by Joe Muto
—
I suppose that, as a godless liberal, I should have been more concerned about this, but on that first day of work, watching my new colleagues spring into action, frantically leveraging the full resources of a multimillion-dollar global news-gathering operation in order to break news of a celebrity death to the world a full half minute before the competition, I was too fascinated by the spectacle of it all to register any qualms I had with the tone of the political coverage.
“Well, that was intense,” I said to Camie once the Marlon Brando fuss had tailed off. “Is it always like that in here?”
She nodded. “Oh, yeah. It gets real wild when there’s breaking news.”
“But I mean with, like, all the cursing and whatnot. Is that normal?”
She nodded again. “Sure is. It’s like a frat house. You’d think they’d tone it down a bit with me around, but no.” She paused for a second, a thoughtful look on her face. “Of course, the women are just as bad as the men. Maybe worse, in some cases.”
That was true, I found out soon enough. Most of the female producers were tough as nails, and just as profane as the guys. They had to be, really, or they’d get eaten alive because they were vastly outnumbered; while the ranks of producers were fairly evenly split between male and female, the tech guys—who filled half the slots in the control room—were almost exclusively men.
So, much to my delight, the control room was filled with constant shit-talking. They talked shit about everyone.
They talked shit about the bosses:
“When are they going to fix that fucking smell in here?”
“Those cheap asses would probably have to pay a contractor to put in more drainage . . . so my guess is never.”
They talked shit about the guests on the air:
“Mike, this guest we have on right now is not exactly a looker. Can you throw up some b-roll to cover her face? I don’t want to scare away viewers.”
“Want me to get on the headset with the stage manager and see if she can scrounge up a paper bag real quick?”
They talked shit about the anchors:
“They told me Brit isn’t sitting for the six o’clock tonight. What gives?”
“I heard he had an appointment to get the bolts in his neck tightened.”
I’d listen and laugh so hard that I’d get distracted from doing my actual job, and then they’d talk shit about me:
“Hey, kid, I’m glad you’re finding all this so amusing, but why don’t you get off your ass and bring Rick his scripts so he isn’t just sitting there with his dick twisting in the wind?”
On a typical weekday, Fox News is live from six A.M. to eleven P.M. Seventeen hours a day. For seven of those hours, Camie and I huddled at our tiny workstation in the back of the control room, printing scripts for anchors and taking turns running them into the studio. Here’s the lineup as of 2004, when I first started running scripts:
6:00 A.M.–9:00 A.M.
Fox & Friends, the morning show, featured three grinning jackasses sitting on a couch, bantering about the news. The format called for one of the anchors to introduce the story, often getting the basic facts wrong, then for the other two to join in and chat about it for a few minutes, making opinionated pronouncements that were as emphatic as they were ill-informed. They didn’t need me to deliver scripts for this show, as they had their own production assistants who worked exclusively for them. In any case, the anchors (smug blond former weather guy Steve Doocy, not-too-bright sports guy Brian Kilmeade, and uptight conservative-but-still-sexy housewife E. D. Hill) veered away from the prepared text so often that any written words were rendered essentially meaningless, lost in the verbal diarrhea of stupidity.
9:00 A.M.–1:00 P.M.
These were four interchangeable hours that, in theory, each had their own names. (Fox News Live? Fox Newsroom? World of Fox? Something like that, I think.) They were generic by design, the closest thing that Fox had to “straight” news—meaning news delivered without a strong POV. Each hour had its own staff and own anchor, and each was free to pick its own stories; but all of them still somehow ended up with an almost identical lineup of stories and guests. This was probably a testament to herd mentality more than anything. Because of their generic nature, it was considered less prestigious to be a producer on one of these shows. All the producers wanted to get off these shows and land one of the higher-profile assignments, and they figured the best way to do this was to toe the company line and do the same stories that every other show was doing. The repetitive nature of these hours led to the unflattering moniker “newswheel.” I had to run scripts for all the shows, one of which broke the Brando news.
