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

by Joe Muto

  8 An odd side note—my interview was Friday, June 4, 2004, the day before Ronald Reagan died. The news reports all gave pneumonia as the cause of death, but I’m like 30 percent certain he ended his own life because he’d sensed that Fox was on the verge of hiring a goddamn commie/hippie like me.

  9 I didn’t find out until a few weeks after moving to New York that halal was not a guy’s name but was basically the Muslim version of kosher. Halal carts dot almost every side street in midtown, serving chicken and lamb topped with hot sauce and a mysterious “white sauce.” You can get it served over rice or in a pita. The cleanliness of said carts is suspect. You often see the vendor flipping raw chicken parts with a spatula, then immediately using the same spatula to dish out rice to a customer. New Yorkers refer to it derisively as “street meat.” It’s goddamn delicious.

  10 Along with the O’Reilly staffers, Greta’s and Sean’s people had been unceremoniously booted from the newsroom during a 2008 remodeling that turned the three former prime-time pods into the new hub of the digital video system.

  11 I found out much later that it’s apparently illegal to keep these bins, and that the post office loses millions of dollars a year because of unauthorized hoarding. Fox had literally hundreds of these bins stacked all over the newsroom. So remember that the next time you’re watching the network and a host complains about government waste.

  12 Eight years later, that picture was still on the ID badge that two Fox security guards confiscated before physically removing me from the building.

  13 Ailes denies to this day that he was directly responsible for the ads, which were produced by an outside group that was run by a former employee of his media consulting firm. The Federal Election Commission started an inquiry to discover if Ailes had illegally colluded with his former employee. The FEC commissioners, divided between Republicans and Democrats, voted on whether to launch a full investigation. They deadlocked, splitting evenly down party lines, and ended up dropping the matter entirely when neither side would budge. Ailes, though he has always denied having a hand in the ads, certainly relished the effect they had on the election, and was quoted at one point saying, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”

  14 He was probably ready to go well before I realized. I found out later he was sharp as a tack, but before I got to know him better, his thick Southern accent caused me to unfairly dock him a couple dozen IQ points.

  15 It was only three miles as the crow flies from midtown Manhattan, but thanks to the vagaries of New York/New Jersey public transit, it would have added an extra forty-five minutes of travel time for most of us. Also, the psychological effect of being banished to a relative backwater when most of us had come to conquer the media capital of the world was enough to keep any of us from seriously considering a move, extra money or no. This is probably why MSNBC eventually moved out of Secaucus and into 30 Rock with their bigger siblings at NBC News proper.

  16 If it seems redundant, putting a two-minute news update in the middle of an hour of news, it’s because it is redundant. But the rationale is that the cut-in team stays on top of some of the ongoing stories that the hour-show teams are either ignoring or giving short shrift; this allows the hours to focus their attention on longer, more in-depth reports and interview segments, and not have to worry about updating viewers constantly on what the stock market is doing, or what’s going on in Europe, or whatever other foreign place that Fox viewers don’t care about is having a crisis at the moment.

  17 There was much consternation and confusion within the building when the Rolling Stone article came out. Why would Roger give so much access to a reporter from that liberal rag? Everyone had a theory, but to my eyes, it seemed to be an ill-conceived attempt at image-burnishing that had gone awry.

  18 The overhead page was an amazing feature, allowing you to use your phone to dial into an intercom system that broadcast your voice throughout the entire newsroom. Ostensibly, it was there to reach people who had stepped away from their desks and were needed urgently. In practice it was used to prank the entire newsroom. For example, a writer for the Fox Report, during a slow news day right before Christmas, dialed up an overhead page, then simply placed his phone receiver next to his computer speakers, which were playing a novelty version of “Silent Night” featuring the Star Wars character Chewbacca warbling the tune. He walked away from his desk and let the strangely beautiful melody play for five minutes.

  19 “They bought like two hundred of these decks when the network started,” Marybeth told me in 2004. “But they’re having trouble fixing them now because the manufacturer doesn’t even make them anymore. Our engineering department is buying old decks off eBay for spare parts. Apparently, we’re the only company in the world that still uses this format. Everyone else has gone digital.”

  20 This was a common trick if you didn’t have enough footage to spare. It certainly wasn’t ideal for the picture to freeze on air, but it was even worse if the tape went to a black screen.

  21 On air, Fox anchors were supposed to refer to these as “homicide bombings,” a term that supposedly avoided glorifying the perpetrators but, I suspected, just ended up confusing our viewers.

  22 Despite being on the air during prime time, the most-watched portion of the day, evening cut-ins is generally considered to be an unprestigious shift for an anchor. It’s much better to be the host of your own hour, even if it’s one of the garbage-time morning newswheels.

