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

by Joe Muto

  One downside I should mention—Bill’s frugality,64 while admirable in many respects (i.e., it reinforced his populism, his Everyman bona fides), was to his staff’s detriment sometimes. We’d look on jealously as Hannity treated his producers to dinners at Del Frisco’s, the lavish, ultraexpensive steak house next door to the News Corp. building. Or live vicariously through Fox Report staffers’ stories about the booze-filled holiday blowouts that Shep Smith threw at his gorgeous downtown Manhattan loft.

  Meanwhile, if Bill invited you to dinner at all, which he rarely did, it would be to Langan’s, for serviceable if unexciting pub food, or to the generic, red-sauce Italian joint around the corner from the office, which Bill inexplicably loved. And then he’d want to split the check at the end of the meal. (Not that I think he should be required to pick up the tab for anyone. Far be it from me to suggest that Bill should always pay for dinner. But when you make twenty million dollars a year, sometimes it’s nice to offer to pay the forty-six-dollar check.) And no one was ever invited to his house except Tony, the graphic designer who worked on Bill’s website—who was repeatedly called out to Manhasset for a series of menial tasks: setting up the Wi-Fi, reprogramming the TV remote, and getting a jammed disc out of Bill’s son’s Xbox, among others.

  This book is critical of O’Reilly, and for good reason—he deserves criticism on a lot of things. But even Bill’s most harsh critics cannot completely discount his talent. Whether you agree with him, you have to acknowledge that he is a master of the medium. He’s had the number one show on cable news since 2000, and his perch at the top has never really been threatened. Hannity might beat him every once in a while, just for a day; Beck was even closer in his brief heyday; but week in and week out, no one has delivered as consistently as Bill. And that can’t be a fluke.

  The truth is that the man has a great sense for what viewers want to see. He puts together an interesting show night after night. We on the staff deserved credit—probably more credit than he ever gave us—for making his vision come to life; but the vision was his and his alone. He dictated every story, every guest, every line of every script. He has an innate sense for the proper mix of hard news and fluff that makes viewers want to tune in, and a knack for writing teases that makes them stick around during the commercial breaks. He has a keen eye for talent, launching or boosting the careers of numerous analysts and pundits; people like Karl Rove, Megyn Kelly, and Glenn Beck all owe a good chunk of their success to regular slots on The Factor. And Bill has single-handedly kept Dennis Miller’s career afloat by offering him a weekly platform after the comedian decided post-9/11 that being conservative was much more important than being funny.

  He’s got great business sense as well, milking every last dollar out of each venture he does. At the end of every episode of the TV show, he plugs the products that are for sale on his website: T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, fountain pens—you name it, he’s slapped his name on it or adorned it with one of his many catchphrases. (Which, to be fair, all lend themselves surprisingly well to merchandising: THE SPIN STOPS HERE printed on golf balls; YOU’RE ABOUT TO ENTER THE NO SPIN ZONE printed on doormats; the possibilities are endless.) It’s easy to mock him for shilling these products. But I’ve seen the balance sheet, and the website is clearing seven figures a year, easily. Plus—and this part is really admirable, no joking or snark here—all the profits go to charity.65

  Bill is rightfully proud of his merchandising operation, designing some of the products himself. He was particularly happy with his efforts on a particular polo shirt.

  “This thing is going to be one of our best sellers ever,” he said when announcing the new product at a pitch meeting. “I designed it myself, you know . . .” He paused, as if deciding whether to say the next sentence. Wondrously, he chose to let it fly:

  “I should have been a gay guy.”

  Stunned silence as a dozen people looked back at him, struggling to remain stone-faced. Had he just said that?

  Seemingly realizing the bizarreness of his last statement, he coughed embarrassedly and said, “Anyway,” before continuing the meeting. Meanwhile, I pretended to drop my pen behind a file cabinet so I could duck behind it and laugh with a hand jammed over my mouth, hoping Bill didn’t hear me.

  Delusions of gay grandeur (gayndeur?) notwithstanding, I honestly think Bill might be one of the most misunderstood figures in media. Part of this might be some lingering affection I have for him, and part of it might stem from the fact that he’s probably mellowed a bit over the years, but I really think there’s some credence to what Jon Stewart said during one of his epic interviews on The O’Reilly Factor:

  “You have become in some ways the voice of sanity here, which is like being the thinnest kid at fat camp.”

  What separates Bill from the hacks like Hannity, or the kooks like Glenn Beck, is that he is not an ideologue. Sure, he’s ideological, in that he takes the conservative position on most topics. But Bill, I would argue, is more intellectually honest. He’ll admit he’s wrong. Yes, it’s like pulling teeth to get him to admit it, and yes, he’ll do everything he can to weasel out of the admission—but if you present him with irrefutable evidence that he knows he can’t explain away, he will eventually, reluctantly, own up to his mistake.

  If it sounds like I’m damning him with faint praise, so be it; but it’s more than a lot of other people at Fox would do.

  —

  I have some terrible news for my fellow liberals out there: Ann Coulter is a nice person.

