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

by Joe Muto

  It took them a week to respond, a long enough span that common sense got the better of me, and I was starting to reconsider. But, alas, it was not to be, and they finally answered my e-mail. First Emma, and then John. After some jousting back and forth, with them trying to figure out if I was pranking them or wasting their time, we agreed to meet one weeknight after work at the Chinese place.

  “I want to leave Fox,” I told them after we’d ordered drinks and dumplings. “I’m done there. And I want to come work for you guys.”

  The two Gawkerers exchanged a look, then returned their attention to me.

  “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” John said. “First, can you show us the clips?”

  I pulled out my iPad and cued up the clips one after another. The first showed Newt Gingrich awaiting an interview with O’Reilly. The former Speaker of the House is sitting in a chair, getting his makeup done by a professional, when Callista, his helmet-haired, icy-eyed automaton of a wife comes in from off camera and starts doing his hair. Armed with a giant brush and a can of hair spray, she grooms her husband, who seems happy as a clam to receive the primping.

  The second set of clips was from an interview that Mitt Romney did with Sean Hannity. Some of the chatter during the commercial breaks was interesting to me. In one part, Romney waxes rhapsodically about the horses that he and his wife own:

  “She has Austrian Warmbloods, which are—yeah, it’s a dressage horse, it’s a kind of horse for the sport that she’s in. Me, I have a Missouri Fox Trotter. So mine is like a quarter horse, but just a much better gait. It moves very fast, and doesn’t tire, and it’s easy to ride, meaning it’s not boom-boom-boom, it’s just smooth, very smooth.”

  At another point, Hannity advises the gaffe-prone Romney to start using a teleprompter for his speeches; then, in almost the same breath, he turns around and mocks Obama’s use of prompters.

  I hadn’t saved the clips with the intention to give them to Gawker or anyone else. I’d just grabbed them because I thought they were funny (or in the case of the teleprompter exchange, hypocritical and rage-inducing). But when I made up my mind early in 2012 to finally leave Fox, I had the not-very-bright idea to use the clips as an attention-getting ploy with prospective new employers—a calling card of sorts. I figured the unconventional loudmouthed cover letter had worked to get me the Fox job in the first place. Maybe lightning would strike twice and an even more unconventional, even-dumber scheme would be just the thing to get me out of it.68

  It’s not like I hadn’t tried other ideas to leave first. I know that the events of this book, and this chapter in particular, probably leave you with a lot of doubts regarding my mental capacity. And rightfully so! But you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that even I am not stupid enough to make something like this my first plan. Naturally, I went through the job application process initially. In fact, I sent an application to CNN the day I read the Hip Hop BBQ post for the first time. Then I sent another. And one to MSNBC. And another. And one to all the networks, and any other position I could find that would need someone with my very specific skill set. I began to suspect that my years at Fox had somehow blacklisted me, made me persona non grata to the rest of the broadcast news industry at large. Either that, or I’m just really crappy at writing cover letters.69

  But after months of sending résumés into digital pits of no return, I finally reached the end of my rope, and in one night of desperation I wrote and sent the fateful e-mail. And that’s how I came to be sitting in the restaurant that day, watching John and Emma from Gawker share a pair of earbuds plugged into my iPad to listen to Mitt Romney’s effete chatter about his cherished horses.

  “So what do you want?” John said when he’d finished the video.

  “Honestly,” I said, “I just wanted to meet you guys. Like I said, I’m leaving Fox soon, and I’m looking for my next job. I thought this video would be a good way to get your attention.”

  “Mission accomplished,” Emma said. “You have our attention.”

  “You say you want to work for us after you leave Fox?” John asked.

  I nodded.

  “What about,” he said, leaning in and looking me square in the face, “working for us before you leave?”

  —

  “We’ll call you the Fox News Mole. Does that name work for you?”