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M.
DaySide with Linda Vester was a program with a live studio audience, sort of a low-rent, slightly newsier version of an afternoon talk show. This was a good idea in theory—the host was supposed to periodically let audience members speak, surveying them about their opinions on the day’s events. Nothing like a live audience to add energy to a broadcast, right? In practice, however, the audience was filled with bored tourists who had been reluctantly wrangled from Times Square mere minutes before the broadcast, enticed into the studio by fast-talking audience coordinators who stood on street corners promising a “REAL DEAL NEW YORK CITY LIVE TV SHOW EXPERIENCE.” This disinterested, gullible posse of onlookers was then subjected to Linda Vester, a woman who could have been a great host if only her face didn’t chronically appear to register utter contempt for the warm bodies assembled to watch her show. The end result was a tense-looking Vester stalking the aisles of the stadium seating with a handheld microphone, barking questions at obviously uncomfortable audience members and nodding impatiently, trying to maintain an appearance of interest as they stuttered out their incoherent responses. It was a glorious train wreck, but mostly I loved it because they didn’t need me to do anything, and it gave me a full hour to get lunch.
2:00 P.M.–3:00 P.M.
Another hour of the newswheel! For Camie and me, another hour of running scripts up and down the hall!
3:00 P.M.–4:00 P.M.
Studio B with Shepard Smith would have been yet another hour of the newswheel except it had a secret weapon: the anchor. Shep was whip-smart, funny, and irreverent, and his presence made for a fast-paced, witty, and endlessly watchable newscast. It wasn’t an opinion show, and was tightly scripted, but the host still managed to add his interjections between stories. It’s as though somebody figured out a way to clean up the control room banter and put it on the air. I liked delivering scripts to him.
Shep was dogged by rumors—both in the building and in the rest of the media—that he was both secretly liberal and secretly gay. It’s not clear which of those two things, if confirmed, would hurt his career at Fox more.
4:00 P.M.–5:00 P.M.
Your World with Neil Cavuto was Fox’s daily business show, timed to coincide with the market closing. The show was mostly notable for finding gratuitous ways to shoehorn tits and ass into a financial broadcast. For example, interviewing the CEO of Hooters while he was flanked by three of his waitresses—in uniform, of course—during a segment about the restaurant industry. Or doing a piece on the “economics of spring break,” and using it as an excuse to run nonstop b-roll of co-eds bouncing around Cancun in bikinis. Cavuto was utterly shameless, and quite possibly a genius, but we did not have to deliver scripts to him. He had his own minions who did it for him, while we gathered our strength for the final push of the day.
5:00 P.M.–6:00 P.M.
The Big Story with John Gibson was my last script-running hour of the day. The show was sort of an O’Reilly Lite, with the white-haired Gibson offering a more low energy version of Bill O’Reilly’s cranky right-wing populism. The outrage was the same, but the wattage was lower, the shouting muted to a dull rumble, as if a dimmer switch had been slid down ever so slightly.
At this point, my day was done. But the network kept going. Let’s run through the rest of th
e shows, just so we’re all on the same page.
6:00 P.M.–7:00 P.M.
Special Report with Brit Hume was the political roundup, which was handled entirely by Fox’s DC bureau. Hume (he of the aforementioned neck bolts), a crusty veteran newsman and former ABC correspondent, had a chip on his shoulder after twenty years of being forced to sublimate his conservative impulses, and the anger sometimes seeped into his broadcasts. That being said, the DC bureau took journalism a lot more seriously than the ratings-obsessed New York crew. As a result, the six P.M. hour was probably the most credible, serious show on our air, and was the closest thing to “straight” news we had with the exception of any time Shep was on the air. Speaking of which . . .
7:00 P.M.–8:00 P.M.
The Fox Report with Shepard Smith was basically an evening version of Studio B. But where Studio was laid-back, Report was frantic, cramming almost twice as many stories into an hour. Shep sometimes seemed out of breath as he went from story to story, the camera constantly swirling around him and attacking him from different angles as if possessed.
