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

by Joe Muto

  But it was also true that I’d essentially be working for the enemy. Could I swallow my distaste for Fox News’s conservative leanings? If I took the job, I realized with a queasy feeling, I’d be selling out at age twenty-two—and not even for a lot of money.

  “So what do you think?” Jim’s voice on the phone snapped me out of my mental Hamletting. He sounded like a nice guy, polite, soft-spoken, and eager to recruit me. And he hadn’t asked for any sort of ideological purity test. Neither had Jessica, for that matter. No one seemed to notice, or care, that I was a bleeding-heart liberal. Maybe I could handle this.

  “We’d really love to have you,” Jim’s voice urged.

  My eyes swept across a map that I’d pinned to the wall just the day before. I’d bought it at a souvenir stand near Times Square shortly after my blown interview. The island of Manhattan stretched from the top to the bottom, filling the space, rendered in yellows and reds, and vaguely phallic. When I’d tacked it up, I’d been certain that staring at it every day would be the closest I would ever get to actually living there. But now the opportunity had re-presented itself, unexpectedly.

  I sighed. It might be my only chance.

  “I’m in.”

  April 11, 2012—11:45 A.M.

  I had made it past the suspicious Nick De Angelo, though the encounter had left me rattled. Rather than risk being spotted getting on the elevators on my own seventeenth floor, I’d decided to take a little-used staircase up to the eighteenth-floor elevator bank, where I was less likely to bump into someone who would find it odd that I was fleeing the building with a duffel bag at eleven thirty in the morning.

  I climbed the stairs and emerged into the long narrow space that was currently being uneasily shared by the staffs of Sean Hannity’s and Greta Van Susteren’s shows.10 The two crews, despite airing back-to- back on the same network, were, in a very real sense, competitors, with each staff independently pursuing the same scoops and the same hard-to-get guests. It was an awkward arrangement, to say the least, to have a rival producer ten feet away and able to hear your every word when you were trying to work the phones; but the two staffs had somehow made do for a few years. The room was mercifully mostly empty, with most of the late-working staffers not yet in for the day; the few people who were there seemed to pay me no mind.

  The space was divided equally, with each show getting its own side, but the décor was pure Hannity, the walls plastered with various campaign signs for Republican candidates, and one very large fan-donated piece of art.

  Now, it wasn’t unusual at Fox for some of the more zealous viewers to mail artwork and other mementos to their favorite hosts. The O’Reilly pod a floor below was studded with some of the more memorable examples—most of them of dubious artistic merit, but all of them glorifying the host: a wooden, hand-painted Bill O’Reilly bobblehead doll; a watercolor painting of Bill’s famous on-air confrontation with congressman Barney Frank; a nightmare-inducing papier-mâché depiction of O’Reilly dressed as a lumberjack, for some reason, complete with an ominous, shiny-bladed ax.

  The point is, for a show to display viewer-made art wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but the piece mounted next to the door in the Sean/Greta headquarters stood out; it was enormous, and clearly done by someone who knew how to wield a paintbrush. The giant oil-on-canvas showed Sean Hannity’s massive grinning head on a TV screen with a Fox News logo, with confetti flying through the air behind him. The artist, in an inspired bit of wishful thinking, had added an on-screen graphic that read OBAMA DEFEATED IN HISTORIC LANDSLIDE.

  At least if they fire my ass, I thought as I passed the thing, I’ll never have to see that fucking asinine painting again.

  CHAPTER 2

  I Coulda Been a Contender . . .

  So is this fat fuck dead or what?”

  Kurt Karos, a producer in his late twenties, was barking into the phone, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the control room. We had just received a report that Marlon Brando, legendary actor, star of classic films like On the Waterfront, Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather, noted recluse—and alleged fat fuck—was, in fact, dead. But the report had come from just one source, Fox’s affiliate in Los Angeles, and Karos was on the phone with the assignment desk, trying to get a second source to confirm the news so we could go to air with it.

  “Don’t fuck with me on this, Steve,” Kurt was shouting. “I know it’s still early on the West Coast. . . . Wake them the hell up, then! . . . Look, if CNN gets this first, they might as well stay in bed because I swear to Christ I’ll make it my business that they no longer have jobs to wake up to!”

  I was taking this all in from my perch in the back corner of the cramped, chaotic control room, itching to do something, to help in any way I could; but I was by far the lowest-ranked person in the room, and the producers and technicians seemed to have forgotten that I was even there. So I watched, and waited, as the number one cable news network in America struggled to be the first to inform a blissfully unaware public that a Hollywood icon had dropped dead.

  It was July 1, 2004, my very first day at Fox News.

  I was about three hours into it.

  —

  Four days earlier, I had arrived in New York City with my entire life packed into three suitcases, only six weeks removed from the comforting bosom of college. My diploma was still at the framer’s in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio—which was just as well, because I wasn’t going have an office wall to hang it on anyway.

  I took a cab straight from LaGuardia Airport to my friend Sloane Coupland’s Manhattan apartment. Sloane was a delightfully manic brunette I’d known since freshman year. The first time I met her, she’d brought me back to her dorm room and nonchalantly changed her clothes in front of me. For any other girl, that would have been a brazen come-on, but for Sloane, it was simply a practical matter: She needed to change, and it was rude to ask a new friend to wait outside while she did so. Of course I didn’t know that at the time, and diligently waited for a sexual entanglement that never materialized. By the time I realized that the bra and panties she’d flashed at our first meeting was the nakedest I would ever see her, it was too late: We were friends. Most recently, as seniors, we’d collaborated on a truly overwrought pro-choice student film that she’d written, I’d photographed, and we’d both directed. It didn’t win any awards in the student film festival, but it did give Sloane and me a lot of time to talk about our future plans, with both of us having aspirations to head to New York.

  Sloane had arrived in the city three weeks prior. She was living in a luxury high-rise overlooking the East River, in a spacious one-bedroom that no twenty-two-year-old had any business having all to herself. Sloane was one of those lucky cases that seemed to crop up occasionally in New York: Her parents had agreed to support her for a year while she made a go of it in the film industry.

  When the taxi dropped me off at Sloane’s building, one doorman helped me with my luggage while another held the door for me and a third greeted me at the front desk of the lobby, a soaring marble-clad space with a curtain of water running down one wall and gathering in a little pool. I was still taking it all in, slack-jawed like a moron, when Sloane stepped off the elevators and wrapped me in a hug.

  “You’re here!” she shouted, squeezing the air out of my lungs with her surprisingly powerful embrace. “Finally!”

  “You really expect me to stay in this fleabag?” I wheezed. “The doormen didn’t even offer me champagne on the way in.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny, asshole. Let’s go upstairs.”

  A quick ride in the elevators and we were at her nineteenth-floor apartment.

  “Welcome to New York!” Sloane said with a grand flourish of her arms as we crossed the threshold. “Let me give you the tour!”

  My first impression was actually that the place was small—maybe about six hundred square feet. I would soon come to realize that it was a fucking palace by regular Manhattan standards. But I had been tricked by years of watchin
g New York–based sitcoms, and all I could think was that Sloane’s apartment was even smaller than Joey and Chandler’s.

  The place was decorated and furnished almost entirely with IKEA, but Sloane and her mother had arranged it into what I had to admit amounted to a very chic, put-together setup. It still felt a bit like a dorm room, but it was at least a very grown-up dorm room. Not to mention it was way nicer than anywhere I envisioned myself living anytime soon.

  The tour ended with a big reveal from Sloane, who clearly had been waiting for this moment. We stopped in front of a door adjacent to the small galley kitchen.

  “So this was supposed to be my pantry . . .” she started. “But I decided to turn it into”—she flung open the doors, flourishing her arms like a model at a car show—“my shoe closet!”

  Sure enough, the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with three dozen pairs of shoes.

  “Wow, you’re really living the dream, Slo,” I said, wondering if Sex and the City had claimed yet another victim.

  Later that night, we were on the roof of Sloane’s building sharing a bottle of wine—the very cheapest white that a grumbling wine store clerk had in his small refrigerator—and toasting to our mutual future success, which in our youthful exuberance we both agreed was virtually guaranteed, merely on the basis of our both showing up in the right place.

  As I looked out over the city, the lights from thousands of windows piercing the humid early-summer evening, the majestic stainless-steel-clad Chrysler Building looming nearby, all I could think was Forget shoe closets—I’m the one who’s really living the dream.

  —

  The next morning, I woke up on Sloane’s couch. My head was pounding, the result of our not only finishing the cheap wine but later attacking with gusto the equally cheap bottle of vodka that—aside from an empty ice cube tray—was the lone inhabitant of Sloane’s freezer. She was already gone, having left for her unpaid “internship” at an independent film company that was all too willing to take advantage of eager young college grads trying to break into the industry. I was still three days away from starting work, so I decided to explore the city a little bit.

  I set out on foot for my future office, thinking it might be prudent to time the walk so I wouldn’t be late on my first day. I passed through Sloane’s neighborhood, which my pocket tourist map told me was Murray Hill. I found out later that the area had a reputation for being an ersatz college campus, despised by most locals for the proliferation of bars and high-rise apartments overrun by annoying twenty-two-year-olds fresh from graduation. (Fair enough, considering our circumstances.) But walking through it that day, I was struck by how quiet and orderly it seemed, especially compared to the other parts of the city I’d seen up to that point.

  Soon enough the calm of Murray Hill gave way to the traffic and mayhem of midtown. The News Corp. building was just a shade under a thirty-minute walk from Sloane’s apartment. Not a terrible commute for the few weeks that I’d be living with her.

  My new office was smack-dab in the middle of the part of town you’d probably take your parents to first if they came to visit. A couple of blocks north up the avenue was the familiar sight of Radio City Music Hall, its neon-lit façade stretching skyward. Just to the east of that was Rockefeller Center, the masterful Art Deco complex of buildings, home to NBC, the Today show, the famous Christmas tree, and the skating rink that, I was delighted later to find out, turns into a bar in the summer months.

  To the southwest of my new office was the flashing video-screen overloaded, tourist-crammed clusterfuck of Times Square, filled with street artists hawking caricatures, food vendors generating an ungodly amount of smoke from their grills, and dazed tour groups of old ladies from New Jersey shoving their way through the crowd, hustling to make curtain time for Mamma Mia!

  Farther north up Sixth Avenue, past Radio City, you could just make out a massive expanse of green: Central Park, which is where I headed. Rather than enter the park itself—despite rumors of a recent revitalization, I still knew the park only from the movie Home Alone 2 and the TV show Night Court as a haven for crackheads, prostitutes, and terrifying old ladies who breed armies of pigeons to do their bidding—I hooked a right turn onto Central Park South. It’s the street where all the hansom cabs line up, waiting to give tourists horse-drawn rides.

  New York City visitors have a very romantic vision of the horse-and-carriage ride, but the reality is a disappointing letdown. Instead of a proud, beautiful steed pulling your cart, you have a sad, plodding creature with its head stooped in misery. Instead of a merry driver dressed like a Victorian caroler pointing out landmarks, you have a surly guy in jeans who ignores you and won’t stop texting on his cell phone.

  Also, the entire length of the street smells like horse shit.

  I was walking past the depressing queue of horses, idly wondering whose job it was to empty those little poop-catcher aprons strapped underneath each animal, when I almost ran over a guy about my age standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Excuse me, sir. Would you like to donate to help us defeat George Bush this November?” He was carrying a clipboard and wearing a shirt identifying him as an employee of the Democratic National Committee. He had a JOHN KERRY FOR PRESIDENT button pinned to his chest.

  “Sure, I’d love to,” I replied, digging into my back pocket for my wallet. “How does five bucks sound?”

  The kid, obviously too blown away by my generous offer to speak, scribbled something on the clipboard and handed it to me.

  “I just need your information there. Name, address, employer, and so on.”

  “You know, it’s funny that I’m making this donation,” I said as I filled out the form. “I’m actually starting work in three days for Fox News Channel.”

  “Oh, my God! Why?” He looked at me, horrified. “Why are you going to work for them?”

  “Ummm . . . that’s a great question,” I said. “I guess . . .”

  I was completely taken aback by the anger I heard in his voice. I was still coming to grips myself with the fact that I was in the city to take a job with Fox News, so I wasn’t yet completely prepared to have to justify it to a stranger a full three days before I even started.

  My immediate impulse was to tell the guy that this was just a temporary job, a way to get my foot in the door, to establish a life in New York while I searched for something that I really wanted to do. That I didn’t buy into Fox’s philosophy, and in fact believed the exact opposite. That while I was there I was going to do my best to keep them honest, and to maybe even change them from the inside, to bend the entire organization to my way of thinking through sheer force of will, using my dazzling powers of persuasion. I was going to be a force for good. I would not let the questionable values of my employer change my values, or who I was as a person.

  But I didn’t say any of that.

  What I did say was: “I guess you gotta make a living, right?”

  The volunteer frowned at me but said nothing as I handed him back his clipboard and a five-dollar bill.

  I could still feel his disapproving gaze on my back as I slunk away, the smell of horse shit lingering in my nostrils.

  —

  True story: I showed up for my first day of work with bloody socks.

  All my shoes were brand-new, bought during a spending binge at a Cincinnati department store. In those heady pre-financial-crisis days, the fine people at Macy’s had foolishly decided that I was trustworthy enough for a three-thousand-dollar line of credit. This was good, because I desperately needed some big-boy clothes. I wasn’t 100 percent sure what I was supposed to wear to a Manhattan office job, but I was fairly certain that my standard college uniform of orange athletic warm-up pants paired with an ironic thrift store T-shirt wasn’t going to cut it. (“Mr. Ailes, don’t you find my SOUTH BEND GIRLS’ CHOIR T-shirt hilarious? I picked it up for three bucks at the Salvation Army.”)

  The problem was that three days of walking around the city wearing cheap
shoes that hadn’t been broken in yet had taken a toll, and opened enormous blisters on the heels of both feet. It was just my luck that one of them had started bleeding during the half-hour walk from Sloane’s place to the Fox building.

  I could only hope that my new coworkers wouldn’t notice the red stain blooming on the Achilles tendon on one of my tan dress socks. I didn’t want to be known around the office as “Joe the Bloody Sock Guy.” (It would seriously undermine my plan to get known as “Joe the Large-Penised Genius.”)

  I limped into the lobby a little bit before eight A.M. and checked in again at the security desk. The guard checked my ID and made a phone call, and after a few minutes, a dark-skinned—Indian, I guessed—pretty woman in her late twenties appeared.

  “Hi, I’m Nina. You must be Joseph Mutt-Oh?” she said, mispronouncing my surname.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. “It’s Moo-Toe, actually. And I go by Joe.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Follow me.”

  I obediently trailed after her toward a set of security gates. She pressed her ID badge—suspended from a lanyard around her neck—against a sensor, and two clear glass partitions parted with a satisfying mechanical whoosh noise, letting her pass through. I did the same with the temporary paper ID that the security guard had printed for me.

  “Cool,” I muttered. “Just like Star Trek.”

  Nina looked back over her shoulder.

  “I mean, high-tech and stuff . . .” I said, trailing off awkwardly.

  “There used to be a lot less security in the building,” Nina said. “They’d let anyone come and go. But then, you know. Nine-eleven, I guess.”