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

by Joe Muto

  And then all hell broke loose.

  The Avstar program had a folder marked URGENT, a place to post memos so the assignment desks could keep the entire network informed of breaking news without spamming everyone with e-mails. Every time a new message was posted in the folder, the program made an obnoxious metallic buzzing noise, an electronic scream for attention. Most of the messages were useless—incremental updates about some international story that no shows on the network had been following in the first place (something like URGENT: PERU ELECTS NEW FINANCE MINISTER or BREAKING: ZANZIBAR POLICE CLASH WITH PROTESTERS; 2 INJURED). So ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the software would buzz, everyone in the room would immediately click over and glance at the update, then close it with a disdainfully muttered “Who gives a shit?” That had happened multiple times in the few hours I’d been in the room. So Camie didn’t even bother to click over when it buzzed again. Probably just another false alarm from the assignment desk.

  “HOLY FUCK!”

  Camie and I both jumped as Kurt Karos, the producer for the hour, yelled and smacked his work surface with the palms of his hands, rattling his keyboard.

  “Our LA affiliate is reporting that a source at UCLA Medical Center says that Marlon Brando’s dead,” Karos read off his screen.

  The control room went silent as we all absorbed the information.

  “I guess Sollozzo’s people finally got to him,” one of the front-row tech guys cracked, breaking the silence.

  “He sleeps with the fishes,” the director said, laughing.

  Carrie Lipton, the senior producer, was also studying the alert on her screen, her lips pursed as her eyes darted across the text. “Just one source for now, Kurt,” she said. “It’s still a rumor at this point. We can’t go with it yet.”

  Kurt turned in his chair to face her. “I say we do it now, as soon as we come back from commercial, or one of those assholes”—he gestured toward the ceiling-mounted bank of monitors displaying our competition—“is going to beat us to it.”

  Carrie held firm. “No, we wait. What if the report is wrong? Do you want to explain to Roger why we ran with a bullshit rumor about a major celebrity?”

  Kurt didn’t like it, but he was outranked. “Fine. I’ll light a fire under the desk’s ass and see if they can confirm it.” He picked up the phone receiver and dialed. “But if CNN beats us on this, I’m going to anger-shit my pants. I’m literally going to shit.”

  “No one is going to shit themselves,” Carrie said.

  “I bet Brando did,” a tech guy chimed from the front row. Carrie ignored him.

  “So is this fat fuck dead or what?” Kurt was barking into his phone as Carrie flipped the switch on the console in front of her that allowed her to speak to the anchor Jon Scott.

  “Jon, we’ve got word that Marlon Brando may be dead. I’m just giving you a heads-up. We’re going to alert it as soon as we can.”

  I could see Jon on the main monitor, listening to Carrie through the tiny earpiece on the right side of his head. He nodded and began pecking at the laptop in front of him. When he answered, his voice boomed from the two large, clear-sounding speakers at the front of the control room. “Are we going to go into the alert straight out of the break?”

  Carrie flipped the switch again. “Negative. We’re back in less than a minute, and we’re still waiting on confirmation. But I’ll get in your ear if we get it confirmed while you’re on air.”

  Next, Carrie picked up the phone and dialed. “Jim,” she said—Siegendorf, I realized—“tell whatever PA we have working on this hour to drop everything and pull footage of Brando in The Godfather. Also, see if we have any good b-roll of him handy. Red carpet stuff, interviews, whatever you got.” She listened to the receiver, nodding her head as Siegendorf spoke, then replied: “Well, I’d prefer young and handsome if you can dig any up, quickly. But we’ll take old and chubby if you’ve got it.” She listened for a moment more, this time shaking her head. “No, I don’t think we’ll need the full obit package just yet. Get it ready to go, though. We may run it later in the hour.” She clicked the receiver back into place.