8:00 P.M.–9:00 P.M.
The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly kicked off the network’s prime-time lineup. Bill, as the most powerful, controversial, and highest-rated host on Fox, was also the network’s most well-known personality, a mascot of sorts. He was who most people thought of when they thought of Fox News. As someone who didn’t watch the channel that much before I took the job, he was most recognizable to me as the guy who picked a fight with George Clooney over the funds raised by the 9/11 celebrity telethon (Bill was mad because he thought the cash wasn’t being disbursed fast enough); the guy who cut off the microphone of a guest, Jeremy Glick, the son of a 9/11 victim (Bill was mad that Glick was opposing the invasion of Iraq); and the guy who got rapper Ludacris fired from a Pepsi endorsement deal (Bill was—wait for it—mad because Ludacris used dirty words in his songs).
9:00 P.M.–10:00 P.M.
Hannity & Colmes was the second-highest-rated show on the network, and don’t think that Hannity or O’Reilly ever forgot the pecking order, a source of constant tension between the two.
Alan Colmes was largely an observer from the sidelines for the eternal dick-measuring contest that the network’s two superstars were locked into. Presumably Colmes, who was a fairly smart, pragmatic guy, realized that despite the decent chemistry he exhibited with his conservative cohost, he was completely expendable—easily replaced with another liberal to be determined. Consequently, he didn’t waste any time playing ratings-based, power-trippy mind games with O’Reilly. He was just happy to be allowed in the building.
As the most openly partisan Republican show on the network, H&C attracted a fair amount of scorn and derision from the rank and file: “Goddamn, Hannity is completely unwatchable lately,” I heard one daytime producer say in the control room during one of my first few weeks. “You’re acting like it was ever watchable in the first place,” one of the techs responded. (And these were two conservatives I’d heard casually trashing John Kerry a week earlier. Even they were bored with the constant repetition of Republican talking points that the show had devolved into.)
10:00 P.M.–11:00 P.M.
On the Record with Greta Van Susteren was the final live show of the day. Greta, a lawyer/pundit who ascended to fame in the 1990s based on her analysis of the O. J. Simpson trial, had been a CNN host until Ailes poached her in 2002. She was an odd fit for Fox. She ran in conspicuously Democratic circles—her husband was a big Clinton donor and supporter. And even worse, she was plain-looking, a poor fit for a network teeming with sparkly blond prom queens in the anchor chair. But Greta’s focus was not political; she was much more interested in legal and crime stories, and rarely let her own political opinions slip into the show. And in the months before her new show started, she opted for a mind-boggling amount of plastic surgery, which, to her credit, she openly admitted to, appearing on the cover of People magazine in before and after photos.
After Greta signed off at eleven P.M. every night, the schedule went into repeats, re-airing the prime-time shows until the morning, when Fox & Friends picked things up again.
—
Aside from all the first-day excitement surrounding the death of Don Corleone, my time running scripts had flown by with little incident. Even though I got the hang of it after a day or two, Camie stayed on as my “trainer” for a full two weeks. We’d spend all day shoulder to shoulder at our cramped little workstation, taking turns sprinting the printed pages down the hall to the studio. We fell into an easy rhythm, keeping conversation to a minimum while the shows were on air, communicating in glances, gestures, flicks of the head, or arches of the eyebrows. She had a habit of fiddling with her jewelry while staring at the screen—absentmindedly twisting her strand of pearls until I thought they might break, or fingering the silver charms dangling from the bracelet on her wrist—as if the fidgeting itself might cause the senior producer’s initials to pop up next to the script’s slug line, allowing us to print. And then her sigh of relief, the sharp exhalation of breath when she saw initials finally appear in the rundown, followed by a flurry of hitting CTRL-P on the keyboard, the laser printer spitting out pages, the brief, mutually deferential tug-of-war over whose turn it was to run (“I’ll go.” “No, you went the last two times. I’ll go this time.”), then the hustling through the convoluted route that brought us to the studio, and finally depositing the bundle of paper onto the desk in front of the anchor, who was usually only half paying attention, waiting for the commercial break to end.