  A. J. Daulerio, the editor in chief of Gawker, was sitting across the table from me, next to John Cook. It was two weeks after my first meeting. We were at the same Chinese restaurant as before.

  At the end of the first meeting, I’d given John and Emma a USB drive with the Gingrich clip on it. The plan was for them to put it up on Gawker—without announcing it was from the “Mole”—to test my theory that the video wasn’t traceable back to me.

  They put it up, with John’s headline SECRET VIDEO: NEWT GINGRICH’S CREEPY WIFE GROOMING HIM LIKE A CIRCUS WALRUS. The video made a very minor splash online, but was mostly received with a shrug within the building. I held my breath and waited for blowback. I was certain that there was no record that I had made a copy of the video. When no heat came my way, I assumed—naively, perhaps—that I was in the clear.

  Now I was meeting with A.J. to talk about John’s idea for me to write dispatches from the inside. The plan was—in my head, anyway—that I’d write some dumb, jokey posts for a while, going undetected by my bosses by fudging enough details to throw them off the scent. I’d eventually put in my two weeks’ notice, then start my new career as a Gawker writer, maybe revealing myself as the Mole at some point down the line.

  “The Mole?” I said. “Like a spy movie? Okay, I kinda like that.”

  “How long do you think you can keep it going?” John asked. “Like how long before they catch you?”

  “If I’m careful enough,” I said, “they’ll never catch me. But I’m thinking at least a month or two.”

  A.J. scoffed in disbelief. “I don’t think you’re even going to last three days.”

  We all laughed, not knowing how right he would eventually be.

  —

  The first dispatch from the Fox Mole went up on April 10, 2012. I immediately got a half dozen e-mails from friends asking some variation of “Is this guy you?”

  I hadn’t told anyone my plans. I hadn’t told my roommates. I hadn’t told my parents.

  I hadn’t told my girlfriend.

  Jenny and I had been dating for about a year at that point. We’d started seeing each other a few months after my relationship with her predecessor, Krista, had fizzled.

  Krista, tiring of her administrative position in the legal department of an arts nonprofit, had decided to go to business school. I pushed for her to apply to NYU or Columbia, but she got into an Ivy League program several hours away from the city and never looked back. We paid lip service to attempting a long-distance relationship, but a month in, we both knew that it was over.

  Unable to afford our tiny West Village apartment on my own, I moved right back to Williamsburg, where my old roommate Rufus had a vacancy open in his three-bedroom apartment. I was looking forward to living like a carefree bachelor with Rufus and our other roommate, Ari, another Notre Dame buddy. And for a few glorious months we did exactly that.

  And then Jenny came along.

  We’d met through mutual friends, one of whom was Jenny’s coworker at an academic publishing company. She was gorgeous, with big dark eyes, dark, shiny hair, and a stylish haircut with short, straight bangs. She reminded me of one of the hipster girls who had so fascinated me when I’d first moved to the city. She wasn’t quite a hipster herself, but she usually dressed like one, resembling a more slender version of the actress Zooey Deschanel.

  She was funny and kind, and she liked movies and experimenting in the kitchen as much as I did; but what probably most attracted me to her was her relentlessly sunny disposition.

  A disposition that I was about to severely test.

  She was one of those who e-mailed me after the first post w
ent up—not right away, since she was flying to Pittsburgh to visit family and friends. She’d messaged me pretty soon after landing, though.

  I guess Jenny and the others had recognized my writing style, or my sense of humor. I began to worry that I’d put too much personality into the post.

  I responded to each of them with something like Ha-ha of course it isn’t me. Please don’t even joke about that, because the bosses might be reading my e-mails.

  That had been a very real worry, actually. John and I had set up an elaborate system to avoid detection. I couldn’t e-mail him from my work e-mail, obviously; but also no e-mailing him from my Gmail account, which I looked at on my work computer. He’d set up a temporary phone number for me to call him so his number wouldn’t show up on my phone records, and even suggested that we avoid text-messaging each other.

