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

by Joe Muto

  On March 13, Brian Ross of ABC News unveiled some video that had been hiding in plain sight. It turned out that DVDs of Wright’s sermons had been sold by his church for years. Ross and his team simply viewed the tapes, digging out inflammatory tidbit after tidbit and crafting them into an explosive Good Morning America segment.

  One clip showed Wright accusing the U.S. government of introducing drugs into the black community: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America!”

  Another clip from the sermon on the Sunday after 9/11 featured the reverend reminding his congregation about the thousands killed by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then going on to say, “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

  A more recent clip showed Wright talking about the Democratic primary: “Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger.”

  The clips set off a round of panic in the Obama camp, expressions of glee from the Clinton and McCain camps, and a positively orgiastic feeding frenzy at Fox News headquarters. Even I, weepy Obama lover that I was, had to admit that the video was so explosive it would have been cable news malpractice to not use it. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the extent that the footage was absolutely wallpapered across our air for the next few months.

  The day it first broke, Bill played a long montage, a sort of mashup of Wright’s greatest hits, at the top of the show. If he was on the fence about Obama up until that point, he certainly wasn’t anymore.

  The Wright tapes injected into the campaign an ugly racial edge that had previously been hovering just below the surface. Screening phone calls for the radio show, I was on the front lines.

  “Why won’t Bill ever say his middle name? It’s Hussein, you know,” a caller said.

  “I know, sir,” I said. “Bill knows, too.”

  “Then why won’t he use it? People need to know how much this guy hates America, and if they hear his name is Hussein, they’ll realize it.”

  Other callers were obsessed with the candidate’s exact racial makeup. “How come I never hear anyone say that he’s only half black?” another caller asked me.

  “I don’t see why that matters, sir,” I said.

  “It’s just that the lady on the news always says he’s black, but he’s not. The blacks won’t accept him because they hate white people, and he’s half white.”

  “Okay, sir, thank you for your opinion, but I don’t think I’ll be putting you on air today.”

  Click.

  As the election approached, we also started getting more and more callers asking us to investigate Obama’s real birthplace. I did my best to personally strangle the Birther movement in its crib, explaining to each caller individually that the senator was born in Hawaii, and that there was literally zero proof that he was born anywhere else, and that they should stop believing everything they read in chain e-mails that had been forwarded to them by their racist uncles. But my words fell on deaf ears. As the persistence of that particular movement proves, stupid people—be they talk-radio-loving truckers or tacky, flaxen-haired billionaires—do not easily change their minds, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.

  —

  It was about this time that I started “coming out” to some of my coworkers.

  There were other liberals at Fox. Of course there were other liberals. Even with all their weeding out, the self-selection, the interrogation during the Kool-Aid Conference, it was still New York City, and it was still the field of journalism. You do the math. You could round up every conserva-journo on the Eastern Seaboard and still barely be able to staff a weekend shift at Fox; it was inevitable that plenty of moderates, and more than a few liberals, squeaked by.

  But the liberals at Fox were a minority, and a silent one at that, racked with distrust and paranoia. I was at the company for almost four years before I revealed to Sam, who I trusted implicitly by that point, through casual conversation where my feelings lay. Word slowly percolated to the rest of the O’Reilly staff. No one told Bill, that I’m aware of. I don’t even think Bill would have cared, had he known. The only political opinions he ever cared about were his own. Those were the only views that made it to air, anyway.

  What may have concerned Bill about having an open “left-wing loon” on the staff is that I might have tried to slip him some wrong information, or tried to embarrass him on air. I never did any of that stuff. Never, not once. I never gave him bad information. I never told him anything that wasn’t true. I never did anything to sabotage the show. Not one thing. I took pride in doing my job well, and I was pretty good at it, too.

  What I did do, the only way I was able to maintain my sanity throughout my long run, was to just give a slight spin to the information I gave him, little cues to attempt to nudge him in my direction. Like if there was a poll that looked good for John McCain that Bill wanted in his packet, I’d always make sure to include right next to it two polls that looked good for Obama—whether he asked for them or not.

  Or if he asked for a story about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I’d make sure to include with it a story about Reverend John Hagee, a McCain-supporting televangelist who had said controversial things about Hitler and the Holocaust.

  That was the way to influence Bill. Influence, not manipulate. Bill cannot be manipulated. Despite some critics’ insistence that he was an empty suit, he’s actually quite smart, and always knew when someone was attempting to forcefully move him in one direction or another. It was all about subtlety.

  —

  The 2008 campaign was so much about Obama that it was shocking when McCain suddenly reasserted himself, unleashing a dim-bulb force of nature named Sarah Palin on an unsuspecting American public.

  At first, it seemed like a brilliant move by the McCain campaign. They had completely rejiggered the race in one fell swoop. Not only did they thoroughly stomp on Obama’s convention bounce, unveiling the pick a scant few hours after his Denver acceptance speech, but they also revved up the GOP base, which had previously been depressed and demoralized by the sad, slow decline of the Bush administration and the seemingly hapless and obviously losing McCain campaign.