In our downtime we’d chat—about what school had been like for each of us (she’d gone to a small, genteel Southern college, one where the girls wore big floppy-brimmed hats and sundresses to the football games, which went a long way toward explaining her current wardrobe), about moving to New York (she felt it was a big transition, even though her hometown was only two hours away, somewhere in Connecticut), and once, briefly, about politics. I was the one who broached the topic, actually, after hearing her scoff quietly to herself while a John Kerry sound bite was playing.
“So I take it you’re pretty into the, you know, politics of this place?” I said.
“Oh, sure,” she said, nodding. “I think everyone is, right?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I’m not really that political of a guy, I guess.” I felt bad fibbing to her so soon after meeting, but I wasn’t ready to blow my cover just yet—at least not until I’d figured the lay of the land a little better.
After two weeks, it was time to split up the band. Camie had told Siegendorf that I was more than fully trained, ready to go it alone, and he’d pulled her to start on other duties.
“You sure you’re ready?” she’d asked me on our last day together.
“Piece of cake,” I said, cockily flashing her my winningest grin. “I can do this shit blindfolded by this point.”
My first screwup came two days later.
It was during the taping of Studio B with Shepard Smith. I was waiting backstage for Shep to finish a segment so I could drop off his scripts. I heard him deliver the tease that meant the show was going into the break, something like “we’ll be back in two minutes.” Taking his cue, I stepped from behind the wall and began to stride toward his anchor desk. I’d barely taken two paces when I heard a voice behind me hiss quietly but insistently: “Wait!”
I glanced over my shoulder at the stage manager, a look of panic on her face, frantically beckoning me to rejoin her backstage.
I froze in my tracks, suddenly noticing that one of the jib cameras—which was on the end of a pivoting fifteen-foot-long arm, allowing it to perform swooping vertical movements—had a red light glowing on the front and was pointing straight at me.
Red light meant on-air.
The director had apparently decided to show one last wide shot of Shep as the program cut to commercial. Studio B did this move a lot; it was a flashy little outro to show off the gleaming high-tech set. A set that currently ha
d a twenty-two-year-old production assistant standing in the middle of it, mouth agape, frozen in place with a wide-eyed stare directly into the camera lens.
The on-air light blinked off as I was looking at it.
“And, now we’re clear,” the stage manager said, stepping out from behind the wall and marching toward me angrily.
“What the fuck was that?” she said.
“Uhhh . . . I thought we were in a commercial break,” I answered.
“Well, we are now.”
“Was I in the shot?”
“Oh, yeah, you were in the shot.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said, horrified to have screwed up so early. “I’m kinda new here.”
“No shit,” she said, before turning and storming back to her post.
I sheepishly walked up to Shep at his desk and slid the stack of scripts in front of him.
He grinned at me. “If you’re trying to start an on-air career, you’re going about it the wrong way, pal,” he said, laughing.
Thankfully, word of my fuck-up didn’t get back to Jim Siegendorf, and two weeks later, I had my own scripts trainee, along with the promise that as soon as he was ready to go it alone, they’d move me along to other duties.
My trainee was a guy fresh off the bus from South Carolina with the unlikely name Red Robertshaw. Red was a natural script PA, and took it very, very seriously, sprinting through the halls even when he wasn’t pressed for time, sweating every single missed page, to the point where I was almost shamed by my own lack of effort.
Red also wore a tie to work, which I found excessive. I wore khakis and a button-down, which actually put me in the upper echelons of PA formal wear; this was mostly a jeans, polo shirt, and sneakers crowd. But Red’s tie elevated him another level above me, and I started to resent him for it. Hardworking AND well dressed? Who the fuck was this kid trying to impress?