  Believe me, I was just as shocked as you must be to find that out. Before I met her, I’d never in my life wanted to hate someone as much as I wanted to hate her. It’s a natural reaction to Coulter; inspiring hatred in her ideological opponents is the entire point of her existence. I think she’s a real human woman, but if I didn’t know any better, I’d guess she was a sophisticated artificial life-form created in a secret laboratory several stories beneath the Heritage Foundation, specially engineered by renegade Reaganite scientists and given the superhuman ability to enrage liberals.66

  In reality, there are two Anns—there’s Green Room Ann, the polite, warm, chitchatty girl next door who remembers everybody’s name despite meeting them only once, and gossips with the hair and makeup artists while they prep her for the show; and then there’s Camera Ann, an icy, devilish, sneering, barb-dispensing, stone-cold cable news assassin. Camera Ann is the only woman I’ve ever considered calling the C-word to her face; but Green Room Ann is someone you want to hug good-bye before she climbs into the town car that takes her home after her segment.67

  For those of you who have been lucky enough to not stumble across one of her TV appearances at some point, Ann Coulter is a conservative author and columnist who releases a new book every couple of years. The books invariably have a provocative one-word title, followed by a subtitle blaming liberals, Democrats—or occasionally liberal Democrats—for some sort of societal ill. (Examples: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right; Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.) The book cover always feature a picture of Ann posing seductively in one of her signature skintight dresses, her long blond hair dangling artfully past her shoulders, a half smirk/half smile plastered on her face.

  Credit where credit is due: Coulter has a simple but brilliant marketing campaign for her books. She goes on TV the week before the tome debuts and says something absolutely vile. The targets of her comments vary, but they usually seem calculated to generate maximum outrage. For example, in 2006, while promoting her book Godless, she attacked 9/11 widows who supported John Kerry, accusing them of benefiting from the deaths of their husbands. In 2009, while promoting Guilty, her target was single mothers, whom she accused of raising the future rapists and murderers of the world. In every case, controversy ensues, leaving Coulter with no choice but to punch back against the media liberals who are constantly trying to silence her, and, lo and behold, a week later she’s on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

>   Cable TV bookers love her, of course, because the woman is undeniably good television. When she’s not saying horrible things, she’s wickedly sharp and funny; and even when she’s not promoting a book, she’s always good for one or two provocative statements per segment.

  As a liberal-jabbing attractive blonde, she unsurprisingly spends a lot of time on Fox News, but O’Reilly sometimes wavered about having her on his show. She would pitch herself to The Factor a few times a month, e-mailing Eugene with her take on a certain story.

  “Bill, Ann Coulter wants to come on the show sometime this week,” Eugene would say during a meeting.

  Bill would raise an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? What’s she got this time?”

  Eugene would check his e-mail, paraphrasing Coulter’s message aloud. “Her new column compares Obama to Cal Ripken Jr. She says the media is going to slobber over him as a historic figure every time he does the tiniest thing.”

  “Hmmm . . .” O’Reilly would say distractedly, staring at the board, studying the guest lineup for the week’s upcoming shows.

  “She also calls Nancy Pelosi ‘mentally retarded,’” Eugene would interject, drawing snorts and guffaws and groans from some of the assembled producers.

  Bill would shake his head, sighing. “I can’t do it. I can’t have a bomb thrower like her on the show. She’s going to say something crazy. There’s no upside for us. I just can’t do it.”

  This was no small sacrifice on Bill’s part, for he knew as well as anyone that Coulter usually meant ratings gold. But he was also conscious of the reputation of his show, not wanting it to fully descend into a Hannity-style Democrat-bashing fest, which could happen very quickly with Coulter as a guest.

  So Ann would spend long periods in the wilderness, months on end when O’Reilly would refuse to book her. This wasn’t exactly a problem for her, since she would always find a welcoming home with Hannity or one of the lower-profile daytime shows—which were always glad to have a guest of her stature—but O’Reilly was O’Reilly, and his massive viewership was the top prize for anyone interested in selling a book to as wide an audience as possible. Bill, ever mercurial, would periodically reverse his ban of Coulter, without warning and seemingly without reason. Out of the blue, after months of rejecting Eugene’s pitches on her behalf, Bill would suddenly accept one, and Ann Coulter would triumphantly return to the Factor fold, ready to be a lamb in the green room and a horrible nightmare in the studio.

  April 11, 2012—7:04 P.M.

  The two guards escorted me to the lobby, out through the whooshing Star Trek security gates that had stirred my nerdy fascination my first day on the job.

  “We need your ID badge,” one of them said.

  I fished my wallet out of my back pocket and slid the stiff, blue-backgrounded plastic card from the slot that it had barely left since I’d stopped wearing it on a lanyard around my neck, embarrassed to be pegged as a newbie. A chubby-faced twenty-two-year-old with a dazed look stared at me one last time before I placed it into the guard’s extended hand.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said, absurdly, as they turned and walked away.

  I stepped out onto the plaza, into the early spring chill, and pulled out my phone. An error message told me that my Fox News e-mail account had already been disabled.

  That was quick. It felt like barely ten minutes since I’d left the fifteenth-floor meeting.