  That was my first brush with a not-so-well-kept dirty little secret of the news industry: Fox had hundreds of slick, preproduced four-minute obituary videos filed away and ready to go at a moment’s notice for almost every prominent celebrity and politician over the age of sixty. Every once in a while if a shift was particularly slow, I’d give myself a morbid thrill pulling the obit compilation from the tape library and watching a few of the pieces. Fox was hardly alone in this practice—my understanding is that all the networks and cable channels have similar compilations. But Fox stood out with the unique spin it gave certain figures. My favorite was Bill Clinton’s, whose obit is hilariously Foxified, spending almost half the running time on Lewinsky and other bimbo eruptions. Meanwhile, the Dick Cheney obit makes him out to be a heroic freedom fighter, practically Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rolled into one.

  While Carrie was ordering up Brando’s obit package, Kurt Karos was finishing his call with the assignment desk, throwing in a few more fat fucks for good measure before hanging up.

  “All right, they’re working on it,” he announced to the room. “They think that the Associated Press might move something on it shortly. If that’s the case, we’ll have to work fast, because then the other guys will have it, too.”

  “We have an alert ready to go,” the director said. “And we’re back in thirty.”

  We came back from commercial with the anchor throwing to a reporter for an update on the Iraq War. Midway through the reporter hit, Kurt’s phone rang. He picked it up, listened for a second, then yelled out in excitement.

  “We’ve got it! We got confirmation!”

  Carrie nodded. “Dave, are you ready with the alert?” she asked the director. He grunted in assent.

  “Good,” Carrie said. “I want you to hit it straight out of this report.” The Baghdad reporter was wrapping up on-screen. Carrie flipped the intercom switch to talk to the anchor.

  “Jon, we’ve got confirmation on Brando. We’re going to hit it with an alert as soon as Baghdad is clear.” I could see him on the camera feed, nodding.

  Kurt glanced up at the rivals on the overheads. “Let’s do this, people,” he said, drumming his fingers on the desk in excitement. “CNN and MS still don’t have it. We’re going to be first with this.”

  The Baghdad update ended with the reporter saying, “Back to you, Jon.”

  “Hit that gong!” Dave the director yelled, and the tech at the console next to him punched a button. A red animated graphic swept across the screen with a whooshing noise, followed by a loud ba-bong, as if someone had struck a giant bell.

  FOX NEWS ALERT, the graphic read.

  The screen dissolved back to the anchor, his face somber, his voice even deeper than normal, his delivery slow: “This is a Fox News Alert. We’ve just received word that Marlon Brando, legendary actor, has died at age eighty.”

  The control room exploded into applause and whoops.

  Carrie was jubilant. “Nice work, everybody. Nice hustle.”

  Kurt had stood up and was extending both middle fingers at the overhead monitors. “Fuck off, CNN! Fuck off, MSNBC! Yeah! We beat you fuckers!”

  Less than thirty seconds later, CNN flashed its own alert, and about ten seconds after that, MSNBC had one up, but the celebration in the control room continued.

  We were first.

  The celebration would have been silly to me, except for one thing: It was one of the most oddly exhilarating experiences of my entire life.

  I looked at Camie. She met my eyes and just nodded. I know, right?

  April 11, 2012—11:49 A.M.

  Is it just my imagination, or are there more security guards than normal stationed in the lobby?

  I’d made it past the painting of Hannity’s bloated, mid-celebration head, down the hall to the eighteenth-floor elevators without anyone stopping me, and
caught an empty car down to the lobby.

  And now I was staring at three building security guards, standing about twenty feet away from my elevator bank, where normally there would be none.

  Take it easy. They could just be on a lunch break. It was almost noon. The lobby was swarming with lunchers, some of them on their way out, others returning with plastic bags from nearby take-out places swinging at their sides.

  One of the guards looked straight at me, pondering for a second, then slowly turned his head and said something to his two companions. And then all three turned to look at me. One of them went for the walkie-talkie at his belt.

  And that’s my cue, folks!

  It was all I could do to stop myself from running through the lengthy lobby toward the building’s back exit. I walked as briskly as I could while still appearing normal, willing myself to not look over my shoulder to see if they were following. I assumed that once I got outside, I’d be fine. This is America, after all. Sure, corporations are powerful, but they can’t just seize people on the street, right? Right?