  23 The early ’90s were a terrible, terrible time.

  24 My dad, to this day, thinks of New York City as a dangerous place. He still gets nervous when I, a thirty-year-old adult man, tell him I’m going to ride the subway after ten P.M. “Are you sure that’s safe? Why don’t you take a cab?”

  25 Note: Only assholes called it this.

  26 Translation: “entirely Dominican.”

  27 Hipsters don’t call them concerts.

  28 This one also works if you’re an animal in the Flintstones household that’s been commandeered into doubling as an appliance.

  29 International stories tended to be the ones that broke late. Word of the devastating 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, for example, started to trickle over the wires while I was on an overnight shift. It was horrifying to watch the story develop in real time while the rest of the country slept, the casualty reports mounting exponentially each hour.

  30 The name, like many things at Fox, was a lot more sinister than its actual purpose. While I’m sure there’s been plenty of nefarious business in the War Room over the years, it was mostly used for routine show planning meetings and pizza parties.

  31 The O’Reilly Factor staff, with a sense of superiority derived from high ratings, were the rich kids in school: popular because of their expensive clothes and the expensive cars their parents had bought them for their sixteenth birthdays but secretly loathed by everyone else in the school. Greta’s staff: the honor students. Hannity’s staff: a mashup of the Young Republicans, the debate club, and the mock trial team. Cavuto’s staff: the mathletes. Geraldo’s staff: the stoners. Production assistants were the freshmen. And every anchorwoman was a cheerleader.

  32 One of the benefits of being a PA for an actual news hour instead of the cut-ins—you got your own room and editor assigned to you for a full two hours. No more having to beg, borrow, and steal edit time. I never forgot my roots, though, and made a point of not giving the cut-in PAs a hard time when they tried to horn in on my editor.

  33 Okay, it might have been me.

  34 One anchor spent almost all his time with his door not only closed but locked. His assistant told us that when she knocked to deliver something that needed his attention, he’d often take a suspiciously long amount of time to unlock it and let her in, and would appear disheveled and red-faced. The rest of the floor speculated wildly about what he could possibly be doing in there. The assistant, for her part, was convinced that he was surfing porn sites on his computer and ha
ndling his microphone, if you catch her drift—which, to be fair, might actually be an understandable tension release for someone who is about to go on television in front of millions of people.

  35 The Holloway case would heat up at least two or three more times over the years, mostly thanks to Greta Van Susteren’s dogged, tireless pursuit of a resolution. As of the fall of 2012, the exact circumstances of Natalee’s disappearance remained a mystery—though the main suspect, Joran van der Sloot, was serving a twenty-eight-year prison sentence in Peru for an unrelated 2010 murder.

  36 I wish I could tell you I had been far too smart to join them, but I had simply been in the bathroom when they hatched the plan—otherwise, I might well have been with them.

  37 I would never trust Wikipedia as a source for an important news story, but it turned out to be a valuable repository when it came to trivial nuggets of information about beloved sitcoms from the 1960s.

  38 Wow, this got dark suddenly.

  39 Arguably, this is the reason why his radio show never fully took off. We rarely had guests in the studio. Bill interviewing someone over the phone just didn’t have the same impact. Similarly, with the TV show, you’ll notice a marked difference in the segments where the guest is in the New York studio with Bill versus the segments where the guest is coming in via satellite; most notably, the satellite guests are less afraid to talk back.

  40 Well, okay: sometimes.

  41 See? What’d I say? Totally infectious.

  42 This isn’t a huge secret in the industry, but it is largely unknown to the average viewer, since there’s a totally seamless handoff from the live seven P.M. show to the taped eight P.M. The seven P.M. anchor, usually Shep Smith, simply says something like “That’s it for me tonight. Now here’s O’Reilly,” and the guys in master control hit PLAY on the pretaped Factor episode. If they do it right, it will go straight from Shep to Bill saying his typical show-opening catchphrase: “The O’Reilly Factor is on tonight!” with little or no delay.

  Pretaping actually causes several logistical headaches, which is why The Factor is the only show on the entire network that gets away with it—Bill was the only one with enough clout to demand it in his contract. There are a variety of reasons why he wanted to pretape, but the two most important were (1) he likes being able to fix mistakes after the fact; (2) he likes getting home early to see his kids. Fair enough, on both points. And it got me out of there at a decent hour, so I wasn’t complaining about it either.

  43 Bill called all of us, even the women on the staff, by our last names. We just called him Bill. It was very egalitarian of him, actually, but led to some confusion at times. For example, whenever a female producer got married and took her husband’s name, Bill, a creature of habit if there ever was one, would still call her by her maiden name for months, and in some cases years, after the wedding.

