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

by Joe Muto

  Basically, you are me.

  So here’s my proposition. Read this article from the University of Notre Dame’s alumni magazine: [link] If you read it and don’t like it, I give you full permission to print this e-mail out, post it to the office bulletin board, and subject me to the ridicule of your coworkers.

  If, however, you do like it, and you do think that I can write for FoxNews.com,6 then I’d be eternally grateful if you’d peruse my résumé below. I’ve spent a lot of time on it and have used every ounce of my skill to overhype nearly every position I’ve ever held. I’m sure that if you’ve been a hiring manager for anything more than a month, then you are truly a connoisseur of the overblown résumé; I assure you, my friend, you’ll find my résumé most agreeable in this regard.

  In closing, I’d like to apologize for the unconventional cover letter. I felt compelled to write it, mostly because I have a conscience and I refuse to subject you to the antiseptic tripe that Monster.com suggested I send you.

  Hope to hear from you soon.

  Yours,

  Joseph R. Muto

  I spent all day writing it, polishing it, perfecting it, then I closed my eyes, crossed my fingers, and hit SEND.

  I heard back a week later.

  I was home in Ohio, having uneventfully survived my graduation ceremony. I was riding in a friend’s car on my way to a party, enjoying a pleasant beer buzz, when I noticed a voice mail on my cell phone. “Joseph, this is Jessica [Italian Name]. We really loved your résumé and would like you to come to New York to interview for a job. Please call me back when you can at the number . . .”

  Two weeks later, I was standing outside of Fox News’s midtown Manhattan headquarters.

  And I was sweating my balls off.

  My four years as a slovenly liberal arts student in the frozen tundra of northern Indiana had left me spectacularly ill-equipped to dress for both business situations and warm-weather situations. I was wearing a blue blazer that was too big in the shoulders, gray flannel pants that were too tight in the butt, and a tie—borrowed from my father—that had probably been produced the same year as the M*A*S*H finale.

  It wasn’t even ten A.M. and the temperature had climbed past 75, according to the conveniently located time-and-temperature display mounted on a tall pole across the street. Sweat was forming on my temples and running in little rivulets down to my neck. I could feel an unpleasantly swampy sensation brewing in my flannel-clad undercarriage. Trying to ignore my leaky body, I took in the sight of the building in front of me.

  It was at the corner of Forty-Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, or Avenue of the Americas, as the street signs, guidebooks, tourists—and no one else—called it. The official address was 1211 Avenue of the Americas, a rather unassuming one for the building that was the U.S. headquarters of News Corporation, the giant media conglomerate that was the parent company of Fox News, the Fox TV network, 20th Century Fox movie studios, the New York Post, TV Guide, and countless other media properties. The company had been founded by Rupert Murdoch, a wizened, Bond-villain-esque Australian zillionaire who had made his fortune in the UK buying newspapers and transforming them into screaming right-wing tabloids.

  To be fair, that might actually be selling him a little short; he also invented a feature so brilliant and wildly popular and disgusting that I’m surprised it hasn’t shown up in the United States yet: pictures of bare titties in newspapers.7

  Though he wasn’t a quirky, cuddly, charismatic billionaire in the Richard Branson mold, I’d later find out that Rupert still garnered a surprising amount of respect and even affection from the News Corp. rank and file—a sentiment that the company’s internal PR team attempted to foment with cult-of-personality building exercises. For example, the theme of the News Corp. holiday party one year was international travel, and the invitations whimsically invited attendees to take a trip with “KRM Airlines”—as in Keith Rupert Murdoch. The man himself even appeared at the party that year, a massive affair that consumed two entire banquet floors of the Hilton Hotel a few blocks away from HQ. Rupert was spotted in the crowd throughout the evening, mingling with the commoners, at one point watching tipsy employees belt out karaoke tunes on a stage, much to the delight of the singers.

