuring several days of coverage on the show as the animal came close to running in the Kentucky Derby. Or Ellen Barkin, a boilerplate liberal celebrity, who insulted Bill on Joy Behar’s Headline News show, becoming the lead Factor story on an otherwise slow news day.

  Works every time.

  —

  It took me five years of failure to learn those rules. I say failure, because knowing the types of stories O’Reilly was looking for is a completely different thing from actually finding said stories.

  I wasn’t enough of a masochist to frequent the right-wing blogs my colleagues combed for good politics-related pitches, so I decided to dedicate myself to an unrelated niche that my fellow producers (smartly, as it turns out) wouldn’t touch: Sexy Outrage stories.

  It did not go well.

  “Bill, there’s a new website called H-Date that people are very angry about,” I pitched one day.

  “Oh, yeah?” Bill said. “Why are they so mad?”

  “Because it’s a dating website specifically for people with herpes.”

  His hands went immediately to his temples, the gesture of weary annoyance that I unfortunately knew quite well.

  “Are you kidding me, Muto?” he asked, suddenly as angry as I’d ever seen him. “You honestly want me to put that disgusting fact on television?”

  I stood in place, knowing from experience that interrupting him at the beginning of a tirade I had set off was a very bad idea.

  “This is a family show,” he continued. “It airs at eight P.M. People are eating dinner. I will not bring a discussion about . . . herpes . . . into America’s living rooms.”

  I probably should have learned my lesson there, but a few months later, I came across another story that I somehow got into my head would be a slam dunk.

  “Bill, people are outraged because the Iowa State Fair is planning to hold an erotic corn-dog-eating contest,” I said.

  “Jesus, Muto!” Stan blurted out as the rest of the producers groaned or laughed nervously.

  But Bill was confused. “I don’t get it,” he said, frowning. “What’s an erotic corn-dog-eating contest?”

  “Come on, we don’t need to hear this,” Stan protested, but Bill silenced him with a wave of the hand.

  “Go on, Muto,” Bill said.

  “Well,” I started, “I don’t know the exact way it’s going to work, but my understanding is that they’re going to bring women on the stage, and then have them eat corn dogs . . . in a sexy way.”

  At this point, Bill had a look of utter disbelief on his face. Is this pitch actually happening? I, of course, misinterpreted the look as confusion, wrongly thinking that he still didn’t grasp what I was describing, so I plowed on.

  “I believe that the objection is that the contestants are going to treat the corn dogs like they’re, uhhh, you know . . . male . . . genitals—”

  “YEAH, WE’VE GOT IT,” Bill said, cutting me off.

  After the meeting, Stan pulled me aside.

  “Erotic corn dogs? What’s the matter with you?”

  I shrugged. “Worth a shot, right?”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, sighing. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then replaced them and leveled his gaze at me. “Maybe in the future you should run your pitches by me before the meeting.”

  “What for?”

  “So I can save you from yourse
lf.”

  April 11, 2012—5:51 P.M.

  Bill glanced at me out of the corner of his eye as I stole up from behind, snatching the folder marked E-BLOCK off the anchor desk in front of him and sliding the F-BLOCK folder into its place. He nodded and mumbled his thanks. I slipped out of the studio and reclaimed my seat in the empty green room.

  I’d made it through almost the entire show. Just one more block to go before I could leave. I was anxious to go, too, because the Gawker people were waiting for me at a downtown bar to plan our next move.

  I had half a mind to walk into the bar and tell them I was done, to call it off right there on the spot. I hadn’t been busted yet, but I had no idea how much longer my luck was going to hold out.

  Also, I wasn’t thrilled with the tenor of the postings. Everything was coming out all wrong. When Gawker had asked me to write an anonymous column from inside the company, I’d envisioned it as a sort of mischievous prank, something fun and light and silly, something that would get a little attention on some obscure media blogs but would go largely unnoticed by the larger world. But I had misjudged Gawker’s ability to stir the shit. They were absolutely brilliant at it, and the story was getting way more notice than I’d ever imagined, with mainstream publications like The New York Times starting to weigh in. But with the added scrutiny, the story had gotten away from me, and the light tone I was hoping for had somehow morphed into something sinister and dark.