  “Texts are too easy for private investigators to get,” he’d said. Instead, we’d worked out a system in which he created a dummy Twitter account and would message me through that.

  All the cloak-and-dagger stuff—and the prospect that private investigators might start digging into my life—had started to worry me a little, but John was so encouraging about the writing in my first post that it had soothed my nerves.

  The first post covered the Romney horse video and rambled a bit about some of my issues with Hannity and the Hip-Hop BBQ post that had finally made me go rogue. I capped the piece with this little riff on one of my favorite movies:

  “So why not just leave Fox News?” you might ask. Good question! I’ve asked myself that same thing many times. And I am leaving. Sooner rather than later, I’m guessing. But I can’t just leave quietly, can I? Where’s the fun in that? So I’m John McClane-ing this shit. I’m inside the building, crawling through the air vents, gathering intel, and passing it along to Carl Winslow.70

  (Note: Please don’t misunderstand and take my Die Hard metaphor as a threat of violence. Like most left-wingers, I abhor actual violence but am still hopelessly enthralled by the Hollywood machine that glorifies it. Also, that was a Twentieth Century Fox movie. Synergy!)”

  The post went live at three in the afternoon, too late to make any appreciable impact while I was still in the building. But that night, at home, I watched with fascination—and maybe a little bit of horror—as it got picked up by multiple news outlets. I thought that reaction would be limited to blogs and Twitter; but I was seeing mainstream organizations like ABC News and The New York Times cover the Fox Mole story.

  I put the finishing touches on my next dispatch, and went to bed telling myself I was still totally secure from detection. I probably should have been nervous, but I was more excited than anything at that point to see the impact I was having.

  The second Mole posting, a very silly piece about the abhorrent state of the bathrooms in the building, went up the next morning. It included a picture I’d snapped of a toilet stall where an incorrectly installed door had left a three-inch-wide gap, allowing the person on the toilet to make eye contact with the person using the sink, and vice versa. Fox, in typical fashion, had been too cheap to hire anyone to fix it. The makeshift solution devised by employees had been to drape toilet paper over the gap, hanging down like party streamers but maintaining the dignity of the person sitting on the bowl. The worst part is, it wasn’t just one bathroom in the building that was like this. It was every bathroom in the building, save one notoriously shabby commode near the newsroom that had finally been overhauled in late 2011, probably because someone had decided it was too disgusting to exist even a day longer.

  About an hour after that post went up, Tim Wolfe delivered the line that had made my blood run cold.

  “Oh, look, they caught him. They caught the Fox Mole.”

  —

  After getting expelled from the building that had been my workplace for almost eight years, I met John and A.J. at a bar near Gawker headquarters. After telling them what had happened, and about my paid suspension, they disappointedly agreed that the jig was up, and the best thing to do would be to just come clean.

  We went back to the Gawker HQ, which was sort of the antithesis of my old office (and it was weird thinking that for the first time—old office), a high-ceilinged loft in Manhattan’s hip Nolita neighborhood, with exposed brick walls and top-of-the-line iMacs at every workstation. Nick Denton, the wily, brilliant, British ex-pat who founded the company, had covered the walls of the space with dozens of framed photos of media titans, including one of Rupert Murdoch and another of Roger Ailes. I posed in front of the Ailes portrait as John Cook snapped my photo, uploading it to head a post I’d hastily written. John headlined it HI ROGER. IT’S ME, JOE: THE FOX MOLE.

  Before the post went up, I called my parents, whom I had kept in the dark throughout the whole process, to warn them. “Don’t talk to any reporters if they call you,” I told them. “Just say no comment.”

  Then I called Jenny.

  “Baby, do you trust me?” I asked her.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “What did you do?”

  —

  The next few days went by in a blur.

  After leaving Gawker HQ, I met Rufus in an East Village bar. He gave me back the duffel bag I’d foisted on him that afternoon, and bought me a much-needed drink.