  I think the secret of Murdoch’s appeal among the grunts is that we always felt we knew where he stood. We were aware that he was an ideologue, but as far as ideologues went, he was a particularly pragmatic, money-grubbing one. Profit always trumped politics for Rupert. If he could make money on a conservative-boosting endeavor like Fox News, great. But if he could also make money on a routinely conservative-bashing show like The Simpsons, that was also fine with him.

  His pragmatism was apparent in the architecture of his chosen corporate headquarters. Unlike NBC, with its grand Rockefeller Center base of operations, or ABC, which had a flashy Times Square studio, the News Corp. building was relatively modest. I say “relatively” because, if you plunked down the forty-five-story tower in the middle of downtown Cincinnati, it would actually be quite impressive—the tallest skyscraper by more than a few stories. However, in midtown Manhattan, it was nothing, just another face in the crowd. A dozen buildings within a ten-block radius were taller. The two towers on the next two blocks up the avenue were built at the same time as the News Corp. building and had virtually identical exteriors, except for being—yes—taller.

  So there was nothing terribly distinctive about the building, except one thing: the Fox News “ticker,” an LED banner that wrapped around the side of the building, scrolling pithy news headlines in three-foot-tall glowing red letters, day and night.

  Inside the building, the news channel took up the entire basement with a large newsroom and several studios and control rooms. More control rooms and studios were on the ground floor. Corporate offices were on the second floor. Most of the on-air personalities were given offices on the seventeenth floor, and additional spillover was located on three or four other floors.

  Fox News vied for space with other News Corp. properties, like the New York Post and TV Guide, each of which had a sizable presence in the building. Even the Fox Network, 20th Century Fox movie studios, and Fox Searchlight—which had their main operations in Los Angeles—still had their own space in New York. And though they weren’t yet there when I started in 2004, The Wall Street Journal and Fox Business eventually set up camp in the building, too. Finally, a large law firm, unrelated to News Corp., occupied the upper floors of the building.

  The mixture made for an eclectic crowd in the lobby, with buttoned-up lawyer types and corporate suits from the parent company mingling with the schlubby journos from the Post and Fox News, as well as the occasional celebrity. It wasn’t unusual to step off the elevators and run into, say, the entire cast of Glee, or Gene Simmons from KISS.

  I was twenty-five minutes early for my interview, so I plopped down on a bench in the stark concrete plaza in front of the building (five or six sad trees and a couple of wooden benches, mostly frequented by a rotating cast of vagrants and cigarette-breaking burger flippers from a nearby Wendy’s) and attempted to gather my nerves. I watched the bright red news scroll for a few minutes, catching a half dozen typos and misspellings. The headlines mostly related to the day’s8 top story, the resignation of CIA chief George Tenet, who, in my liberal opinion, was largely responsible for slam-dunking America into the disastrous Iraq War, which was at that point just over a year old. Good riddance, I thought, the campus radical in me still rising up, despite the fact I was mere minutes away from begging for a job with a right-wing news organization and I was dressed like I was going to a Halloween party wearing an Alex P. Keaton costume.

  I checked my bag, a handsome blue canvas messenger with my school’s logo monogrammed on it. Inside, only the essentials: pack of cigarettes, pack of gum, tourist map of the city, and a faux-leather portfolio filled with multiple copies of my résumé and printouts of some of the less offensive and inflammatory columns that I had written for my college newsp
aper.

  And I waited, watching employees file in and out of the revolving doors, wondering what it would be like to be one of them. They looked generally happy. I don’t know what I imagined crazed wing-nut Republican hacks would look like, but it didn’t look like these people. (I didn’t see anyone goose-stepping, anyway, which probably would have been a dead giveaway.)

  Fifteen minutes before my interview, I decided I’d crossed the threshold from “annoying-suck-up early” to “business punctual,” so I headed inside the building. The air in the huge cathedral-like lobby was chilled to roughly the same temperature as a zoo’s penguin habitat. I felt the beads of sweat that had been accumulating on my brow begin to crystallize, and a single drop of icy cold perspiration began an arduous Lewis and Clark–style journey from the small of my back down toward the crack of my ass.