  I’ll confess—like a lot of other liberals, though I was loathe to admit it at the time—I was initially scared shitless by the Palin pick. The wounds from the Obama vs. Clinton brawl were still pretty raw, and there was a real fear that Hillary’s fans would bolt the party in favor of the Alaskan newcomer, who was, admittedly, unbelievably charismatic and politically savvy, if not quite in the same ballpark or even zip code of intelligence as Hillary.

  Luckily, women voters were not as gullible as the McCain campaign thought they’d be—at least Krista wasn’t.

  “Who do they think they’re kidding?” she raged to me the night Palin was announced. “It’s insulting. Do they really believe that we’ll just think one politician with a vagina is as good as any other?”

  “Does this mean you’ll vote for Obama now?” I asked.

  The Obama campaign wasn’t about to let the Palin pick go unanswered. They had a plan to wrench the spotlight back, and they enlisted my boss to help.

  That’s how O’Reilly ended up interviewing the Democratic nominee on the final day of the GOP convention, giving over a huge chunk of his TV show to Obama on a night when John McCain was supposed to be the focus of everyone’s attention.

  I was fielding calls on the radio show that day, and had to fend off dozens of angry listeners outraged that Bill would fall for such a transparent ploy to steal McCain’s thunder. O’Reilly, to his credit, fielded a couple of critical calls to defend himself, p
ointing out that only half of that night’s show would be given over to the Obama interview, while the rest would be dedicated to covering the RNC.

  The callers howled that the defense was weak, but Bill didn’t really care. He never admitted it on the radio, but he was fully aware that the Obama campaign was using him to crash the Republicans’ big celebration, brilliantly invading the GOP’s favored network on what was supposed to be their special night. The benefit for O’Reilly, in addition to the surefire ratings bonanza that his long-awaited clash with Obama would bring, was that every extra minute he spent on the interview was one less minute he would be forced to spend covering the increasingly dull McCain, who appeared even more boring than before when compared to his charismatic running mate.

  Obama more than held his own in the interview that night, uncapping that now-familiar mix of charm, good humor, and policy wonkery, but O’Reilly still came away unimpressed. After months of chasing the elusive candidate, the thrill was gone, and he felt free to take off the gloves.

  The next week in a pitch meeting, he got apocalyptic, announcing a new segment he’d conceived called the Obama Chronicles.

  “It’s going to be a twenty-five-part series,” he said, explaining that it would examine the senator’s background and associations. “And if it works like I think it will, by the end of it, I’ll have saved this country.”

  He had a far-off look in his eyes when he said that, and the assembled producers shifted uncomfortably on our feet and made fleeting eye contact with one another. Was he being serious? A twenty-five-part series? Save the country? Why did our boss suddenly sound like a crazy person?

  No one said anything aloud, of course.

  The Chronicles started the next week, with a look at Obama’s birth and upbringing.58 If anything, instead of exposing Obama as the crazed radical the right wing had caricatured him as, the segment made him appear sympathetic, highlighting all the hardships in his life that he’d overcome. If Bill’s intention was to save the country from Obama, he was going about it the wrong way.

  The series limped on for a few more installments afterward but never caught on with viewers, and Bill cut it short less than halfway to the promised twenty-five. Given a choice between ratings and “saving” the country, it was no contest.

  On election night, as the returns came in, state by state, it was becoming obvious that Fox’s attempts to make Obama a terrifying socialist bogeyman had failed. Krista and I were at a party in Brooklyn, the rancor of the past few months mostly forgotten.

  Like any good gathering of New York liberals, we were watching the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert coverage. At the stroke of eleven P.M., when California’s polls closed, Stewart announced Obama’s projected victory. Krista and I hugged, tears in our eyes, as the party erupted around us.

  I didn’t catch the understated, almost funereal Fox coverage until the next day, when I watched the replay at my desk. When Brit Hume read the results, he seemed as if he was about to cry, too, but for a different reason.

  —

  I spoke to my dad a few days later. He was nominally a Republican, and had voted for McCain. He was a little annoyed that his guy lost but was interested in getting my reaction.

  “How do you think Fox will take it?” he asked.

  “I think they’ll take it okay,” I said. “You know, give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Are you sure?” My dad sounded skeptical. “I think it’s going to be like Blazing Saddles, when the black sheriff arrives and all the townspeople panic.”

  “No, I think you’re wrong,” I said.

  But, as it turned out, I was the one who was wrong.

  April 11, 2012—6:39 P.M.

  I paced back and forth in the small conference room while the grown-ups in the office next door discussed my fate. I’d played dumb for almost a full half hour. Seeing that no confession was forthcoming, they’d banished me to the room by myself to let me stew in my own juices.

  It had already been ten minutes. If their plan was to drive me insane with fear and uncertainty, it was working.

  The conference room was a corner one. I’d never been in it before, but the view somehow looked familiar. It dawned on me that the vista of Times Square spreading out in front of me was identical to what could be seen from Bill’s office, exactly two stories above the spot where I was standing.

  Finally, I could take no more. I opened the door a crack, peeking outside into the hallway. It was empty, the two security guards nowhere in sight. Diane’s office was to my right, the door closed. I could hear muffled voices coming from inside.

