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

by Joe Muto

Rosie wasn’t even paying attention to us at first. She was yelling to someone across the room. Jesse sidled right up next to her, and I made sure to frame up a shot that showed both of them.

  Jesse started speaking: “Rosie, I’m Jesse from Bill O’Reilly’s show.”

  “No, you’re not!” she laughed.

  “He wants to know why you won’t come on the show,” Jesse continued. “You had such a good time last time you were on. You’re always invited.”

  I should pause here and explain that the “we just want you to come on the show” ruse is essential for a successful ambush. Ambush interviews are generally considered journalistically suspect, except in one very specific set of circumstances: The person refuses to talk to you otherwise. This was the standard established by Mike Wallace years ago, and it’s the banner that O’Reilly wrapped himself in more often than not. You see, we were forced to send a camera crew after this guy because he ignored our phone calls.

  But the truth is that, in most ambush situations, Bill actually didn’t want the person to come on the show—because the interview would have been a disaster. If O’Reilly set his sights on you for an ambush, chances are that you’d actually make a terrible guest. You’d either be too hostile or too crazy, and the interview would dissolve into chaos, or, conversely you’d be too persuasive and reasonable, getting the better of the host.

  The “we just want you on the show” gambit was the easy way out of these situations, giving journalistic cover to the dubious practice of ambushing. The only requirement was that a day or two before the ambush, someone on the staff would place a call or drop an e-mail requesting an interview. This request was almost always wisely ignored by the target (or more often, I suspect, their representatives). Jesse was then free to ambush the subject with the paper-thin excuse that the whole thing was just an attempt to get them to come on The Factor.

  Bill never said so, but everyone knew that the real purpose of the ambush was to make the subject look stupid. This wasn’t particularly hard to do, as almost anyone looks stupid when confronted unexpectedly with a camera crew and a microphone-wielding reporter. Even if the ambush victim answers the questions, they usually come off badly, or at least end up looking as if they have something to hide. And if they’re uncooperative, all the better. Running away provides a great visual, guaranteed to make the show’s preproduced “cold open” introduction video and be teased before commercial breaks throughout the show. If Jesse got really lucky, the victim would try to slam a house or car door on him. That was TV gold.

  But there was no door for Rosie O’Donnell to slam that day. She was sitting at a table as Jesse peppered her with questions and I taped the whole thing.

  “Oh, my God. Is that what you do?” she asked, incredulous. “You go around to book signings?”

  Jesse grinned. “No, we want to meet you. We want you to come on the show.”

  “He knows how to find me, the guy,” Rosie said.

  “We’ve called you a hundred times,” Jesse said, possibly not even exaggerating that much—unlike in the case of some of our other ambushees, O’Reilly actually had made a determined effort to get Rosie on the show, with Eugene leaving her a couple messages a month.

  “I do not want you to call me,” Rosie said calmly. “If Bill wants me, he should tell me himself. He is a big boy. He is a grown-up.”

  At this point, Rosie’s bodyguards still hadn’t noticed what was going on, probably because the noise from the fans waiting in line made it hard for them to hear Jesse grilling their boss. She signaled to them.

  “Hey, this is Bill O’Reilly’s camera crew,” she said. “But don’t throw them out, because that makes it all worse when he puts it on the Bill O’Reilly No Spin Zone.”

  Credit where credit was due—the lady knew her television tropes.

  At this point, Jesse could sense that his time was growing short. He’d been lucky so far that O’Donnell was willing to joke around, but it was time to go for the jugular.

  “Rosie, he wants to know if you regret saying that 9/11 was an inside job?”

  Rosie’s demeanor changed instantly. The smile melted from her face. The joking around was over.

  “I did not say that,” she said. “He is quoting the wrong people.”

  That’s when the guard moved in to shut me down.

  “That is enough,” he said, stepping in front of me, blocking my shot. “Thank you. That’s enough. Sir. Enough. No more filming.”

  He was reaching for my camera when Rosie called him off.

  “Stop, Eddie,” she said. “That’s what they want you to do.” He looked back at her, then reluctantly stepped aside. Now Rosie was talking to me directly.

  “Now, sir, could you put down your camera? Could you turn it off?”

  Never . . . for any reason . . .

  Without stopping the recording, I snapped the viewfinder window shut and lowered the camera to my side, hoping that I could fake Rosie into thinking I had turned it off.

  It didn’t work.

  “I said turn it off. Hello, I work in television, too,” she said. “Can you turn the lens down to the floor?”

  “It’s off,” I lied. But she wasn’t having it.

  “Okay, we’re done here,” Rosie said. “Good-bye.”

  The bodyguards moved in, shoving me and Jesse away from Rosie’s perch on the mezzanine, and bodily escorting us down the stairs to the ground level. A store manager told us we were now officially trespassing in the store and that we had to leave, and we weren’t welcome back. Ever.

  “We’re banned for life?” I asked, holding the still-running camera.

  The manager nodded. “Yup. Life.”

  As the bodyguards corralled us toward the exit, we could hear Rosie, still at her signing table on the mezzanine, yelling after us.