  I told the bored-looking security guard sitting behind the substantial, thirty-foot-long wooden kiosk that I was there for an interview with Fox, and he made a phone call while I looked around. The lobby was marginally impressive, if generic: soaring thirty-foot ceilings, walls and columns clad in marble panels with wooden accents, a massive abstract painting on a canvas—blotches of color with squiggly lines, clearly calculated for maximum boring corporate inoffensiveness—hanging above the guard station.

  After a few minutes, a fresh-faced assistant came to fetch me and brought me up to the second floor, where all of the Fox News executive and administrative offices are located. She deposited me in a waiting area, and told me to grab a seat. Eyeing my forehead, still covered with now frozen sweat, she said, “Um, can I get you a towel or something?”

  “Maybe a Kleenex, if you have it?” I managed to get out. She gestured to a box on a table and I greedily mopped my brow with a handful of tissues.

  After a few minutes in the holding pen, I was rescued by my interviewer, the same Jessica with the Italian last name who had left me the voice mail. She was attractive, with a friendly smile, and surprisingly young for someone who had earned her large office with windows looking out onto Forty-Eighth Street.

  Jessica Italian-Name launched right into it, telling me how much the people around the office had enjoyed the cover letter that I’d sent with my résumé, and how funny they all thought it was.

  “Oh, I don’t know if it was all that funny,” I said with all the false modesty I could muster. “I just dashed it off in a few minutes one day.”

  This job interview is no big deal! I have dozens of them! I hoped the lightness in my voice said. (This is my one and only shot! I’m very, very desperate! I’m pretty sure the haunted look in my eyes said.)

  With the initial pleasantries out of the way, the interview began in earnest, and it was going swimmingly. I was expecting a grilling, but this was really more a breezy conversation. Jess (as I’d mentally nicknamed my new best friend) asked me about school, my extracurriculars, how I liked my major, and growing up in the Midwest.

  In turn, she told me about Fox, the culture, how it was different from the other networks: “We are totally viewer driven. The reason people who watch the network love us is that we give them the stories they want to watch. And in return, our viewers are very loyal.”

  She wasn’t lying. I hadn’t realized how successful Fox News was until I started researching it in anticipation of my interview. It had been around only since 1996, yet the ratings routinely beat those of the main competitors, CNN and MSNBC. It wasn’t even close. Fox often had more viewers than the other two networks combined.

  Jessica pointed to the TV mounted on the wall behind her desk. “You see that little logo in the corner of the screen?” Sure enough, the square Fox News logo was prominent on the lower left of the frame. “We call that the ‘bug.’ Watch how it rotates every few seconds,” Jessica said.

  I waited obediently, and sure enough, a few seconds later, the square revealed itself to be a cube, and spun a quarter turn to reveal a new face. FAIR & BALANCED, it now read.

  “The reason they did that,” she explained, “is because our viewers kept the channel on so many hours in a row, every single day, that the logo would actually get burned into their screens and ruin their TVs.” She laughed. “Isn’t that hilarious?”

  This was not, as it turns out, the last time that I heard this anecdote. It was relayed to me at least a half dozen times over my first few months on the job. People seemed unusually proud that our viewers were so loyal that they were ruining their TVs. But the only thing it ever called to mind for me was that our audience was either so elderly that they hadn’t figured out the remote control and/or so infirm that they were literally unable to change the channel.

  But obviously the interview was no time to voice that sentiment, so I smiled broadly as Jessica laughed heartily at her own anecdote. I’m really nailing this, I thought.

  I thought too soon.

  We had come to the end of the interview, the part where the interviewer asks if you have any questions. Feeling cocky from the smoothness of the proceedings up to that point, I decided to open my dumb mouth.

  I had noticed on her TV at that moment that a reporter was doing a piece on the tabloid story of the moment: the Scott Peterson trial.

  Scott was a smug-looking guy in his early thirties whose eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci, had disappeared on Christmas Eve. Cops became suspicious of him when it turned out he was having multiple affairs behind his wife’s back. His laughable alibi for the day his wife disappeared was that he had been alone in his boat, out on the San Francisco Bay, fishing. When Laci’s body washed up on a nearby shore several months later, cops arrested Scott, who appeared to be in the midst of preparing to flee to Mexico.