  44 And yes, I imagine this sort of thing a lot, in case you were wondering.

  45 For more on ambush artiste extraordinaire Jesse Watters, please see chapter 13. Or, you know, just keep reading ’til you get there.

  46 Exceptions were made for the recurring cast of regulars who appeared on the show every week, like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and Bernie Goldberg, each one older, grayer, and whiter than the last.

  47 In the mainstream journalism world, the widely accepted definition of breaking a story means that you’re the first person to report it. In Bill’s mind, however, breaking a story simply meant that he was the first person to talk about it on television. It didn’t matter if the story had been kicking around on blogs for six months—as long as Bill was the first to put it on TV, he would take credit for breaking it.

  48 Not that Bill wanted to follow the lead of the right-wing blogs too closely. He held the conservative blogosphere at arm’s length, not considering himself part of it, and going so far as to reject any story he saw as excessively partisan, lest it taint the aura of fairness he seemed to think he’d managed to hold on to. For example: He never embraced the Birther movement, refusing to give any oxygen to those who questioned President Obama’s birthplace. It was only when Donald Trump started dabbling in Birtherism in 2011 that O’Reilly finally started giving the issue a prominent place on his show.

  49 In contrast, our other (much less prolific) ambushing producer, Porter Berry, was a more staunch conservative, and it showed. When he ambushed a liberal, it came off as if he could barely contain his disgust at having to be in the same room with the person. While Porter was probably accurately mirroring the emotions of many of our viewers, it tended to make his ambushes seem self-righteous, which made for bad television. Jesse’s sarcastic, somewhat softer touch was much more entertaining.

  50 The crown jewel of my career was a weeklong engagement as Barry the Best Man in a semiprofessional production of Tony and Tina’s Wedding in downtown South Bend, Indiana. I wish that were a joke or an exaggeration.

  51 My place in this somewhat tortured metaphor: When I started at Fox, I was probably space dust, but by the time I left, I’d arguably worked my way up to chimpanzee astronaut.

  52 He was also notorious for being a micromanager and would often call the control room to complain about small matters, demanding that a piece of b-roll be removed from the rotation, or that a sound bite be cut slightly differently.

  53 The reason for the ban was simply “because Roger hates him as a guest.” My pet theory was that he was blacklisted because he was too good—he was likable, charismatic, and made persuasive cases for liberal policies. This made him totally anathema to Roger, who prefers his left-wingers to be paper tigers.

  54 I wish I could say this was solely an affliction of the right, but I suspect that it is depressingly common among Americans on both sides of the aisle. Writing incomprehensible e-mails to public figures is a pursuit that knows no ideology.

  55 FBN was founded on the erroneous—and frankly ludicrous—premise that CNBC, the official channel of $5,000-suit-wearing plutocrats, was somehow not pro-business enough. The idea was to combine financial coverage with conservative politics and underqualified but sexy twenty-five-year-old anchor babes. A friend who worked in finance told me that half the TVs on his company’s trading floor were tuned to FBN on mute, specifically for the eye candy, but anytime they wanted actual information, they turned the volume up on CNBC.

  56 They are the most impossibly tall, thin, and good-looking couple I’ve ever seen in real life. Their continued existence is simply unfair to us normal, comparatively hideous people.

  57 Hannity even convinced Wright to come on his show at one point, an interview that went mostly unnoticed by the mainstream press—probably owing to the fact that it was incredibly boring, consisting mostly of Hannity trying to get the reverend to admit he was a black separatist, and Wright stonewalling the fiery conservative host with jargon about “Liberation Theology” and references to obscure works by equally obscure authors. It was not good television.

  58 Notably, Bill and the guest agreed that Obama was born in Hawaii, leading to a flood of angry calls and e-mails.

  59 Word was that Greta and her Clinton-friendly husband did not take Hillary’s loss in the Democratic primary well, and had vowed to never support Obama. In the meantime, they’d both befriended Sarah Palin.

  60 This didn’t seem to hold true in the 2012 cycle, as I noticed from my new perch as an outsider that Rove was often going on air and arguing things that someone as smart as he couldn’t possibly believe. This may have been because he was running a large Super PAC that had convinced hundreds of mega-rich conservatives to shell out millions of dollars with the express purpose of defeating Barack Obama—he became less an analyst and more a cheerleader. The low point of this behavior came on election night, when Rove pitched an on-air tantrum of denial after the network called Ohio—and hence the victory—for President Obama.

  61 I’m strictly a Reds fan, but I give myself permission to root for my adopted hometown’s American League team on a situational basis. Fuck the Mets, th
ough.

  62 Fair warning to my esteemed publisher—when this book comes out, I’m probably going to bring an empty cooler to the release party so I can take home any unopened bottles.