  I won’t deny that a small part of me was exhilarated by seeing the fuss I had kicked up; but mostly I was terrified by the slow realization that I was dealing with forces I didn’t understand, and consequences that I’d underestimated.

  I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that my best bet was to cut my losses while I was still anonymous, wait a week or two for the heat to die down, then give my notice.

  I’d just about made up my mind when the green room door opened. I looked up. It was Stan, who should have been in the control room supervising the end of the show. He had a grim look on his face.

  He didn’t need to say anything. I knew I was fucked.

  CHAPTER 12

  Loofah, Falafel, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

  On a list of days that will live in infamy, October 13, 2004, is, for most people in the outside world, probably pretty close to the bottom. If we consider dates like December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, to be at the top of the Infamy List, then 10/13/04 would have to fall somewhere between March 6, 1969 (Major League Baseball introduces the Designated Hitter rule), and May 19, 1999 (George Lucas releases the first Star Wars prequel).

  But that was just for the outside world.

  In the insular, gossipy microcosm that was Fox News, the day that saw the release of a salacious sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill O’Reilly—our biggest star and most fearsome newsroom presence—had the same effect as Lee Harvey Oswald flying a Japanese Zero into the World Trade Center.

  I was still in my early green days then, doing videotape for the afternoon and evening cut-ins. I showed up to work like normal at three P.M. and grabbed a desk next to the rest of the team. As I was logging in, I noticed that something was amiss in the newsroom. It was quieter than usual. Instead of the sound of workers talking on phones or shouting questions to colleagues seated across the room, people were huddled in small groups around desks, talking in muted tones, occasionally stifling giggles or gasping, and periodically looking around nervously. It reminded me of a bunch of schoolkids furtively attempting to share a hilarious passed note but not wanting to get caught by the teacher. All the small groups appeared to be looking at the same website, because the same bright orange background appeared on all the monitors.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Barry, a cut-in writer I was friendly with who was occupying the desk next to mine. He was, I noticed, also reading the orange website as intently as the rest of the newsroom. “What’s everybody looking at?”

  “Oh, my God. You haven’t heard?” Barry said, minimizing his browser window and turning to me with a gleeful look. “Go to The Smoking Gun. Right now. Immediately.”

  The Smoking Gun is a website that posts government documents, lawsuits, mug shots—anything in the public record that might be entertaining. I’d actually looked at the site a few weeks prior, laughing at the section featuring leaked concert “riders”—backstage demands that musicians inserted into contracts with promoters. (My favorite: macho conserva-rocker Ted Nugent’s 2002 request for tropical-fruit-flavored Slim-Fast in his dressing room.)

  But a secretly effete rock star’s beverage preference was not the topic du jour at TSG that day.

  O’REILLY HIT WITH SEX HARASS SUIT, the site’s headline screamed.

  The story went like this: An associate producer named Andrea Mackris had accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment and asked for sixty million dollars from him and Fox to keep quiet about it. (The sixty-million-dollar figure was the amount of revenue Mackris and her lawyers estimated The Factor brought in for Fox each year.) O’Reilly and the network reportedly negotiated quietly at first but then balked, and sued Mackris for extortion. She countersued for harassment, and filed a salacious twenty-two-page lawsuit that The Smoking Gun posted, and that two-thirds of the employees in the newsroom currently had their noses buried in.

  “This is some pretty racy shit,” Barry said.

  And so it was. I’ll spare you most of the horrific details since I’m not a sadist (and since this is 2013 and you all have access to Google if you want to see the damn thing for yourselves), but the gist of it is: Mackris claimed that, over the course of several dinners and phone calls, Bill repeatedly made suggestive remarks, tried to convince her to buy herself sex toys, and on at least three occasions called her while he was pleasuring himself. The lawsuit never says so explicitly, but Mackris apparently had audio recordings of some of the phone calls, because at some points, it quotes O’Reilly verbatim and at length.