  I powered through the revolving doors and emerged into the midtown Manhattan air, which for once smelled sweet to me. It smelled like freedom, and relief—not at all like the usual scent of curbside garbage and hobo pee.

  Once I was outside, I felt it was safe to check behind me. I turned and looked.

  No one.

  No one was following me. Gazing through the glass doors into the lobby, I couldn’t even spot the three guards who had spooked me. They had disappeared from the spot they were standing. Maybe I was right, and they were just meeting up to go to lunch together. Was I being too paranoid? Was I losing my mind?

  I had to call Gawker.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Rupert Met Roger

  Fox News was, by the time I joined it in July 2004 as a lowly production assistant, pretty obvious in its rightward lean, even as it staunchly clung to the ass-covering catchphrases “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide.” The truth was, Fox had been conceived from the very beginning as a venue for TV news with a deliberate slant.

  Liberal alarm bells went off in early 1996, when Rupert Murdoch announced that he was going to start his own cable news network to compete with CNN and the still-in-the-works MSNBC. The suspicion on the left only increased when it was announced that the head of the network was going to be Roger Ailes, a jowly, fire-hydrant-shaped former GOP operative and media consultant who had made his bones during the 1968 Richard Nixon campaign. Under Ailes’s sharp tutelage, Nixon was able to skillfully leverage television to trick the American public into believing he was a halfway reasonable human being instead of the sweat-soaked paranoid head case that he actually was. His reputation as a TV genius solidified, Ailes went on to advise more GOP presidents, most notably Bush the elder.

  With Ailes’s skill set joining forces with Murdoch’s fire hose of endless money, it seemed like a plot hatched in the bowels of the Republican National Committee headquarters.

  “Will FNC be a vehicle for expressing Mr. Murdoch’s conservative political opinions?” The New York Times asked in an article shortly before Fox News Channel went live. The Times’s question seems hilariously naive in retrospect, but the truth is that in those early years, the answer was initially unclear. Instead of the partisan firebrand it later became, the young network’s content was mostly of the anodyne “news you can use” variety. The daytime programming featured lengthy segments on travel, culture, and religion, topics to which the Fox News of later years would give screen-time only in passing. On weekends, there was a two-hour animal-themed call-in show called Pet News. If Murdoch and Ailes were aiming for right-wing indoctrination straight off the bat, they sure had a funny way of going about it.

  But some of the seeds for the future rightward lunge were already there. Hannity & Colmes, for one, was in place in the nine P.M. slot the day the network launched. H&C was a debate show featuring the robust, square-jawed, thick-haired, all-American-looking conservative Sean Hannity squaring off against the thin-haired, sickly looking, bespectacled liberal Alan Colmes. It was an article of faith around the office that the visual mismatch had been a deliberate choice by Ailes, a transparent but effective attempt to make the conservative host—and by extension his ideas—more appealing. The show had in fact been conceived from the start as a vehicle for Hannity, with the addition of a liberal foil as an afterthought. (The working title for the show was Hannity & LTBD, meaning “Liberal To Be Determined,” Colmes revealed in an interview once.) Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a fair fight, but as the show progressed, a lopsided dynamic emerged—one in which Colmes got clobbered on a nightly basis, as the aggressive Hannity held him personally responsible for every single transgression of the Clinton administration.

  My future boss, Bill O’Reilly, was also present at the launch, though his six P.M. O’Reilly Report was still clearly a work in progress; it had yet to get its eight P.M. prime-time slot and catchier name, The O’Reilly Factor. Content-wise, it wasn’t as overtly political as its later iteration—politics generally took a backseat to zeitgeisty cultural issues: drugs, gangster rap, teens gone wild, and so on. These topics jibed with his past work as the host of Inside Edition, a tabloidy syndicated news magazine show that he had brought to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With his show on Fox, O’Reilly—who had gotten his start as a straight news reporter—had editorial independence for the first time in his career, and he took the opportunity to develop the persona that eventually became his signature, the populist everyman who is protecting the average people (or “the folks,” as he loved to say) from the forces trying to harm or corrupt them: liberals, atheists, college professors, the mainstream media, and Hollywood celebrities. Bill’s brand of cranky populism was groundbreaking, and was eventually adopted as the editorial persona for the entire network.