  “Bill O’Reilly is a sexual harrasser! He’s a sexual harrasser!” she screamed, loud enough to be heard throughout the entire store.

  The fans still waiting in line broke into cheers and applause.

  And then Jesse and I were out on the street in front of the bookstore. The whole thing had taken maybe ninety seconds.

  Jesse shot a glance at the camcorder, still clutched in my adrenaline-shaky hands. “Did you get it?” he asked.

  “God, I hope so,” I said.

  We walked a few blocks and found a Japanese restaurant, immediately knocking back shots of vodka with beer chasers to calm our jangled nerves. (Well, my jangled nerves. Jesse seemed as calm as ever.)

  We reviewed the footage. Fortunately, I had gotten it all. Even after closing the viewfinder and lowering the camera, I had managed to keep Rosie more or less in frame. I had accomplished my part of the mission—I kept the camera running. I hadn’t stopped recording until the manager ushered us into the street.

  Jesse’s fiancée picked us up in her car, and dropped me at the nearest train station. Before I left, Jesse reminded me of the fieldwork per diem: “If you want to take your girlfriend out to a nice dinner tonight, you can expense it,” he said. He may have been kidding, but knowing him, he probably wasn’t. Either way, I didn’t feel like risking it.

  The original plan was for me to bring the footage into work on Monday, but I was still so hopped up on adrenaline that I couldn’t wait. I went straight from Penn Station to the office, where I transcribed the footage and e-mailed the text to the rest of the staff. I was proud of our excursion, and couldn’t wait until Monday.

  As it turns out, I didn’t have to.

  Rosie’s own camera crew, which I’d initially noticed but quickly forgotten about, had been rolling the whole time, recording the event for her website. She put up a video clip of the entire encounter on her blog, along with text written in a weird haiku format (as was her wont at that time) calling Jesse and me “khaki-clad henchmen.”

  The story became instant national news and was picked up by all the entertainment shows. And unlike the shot I had taken—which showed only Jesse and Rosie—I was visible in the new
footage. You could see me holding the camera and intently watching the viewfinder.

  My mom called me on Sunday to tell me that one of the neighbors had seen me on Access Hollywood.

  The Rosie ambush was a real turning point for me on the show. Bill was thrilled with the footage, lavishly praising Jesse’s interviewing and my camera work. The feeling of pride came again, but this time it wasn’t unwelcome. I’d been at Fox for more than three years. Participating in the attempted takedown of a liberal celebrity, an activity that would have horrified me at the beginning of my career, now felt like all in a day’s work. I still had my core progressive beliefs, but for the first time, I didn’t feel bad about contributing to the network’s push to seek and destroy liberals.

  I’d gone over completely.

  April 11, 2012—6:01 P.M.

  In the end, the security goons didn’t come to get me.

  Instead, they waited politely for me to come to them.

  There they were, two of them, standing outside the office of the Fox News vice president for legal affairs, in a remote corner of the fifteenth floor where Stan had led me. The guards asked for my cell phone, and I pulled it out of my jeans pocket, hoping my hands weren’t shaking.

  “We’ll just hold on to this for now,” one of the guards said. He was big, a tallish white guy, but nothing too intimidating. I estimated I could overpower him if need be.

  Of course, the fact that I was even remotely considering this course of action is a dead giveaway that I wasn’t thinking clearly at that moment. What was I going to do, fight my way out of the building? My mere presence outside that office—the fact that they had somehow, despite all my precautions, caught me—had just proven that I didn’t have anything approaching the espionage skills of James Bond; I don’t know why I was entertaining the notion that I might have his hand-to-hand-combat expertise.

  But the guard wasn’t really what was worrying me. All I could think was that if Bill O’Reilly was on the other side of that door, there was a good chance that he’d hulk out with rage and twist my head clean off my shoulders, as easily as unscrewing the cap off a Coke bottle.

  And at that moment I don’t think I’d have tried to stop him, either.

  But O’Reilly wasn’t in the office. It was just the VP of legal, a woman named Diane, along with a man from the IT department and a woman from human resources. Stan followed me in and shut the door behind him.

  Diane invited me to sit down, and I took a seat while four pairs of eyes followed my every move.

  I’m not proud of this next bit.

  I wish I had handled it differently, anyway.

  What I should have done is admitted it right there. I should have just smiled, thrown my hands up, and said, “All right. You got me.”

  But that’s not what I did. Instead, I lied my face off.

  CHAPTER 14

  Fox-Flavored Sausage

  People would often ask me about how Fox pushes a message.

  And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes.51

  An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status. Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with The O’Reilly Factor. (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Sometimes the anchors were relatively weak—as was the case with a lot of weekend shows, and maybe some of the newswheel hours—and a strong senior producer or producer outranked, or at least pretended to outrank, the host. (For example, Lizzie from The Lineup, who was only a producer but was tough enough that she probably could have bossed around Ailes himself had she been left alone in a room with him for more than five minutes.)