  I spotted my iPhone sitting on a secretary’s desk, white and shiny and tantalizing. It would be so easy to just snatch it and make a run for it.

  I pushed open the door and stepped into the hall.

  That’s when the voice came from behind me.

  “Mr. Muto, could you come back in here?” Diane the lawyer was standing in the doorway of her office. I hadn’t gotten more than two steps toward my unguarded phone when her door popped open. I don’t know if they’d heard me emerge from the conference room and rushed to intercept me, or if I just had lousy timing, but there was nothing to do but meekly shuffle into her office.

  “We obviously can’t prove you did this,” she said. “But it doesn’t look good for you, either.”

  “That, it does not,” I agreed.

  “So we’re going to suspend you. With pay. Until we can sort out what exactly went on here.”

  And that was that.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rhymes with “Cat Bit Hazy”

  Fox News responded to the inauguration of Barack Obama with a surprising, uncharacteristic amount of restraint.

  That is to say, they waited until he was in office for at least thirty-six hours before calling him a socialist.

  Very sporting of the network, actually, to give him that much of a head start.

  The various conservative pundits and hosts of Fox probably should have taken the 2008 election loss as a chance to reflect, to learn from the mistakes of the Bush era, graciously giving the new president a bit of breathing room to begin to fix the economic and geopolitical wreckage that Dubya left behind, littering the American landscape like so many empty kegs and trampled Solo cups cluttering the floor after a frat party.

  Instead, they did the exact opposite, as the entire network lost its fucking mind.

  The hackery was led, as usual, by Sean Hannity. The host was newly unfettered following Fox’s first prime-time lineup change in almost a decade: Alan Colmes, the liberal half of Hannity & Colmes, had left the show shortly after the election. His replacement: No one. The show was renamed simply Hannity.

  Colmes and the company brass put a sunny face on it, pointing out that he would stay with the channel as a commentator and that he wanted to “develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network.” But there was something undeniably fishy about the channel’s most prominent liberal receiving what was effectively a demotion when the country was on the cusp of a Democratic presidential administration. Conspiracy theories spread through the office. One popular rumor was that Colmes was forced out by a Second Floor that wanted to consciously move the network to the right in reaction to the new administration. A later theory—one that I suspect is the accurate one—held that Colmes was simply tired of playing second fiddle on his own show, taking abuse from Hannity, the viewers, and even some fellow liberals who were mad at him for continuing to appear on the network.

  Aside from the Hannity & Colmes intrigue, the network’s schedule had remained remarkably stable over the years. Fox & Friends had changed one out of three cohosts, swapping frisky housewife E. D. Hill for the even friskier former Miss America Gretchen Carlson. DaySide, the show with the live audience, tried retooling itself with new hosts but never managed to catch on. The program was scrapped in favor of a two-hour block starring up-and-comer Megyn Kelly. Megyn had risen through the ranks to become the Platonic Ideal of a
Fox anchoress: the blondest, prettiest, most contentious host we’d ever produced.

  Beyond that, all the other big network stars were still in place: Shep, Greta, and O’Reilly. They each had their own reaction to the new president and the challenges he faced, but no one embarrassed themselves quite as much as Hannity in those first few months: With a nation in crisis, he bravely chose to speak truth to power . . . by attacking President Obama’s choice of condiments.

  In May 2009, Obama had just barely finished his first one hundred days in office. He went to a DC-area burger place with the press corps in tow. The outing elicited the sort of embarrassing-in-retrospect media fawning that was typical of the early Obama presidency; but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for a president still in his honeymoon phase.

  Cameras rolled, capturing every word, as Obama placed his order at the counter. Most casual observers would say that his order was innocuous, but Hannity, unlike the obviously-in-the-tank liberal reporters, saw something insidious in Obama’s choice of burger toppings. He saw something elitist. Something French.

  The president, when ordering, had asked for “spicy brown mustard, something like that, or a Dijon mustard.”

  Quelle horreur!

  “I hope you enjoyed that fancy burger, Mr. President,” Hannity sneered after playing a clip of an old Grey Poupon commercial from the 1980s.

  Even if we set aside the fact that Grey Poupon—manufactured by Kraft Foods right here in the good old USA, and costing a whopping three dollars and change per jar—is hardly an elitist food item, this was still a dumb attack, and foreshadowed the sorts of attacks that Fox and the entire right leveled at the president from the minute he set foot in the Oval Office. MustardGate was typical of the laziest, most offensive form of partisan journalism that reared its head in those early months, and persists to this day: If Obama does it, it must be bad.

  Another example—the presidential teleprompter. It’s no secret that Obama gives a good speech. When he was on the campaign trail in 2008, he almost always gave his stump speech off the cuff—no notes, no prompter. When he became president, he started using teleprompters more. Naturally, this is because, as president, your words have much more weight than they did before, and the stakes are a lot higher than when you were just a candidate. It makes perfect sense for an American president to use a teleprompter, especially when there’s the distinct possibility that a single botched sentence has the potential to trigger World War III.