  While I was at the bar, Sam Martinez texted me.

  Please tell me it isn’t true, he wrote.

  I’m sorry, man. It is, I wrote back. I’ll talk to you when this is all over.

  If you say so. But my heart is breaking.

  The next day—a Thursday—my phone didn’t stop ringing. I fielded a few calls but let most of the others go to voice mail. Interview requests flooded in, all of which I ignored or declined.

  Two messengers came to my apartment. The first one delivered a letter from Fox, officially and politely informing me that I was terminated, effective immediately.

  The second messenger had a somewhat less polite letter from Fox’s law firm, a “cease and desist” telling me to stop leaking material to Gawker.

  That wasn’t going to be a problem. Gawker had already published everything I’d given them. It never was about the video clips, for me. They were just gravy for the meaty dispatches—dispatches that I never got a chance to write.

  A tenacious reporter from the Daily News camped outside my door all day long, not believing my roommate Ari’s story that I wasn’t home. He eventually ambushed me, along with a photographer—perfect karmic payback for me—when I left the house that night to regroup with my Manhattan-dwelling sister and some friends.

  “Hey, man, I hate Fox probably as much as you do,” the reporter said, successfully buttering me up when at first I refused to talk. “I think you did a great thing.”

  “Am I going to make the cover tomorrow?” I asked, laughing.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “This wasn’t exactly the crime of the century here.”

  “I bet you’d put me on the cover if I were a hot blonde,” I said.

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  I smiled when he said that, and that’s the picture the Daily News used the next day—me, grinning like a jackass, apparently proud that I’d done something stupid and gotten fired for it. Despite my smile and the assurances of the reporter, I wasn’t so sure what I’d done was so great.

  I agreed to do an interview with Howard Kurtz, a CNN media critic who hosted a Sunday show, Reliable Sources. I taped the interview on Friday afternoon, in CNN’s headquarters at the Time Warner Center overlooking Central Park. The CNN offices were impossibly gorgeous, sparking pangs of jealousy. Whatever. Their ratings still suck, I thought, the residual Fox chip on my shoulder asserting itself inadvertently, and much to my surprise.

  Old Howie carved me up pretty good, and I stumbled through my interview without getting to explain myself very well. I figured I’d been behind the scenes on these interviews so often that I would automatically be good at it when the tables were turned. But I left the studio with newfound respect for our
on-air talent and guests. Their job was not easy.

  One of the things distressing me the most was that, judging from what I’d seen of the coverage, my intentions were getting widely misinterpreted. I had always pictured myself as a mischievous prankster whose conscience had suddenly gotten the better of him. But I was coming across more as a criminally insane malcontent—and an incompetent one at that; a good portion of the Internet commenters were simply laughing at me for lasting less than thirty-six hours. It was like being outed on a national scale as a premature ejaculator.

  I’d gone in with so much bravado, talking about Die Hard, but the movie ended all too quickly. And instead of John McClane throwing Hans off the building, two security guards used their hands to throw me out the revolving doors.71

  I tried to temporarily push my concerns aside and enjoy the notoriety. I knew the clock had already started ticking on my fifteen minutes. After my filleting by Howard Kurtz, I met some friends at a bar, and they showed me the copy of the Daily News with my goofy grinning mug in full color as I walked down the street, trying to escape the pursuing reporter.

  I met two old colleagues for coffee on Sunday. One had recently left the company of her own volition, seeking better-paying work. The other had been laid off just two months prior when his show—a libertarian-focused hour airing on the Fox Business Network—was unceremoniously canceled. Neither had any love left for Fox, and both were highly amused by the whole affair, though they agreed that Kurtz had gotten the better of me.

  “I talked to my grandma on the phone an hour ago,” the woman said. “She watched the interview and said, ‘Oh, that poor boy didn’t do very well, did he?’”

  “Even your grandma thinks I bombed?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, sorry.”