  One of these word-for-word passages features Bill monologuing a fantasy of showering in a hotel on a tropical island with the producer. He repeatedly mentions his desire to scrub her down with “one of those mitts, one of those loofah mitts.”

  Let me interject at this point and defend my former boss on one point.

  I’m not sure if his scenario qualifies as erotic, per se—though if getting a soapy caress from a volatile middle-aged millionaire floats your boat, this is pretty much the pinnacle. What it is, however, is extremely hygienic, and also practical in its use of specific props likely to be on hand. This was clearly a well-thought-out fantasy, showing a lot of planning and dedication. (As I would later learn working for him, Bill’s a detail-oriented guy. The lawsuit doesn’t say so, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a specific make and model of loofah in mind.)

  Unfortunately for Bill—and fortuitously for late-night comedians and Keith Olbermann—soon enough, the thread of his tropical fantasy gets away from him, and he temporarily forgets the name of his ersatz sex toy, confusing it with a word for a delicious Middle Eastern food made from fried chickpeas.

  And that’s how the entire Fox News organization and the world at large discovered that the number one host in cable news had allegedly told one of his producers that he wanted to massage her lady parts with a “falafel.”

  I had just finished the falafel section of the lawsuit, and my jaw must have been hanging open, because Barry sounded panicked when he quietly hissed at me: “Dude!”

  I turned to him and saw that his monitor was no longer displaying The Smoking Gun. No one’s was. A hush had fallen over the newsroom, the chat groups had evaporated, and everyone was back at their own seat with their heads buried in their screens, suddenly very interested in whatever duty they had been shirking in favor of gossip. I looked around, puzzled. Barry caught my eye and gestured with his head toward the newsroom entrance.

  It was O’Reilly.

  He stood framed in the doorway, tall and stone-faced, surveying the room like some sort of cabl
e news golem, seemingly daring anyone to make a peep.

  No one did.

  He pushed into the room, walking briskly down the main aisle toward the Factor pod, as producers unlucky enough to have a desk in his direct path ducked their heads even farther, trying to make themselves invisible.

  He came within twenty feet of my desk. I risked a peek out of the corner of my eye as he blew past. I had misjudged his countenance from a distance. It wasn’t the impassive stone face that I had originally thought. It was a clenched jaw and a mask of pure, unadulterated fury.

  Just fucking try me, his face said. Make my fucking day.

  —

  The fallout was swift and severe. Bill usually started every show with a segment called the Talking Points Memo, an editorial monologue about five minutes long. Normally he’d spend it commenting on some political issue, giving his opinion while his words appeared, bullet-pointed and paraphrased, in a graphics box floating next to his head.

  The Talking Points segment that night, a few hours after the charges broke, was anything but business as usual. Bill vaguely referred to the allegations, saying, “This is the single most evil thing I have ever experienced, and I’ve seen a lot.” But where Bill was vague, the late-night comedians were happy to be much, much more specific, as I discovered that weekend going through the shows for my Fox & Friends duty. Conan O’Brien may have been the most merciless, doing a recurring bit where a Bill sound-alike called into the show to chat and ended up soliciting Conan for sex. Tina Fey, who was still behind the Weekend Update desk on Saturday Night Live at the time, was also brutal, uncorking a fast and furious monologue that mixed righteous feminist anger with penis size speculation, entitled “Don’t Forget Bill O’Reilly Is Disgusting.” Even the normally bland Jay Leno got in on the action, cracking a joke about a “fair and balanced” set of breasts.

  Reaction among the newsroom staffers was surprisingly gleeful. Schadenfreude reigned, as most people agreed that Bill had it coming. I hadn’t been around long enough at that point to have had any significant run-ins with him, but there was no shortage of producers, video editors, makeup ladies, and security guards he had rubbed the wrong way over the years; some of these folks were now positively crowing, filling the air with speculation about O’Reilly’s future. Interestingly, not one person I spoke to thought Fox would go so far as to pull him off the air. He was just too valuable. If one lowly producer had to endure his masturbatory phone calls on a regular basis, that was the price the suits on the second floor were willing to pay for the five million viewers and countless ad dollars he brought in every night.