  I dialed John Cook, the Gawker writer who was waiting for me at a bar downtown. I was already late for the meeting.

  “Joe,” he answered. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s over,” I said.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Mole

  I don’t quite know what finally sent me over the edge with Fox. It’s true that after the Rosie O’Donnell ambush, I’d decided I wouldn’t worry about the ideology anymore and would just try to relax and have a good time. But as the Obama years wore on, I saw the network take a nasty turn, and I found myself less and less comfortable with staying there.

  I suppose the final straw, if you try to pin me down on it, would have been August 2011. Oddly, it wasn’t anything on TV that turned me rogue. What finally broke me was a story on The Fox Nation, a news aggregating website that the network had launched shortly after Obama’s inauguration. (Coincidentally, the site was the brainchild of The Factor’s own Jesse Watters, who pitched it to the Second Floor and had a small hand in its day-to-day running.) The Nation was an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and a Klan meeting, gathering stories, giving them provocative (and often sexist or race-baiting) headlines, and inviting commenters to weigh in.

  The comments on the site are fascinating, actually, if you can detach yourself enough to view them from a psychological/anthropological/politically scientific stance, interpreting them as a sort of id of the conservative movement. Of course, if you can’t detach yourself, then you’re going to come away with a diminished view of human decency, because, holy moly, these people do not like the black president. I’m not saying they dislike him because he’s black, but a lot of the comments, unprompted, mention the fact that he is black, so what would you say, Dr. Freud?

  The Fox Nation moderators realized early on that they had a problem on their hands, with commenters leaving spittle-flecked rants that verged on white supremacy. So in response, they did the absolute bare minimum, assigning one or two unpaid interns to comb the comments and delete the most egregiously racist postings, and putting in automatic text filters that blocked certain key words. Of course, the intrepid commenters quickly found ways around these filters, using letter substitutions and odd spacings, which is why many postings denounce “our n@gger president” and “the dirty M u s l i m in the White House.”

  In just a few years online, the site had become the seedy underbelly of the Fox News online empire—an empire that was surprising in its mere existence, considering that the network’s fan base was mostly septuagenarian technophobes.

  The Fox Nation post that broke this camel’s back was an item that was an aggregate of several innocuous news reports on President Obama’s fiftieth birthday party, which had been attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos, and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay-Z, and the headline OBAMA’S HIP-HOP BBQ DIDN’T CREATE JOBS.

  The post neatly encapsulated everything that had been bugging me about my employer for so many years: the non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; the gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts. It jammed together all the ugly things about my network that had been doled out in small doses over the years, all the segments I’d watched on the small TV at my desk and ground my teeth over.

  The worst thing about the Hip-Hop BBQ incident is that Fox didn’t back away from the posting. VP Bill Shine bafflingly doubled down and defended it. The story still exists on the Fox Nation site, headline and photo montage intact, to this very day.

  That was it for me.

  It wasn’t that the one incident was so bad, in and of itself. But it was so galvanizing, and topped off so many other little incidents, that I guess it just finally pushed me over the edge.

  I knew then that I wouldn’t survive another election year at Fox with my sanity intact, not with the hosts and pundits gearing up for a nonstop barrage of wanton attacks on President Obama—of whom I was still a huge fan.

  In addition to finally reaching my limit, the truth is that I felt I was in a bit of a rut at the office. Sam Martinez, my partner in crime for my entire tenure with The Factor, had left the show, going on to work as an editor at the newly launched Fox News Latino website.

  I went to visit him at his new workspace on the fourteenth floor. He liked his new duties, he said, but he missed the rest of the O’Reilly crew. Ever the racial provocateur, he missed being able to make jokes about being the only brown person in the room.

  “Now I’m surrounded by brown people
all day,” he said glumly.

  I missed Sam, though I did like his replacement, a producer whom Stan had poached from Greta Van Susteren, a guy my age named Tim Wolfe.

  —

  “So who exactly are you?” John Cook asked.

  I handed him my business card, the one with the Fox News logo, and my title “Associate Producer, The O’Reilly Factor & The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly.”

  He looked it over, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  “Well, I was interested in the video clips,” John said. “But now I’m more interested in you.”

  It was March 2012. I was at a restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a divey dumpling-and-noodle joint that the Gawker writers had adopted as their Langan’s, ignoring the name on the door and nicknaming it Chinese Fantastico. I was sitting at a table across from John and his Gawker colleague Emma, both of whom were now sizing me up as if I were some sort of exotic creature who’d just stumbled into their midst.

  I was way out on a limb.

  I’d approached them, actually, creating a fake AOL e-mail account under the name “Gordon Schwartz,” an inside joke of sorts; it was an old nom de plume I’d used for certain nefarious deeds in college. I’d sent a cryptic message to the Gawker tips in-box, offering to show them my behind-the-scenes video of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

  At that point, the GOP was in the thick of their primary, and Newt’s name was on the tip of everyone’s tongue for the first time since the late ’90s. But Romney was clearly starting to pull away with it, so the window for anyone being interested in a video clip of Gingrich was slowly but surely closing.