  Almost a year after his arrest, his trial was huge news and was getting wall-to-wall, breathless coverage on Fox, coverage that I’d noticed while watching the channel the week before, studying up for the interview.

  It was, understandably, an irresistible story for a certain segment of the population—there would always be an audience for salacious murder trials involving attractive, well-off white people. But it struck me as a little odd that the sordid details were being covered so extensively by a “news” channel while the country was in the middle of an increasingly bloody war in Iraq and was also about five months away from a presidential election.

  So when Jessica asked me if I had any questions, it turns out I did—a really unwise one, in fact: “Do any of the journalists here complain about having to cover stories like the Peterson trial instead of, you know, real news?” I asked.

  The atmosphere in the room changed instantly. The smile dropped off her face. The laughter went out of her eyes. And I don’t know how she did it without touching them, but I swear the blinds lowered a little, darkening the room.

  Realizing my mistake, I instantly felt like throwing up.

  “No,” she said in a voice that was suddenly quiet and pinched. “Our viewers love that story. It gets great ratings. We cover stories that our viewers want to watch. And we wouldn’t want to hire anybody who would second-guess our viewers like that.”

  I wish I could tell you what the rest of the interview was like, but I have zero recollection of it. I’ve totally blocked it out of my mind—a defense mechanism, no doubt, against the trauma of that moment. All I remember was that she ended it very quickly after my question. I was out on the plaza, already starting to sweat again, in what felt like ninety seconds later.

  I’d blown it. My only job interview. My one chance to get to New York, to escape the infamy of being a college graduate with parents for roommates. Loads of potential, squandered, because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut.

  Oh, well, I thought, at least I have the rest of the weekend in the city to enjoy myself before I have to go back to the Midwest to start the rest of my sad life.

  Six days later, they called and offered me the job.

  —

  “This is Jim Siegendorf, an executive producer at Fox News Channel,” the voice on the phone said. “We want t
o hire you as a production assistant.”

  I cradled the phone against my ear in my childhood bedroom in Cincinnati, rendered momentarily speechless. I had been rushed out of the interview so quickly after I dared to question the journalistic soundness of a salacious murder trial, that I was absolutely certain I’d blown it.

  In my despair I’d gone full Bridget Jones and immediately started depression eating. I bought and devoured a giant lamb pita sandwich from a food cart advertising itself as halal9 parked outside the Fox building. The food helped, but it still felt like a long nine-block walk of shame back to my hotel to peel off my interview clothes, which were now drenched with flop sweat in addition to heat sweat, and speckled with lamb grease.

  So, yeah, I was a bit surprised to be offered a job. But I managed to hold it together and not betray my utter shock.

  “Production assistant? What’s that?” I asked.

  “You’ll be helping out with the TV shows we produce,” Jim said. “I don’t know yet what show we’ll put you on. It depends on what slots we have to fill.”

  TV? I had only applied for a website job, but this was actually even better. I’m going to be a rich television producer!

  “The job pays twelve dollars an hour,” Jim said.

  I’m going to be a frugal-living television producer!

  “I have to tell you, it starts out freelance, so there aren’t any health or dental benefits right away.”

  I’m going to be a frugal-living, disease-ridden, toothless television producer!

  The salary was a bit of a disappointment, but since it represented a 50-percent raise from the eight dollars an hour I’d been making at my landscaping job the previous summer, it didn’t sound too bad.

  But now I was again confronted with the same moral quandary I had been wrestling with when I sent the application in the first place. It’s true that I was desperate for a job, any job, to prove to my parents that their faith in me, their indulgence of my frivolous-in-retrospect film and television studies, hadn’t been a huge mistake. And I was eager to move to New York City, a place that I’d fallen in love with at a very young age and, to paraphrase Woody Allen, a town I idolized all out of proportion.