  Essential to O’Reilly’s narrative was the pretense that he was an independent; the claim was that he wasn’t partial to the Republicans or the Democrats, the right or the left—he went after both sides, doling out scorn to whomever deserved it more. It just so happened that those on the left were the ones who deserved rebuke 95 percent of the time. The remaining 5 percent of the time when he went after the conservatives—on certain carefully chosen issues like the death penalty and climate change—gave him plausible deniability. I’m fair, I’m balanced. I call it like I see it.

  Fox launched just a few months after MSNBC, which—due to the backing of Microsoft and NBC News—was deemed by media critics as a more credible competitor to CNN. But Murdoch had given Ailes a mandate: Do whatever you can to beat CNN. And Ailes thought he had a solid strategy to do so, reasoning that the conservative hordes who flocked to talk radio were being underserved by CNN, which had a perceived liberal bias. Give those conservatives a home on cable TV, Ailes’s reasoning went, one that serves up both openly conservative opinion and conservative-slanted reporting that is thinly veiled as “straight” news, and they’ll become habitual watchers.

  The first turning point for the network came during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Fox News had started broadcasting only about a month before the ’96 elections, too late in the game to make much of an impact. Having missed a chance to beat up on Bill Clinton then, Fox made up for lost time, hammering Bubba for his illicit blowjobs. O’Reilly and Hannity were especially tenacious, and their spirited denunciations of Clinton juiced the ratings to the point where Fox’s prime time was nipping at the heels of CNN.

  Ailes’s strategy was working. He was proving that a fiercely loyal niche audience, one that watched so fervently that they literally ruined their TV screens (as I was reminded repeatedly), could bring in higher ratings than the wishy-washy broad audience that CNN was pursuing. As if to punctuate the point, in 2000, O’Reilly for the first time topped Larry King in the monthly ratings, becoming the most-watched show on cable news.

  He’s never been beaten in a monthly rating since.

  If the Lewinsky scand
al was good for Fox’s ratings, the 9/11 attacks were nothing short of great. With the whole country traumatized, viewers had little patience for middle-of-the-road nuance, and even the staunchest liberals found themselves drifting a little bit rightward.

  All the news networks went the full patriotic route following the terrorist attacks—plastering their screens with flags and red, white, and blue graphics—but Fox did it with the most relish and conviction, and the ratings soared. In January 2002, the 9/11 bump led to another ratings milestone—Fox’s network-wide numbers passed CNN’s for the first time.

  Again, the network has not been beaten since.

  Another benefit of 9/11 for Fox—it helped the network ratchet up support for the Bush agenda while maintaining plausible deniability. We’re not being partisan—we’re simply being patriotic! Consequently, Fox ended up being one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq War, with, in the words of The New York Times, “anchors and commentators who skewer the mainstream media, disparage the French and flay anybody else who questions President Bush’s war effort.”

  And this was the place I found myself working.

  When I started in summer 2004, the Iraq War had just started to go bad but was still at the Hmmm, this could be a problem stage (as opposed to the later Holy shit, what in Christ’s name were we thinking? stage). Meanwhile, the election was heating up, and the Democrats, apparently not having learned their lesson with Michael Dukakis, were serving up yet another aloof, effete Bay Stater to be shredded by the Republican attack machine. The difference is that in 1988, Roger Ailes was skewering Dukakis from within the Bush campaign—where he was alleged to be the mastermind behind the infamous Willie Horton TV ads that portrayed Dukakis as soft on crime13—while in 2004 he found himself as the head of the highest-rated cable news network in the country, able to push whatever narrative he wanted for free.