  The bottom line is that each show had one person—be they anchor or producer or whoever—who was directly accountable to the Second Floor. That was the brilliance of the company’s power structure. One misconception that outsiders always had about the channel is that we’d sit around all morning planning how to distort the news that day. But there was never any centralized control like that. No “marching orders,” as it were. Instead, it was more a decentralized, entrepreneurial approach. Each show was an autonomous unit. Each showrunner—who had not risen to their position by being stupid—knew exactly what was expected of them, knew what topics and guests would be acceptable.

  Theoretically, each show could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, and take any angle they wanted to take, and book any guest they wanted to have on.

  Realistically, there was tremendous pressure to hew closely to the company line. The Second Floor monitored the content of every show very closely. Each show was required to submit a list of all the guests and all the topics well before the fact; the list would be reviewed by one of the relevant vice presidents. Most of the time, this was just a formality—as I said, the showrunners knew their boundaries—but every once in a while, a certain guest or topic would set off alarm bells on the second floor, leading to a series of increasingly urgent and unpleasant e-mails and phone calls for the showrunner.

  Even if a segment passed initial muster, the Second Floor reserved the right to pull the plug if it took a turn they didn’t like. They were always watching, and never hesitant to exercise their authority. Roger himself had a phone in his office, a hotline he could pick up and immediately be connected to the control room. Every producer knew that, and dreaded seeing his name on the caller ID. If Roger took the time to personally call the control room, in my experience it was almost never complimentary.52

  It was a unique, bottom-up management structure that had built-in checks and balances coming from the top down. This approach had its advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, it often led to innovative programming, with adventurous hosts and producers coming up with story ideas and segments that a more buttoned-down, dictatorial management structure might otherwise never have approved. (O’Reilly was one of the beneficiaries of this, successfully experimenting with some of his more outlandish, barely news-related segments like Body Language and the Quiz.)

  One of the disadvantages was that the Second Floor often put insane, arbitrary restrictions into place, with networkwide implications.

  For example, some unlucky guests were banned for life from every show on the network, a result of a diktat from the Second Floor. Comedian Bill Maher, once a semi-regular guest on The Factor and some other Fox shows, made too many cracks about Sarah Palin over the years, raising the ire of a powerful female VP who banned him from our air and demanded that all Fox-affiliated websites refer to him only as “Pig Maher.”

  Sometimes entire organizations were given lifetime bans. The website Politico wrote something a few years back that rubbed Roger the wrong way (we were never told what exactly the transgression was) and word went out to all the shows: No more Politico reporters as guests. Also, any anchors who mentioned the site on air had to use the phrase “left-wing Politico”—an absurd designation for a publication that usually played it down the middle.

  Some anchors and producers had enough juice—proportional to the size of their audience, generally—to push back against the Second Floor’s mandates, with varying levels of success, though even O’Reilly, who had more juice than anyone, could only do so much. When one of his favorite guests, a fiery, young, liberal African American college professor, was banned,53 Bill lobbied on his behalf, eventually striking an agreement with the Second Floor allowing him to continue to use the guy as long as his appearances were limited to once a month. O’Reilly wasn’t happy with it, but it was better than walking away empty-handed.


  There was nothing Bill hated more than management impositions on his show. These impositions almost always followed the same pattern—Stan would get a phone call in his office from one of Roger’s underlings, usually a vice president named Bill Shine. I’d hear Manskoff’s end of the conversation. “You’re killing me here, you know that, don’t you,” Stan would say. “You know he’s going to hate this.” Manskoff would hang up, shaking his head in disbelief, and make the fifteen-foot trek to Bill’s office, closing the door behind him. Through the door, we’d hear muffled talking from Stan, then muffled shouting from Bill, followed shortly by the door popping open and Stan bolting from the office like a pinball from a launcher.

  “I’ll do it this time, Manskoff,” Bill would call after him, “just this once. But I’m tired of this bullshit!” He’d always slow down for the next part, hammering each phrase so there would be no mistake in the future: “I want the interference! With my show! To stop! Now!”

  Relations were rocky enough between O’Reilly and the Second Floor that VP Shine was dispatched on a regular basis to smooth things over, meeting in O’Reilly’s office every Tuesday at four P.M. These meetings would sometimes last upward of forty-five minutes. Though I was never privy to what was said in the meetings, neither man ever looked particularly pleased upon completion.

  It was Stan’s job to run interference between O’Reilly and management, keeping the bosses out of Bill’s hair but also insulating the suits from Bill’s fits of rage. Ninety-nine percent of all issues could be solved with Manskoff and Shine collaborating, not having to involve Ailes or O’Reilly. But every once in a while, O’Reilly would refuse to back down, and Ailes would be forced to intervene.

  The most memorable instance of this was in late 2008, when Lehman Brothers went tits-up and the whole economy was teetering on the brink. President Bush prepared a massive bailout package for the banks, and conservative talk radio exploded with outrage and opposition. One prominent conservative voice in favor of the bailout? Bill O’Reilly, who believed that the entire financial system would collapse without it. He took to his radio show that day and excoriated the radio hosts who opposed the bailout: