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

by Joe Muto

  Luckily, I was very good at it—my film and television major, the one my father had worried would leave me completely unemployable, had actually left me overly prepared for the field I was in. I worked fast, I picked video that was visually interesting, and—most important—I was unflappable under pressure. I was the anti-Siegendorf. My boss tended to lose his head when the heat was on; I was the exact opposite—in times of extreme stress, I was able to achieve maximum focus, becoming incredibly calm and tuning out all distractions until the emergency was over.

  At the end of a month of training, Marybeth had taught me everything there was to know about videotape. I was moved full-time to the evening cut-in unit, which was a small team consisting of two PAs, a writer, a producer, and an anchor. We’d start work at three P.M., when the newsroom was still bustling with activity, and finish at eleven P.M., when it was mostly empty.

  My producer in those first few months was a wry, blond twenty-eight-year-old name Angie. She’d started with Fox straight out of New York University as a production assistant, and had climbed her way up the ladder from there.

  The writer was a crusty old-timer, a salt-and-pepper-bearded former National Enquirer reporter named Lenny. In his downtime—when he wasn’t griping about how much he hated John Kerry and his wife, Teresa—he’d regale me with stories about digging through the trash cans at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch during the King of Pop’s first molestation trial, or digging through trash cans at Gianni Versace’s Miami mansion after the fashion designer’s murder, or digging through trash cans at John Bobbitt’s house after his de-penising.

  “Believe it or not, I miss it a little,” Lenny said wistfully one night. “It was a dirty job, but it was real investigative journalism, you know? Not like this mindless repackaging of crap that we do now.”

  I actually found this crap to be pretty interesting, at least as far as the process went. I suppose it wasn’t journalism, per se, in that we didn’t do any original reporting or investigating. We’d simply take the reporting of others—most often the wire services, Associated Press or Reuters—and compress it into tidy, two-minute updates that aired once an hour.

  Angie, as the producer, got to pick the stories. Two minutes was enough time for about four or five items of twenty to thirty seconds apiece. She’d pull stories from the wires and copy the text into the rundown. Lenny would go through and reword them, condensing and simplifying them so they’d sound good when read aloud.

  “The key is to be concise,” Lenny told me. “No big words, or words with lots of syllables. Leslie tends to trip over those.”

  Leslie Stuart was the anchorwoman in our unit. She was a statuesque blonde, with about an inch of height on me in bare feet. (Once you added high heels and the ludicrous beehive helmet that the stylist tortured her hair into every afternoon, she towered over me by almost a full foot.) Despite making six figures for what amounted to about sixteen minutes of actual work spread out over an eight-hour shift, Leslie seemed to be miserable in her job. She’d spend her downtime e-mailing her agent imploring him to convince the bosses to give her a better gig.22 When she wasn’t doing this, she spent her time nodding her head vigorously in agreement with Lenny’s anti-Kerry barbs and, if I didn’t know any better, flirting with me and some other male production assistants. (Yes, I know it sounds unlikely that the hot Amazonian anchor was flirting with me. Believe me, I was just as incredulous then as you probably are now. But years later, I saw her on TV, saying that she had been a serious alcoholic during the time I was working with her, so that would explain a lot.)

  After more than three months on the job, I was content. I was pretty settled in and—dare I say—happy. The work was challenging and occasionally entertaining. My schedule was a little strange, but as the exact opposite of a morning person, going in to work at three P.M. appealed to me. And aside from Lenny’s constant conservative patter (“I’m so sick of this horse-faced windsurfing ass and his bitchy ketchup wife,” he’d complain), I wasn’t routinely being confronted with the right-wing ideology I’d been so concerned about before I took the gig. I knew it was there, of course—on the TV screen, in the newsroom, all over the executive offices of the second floor—but I was finding it increasingly easy to ignore or laugh off.

  I don’t know what was more disturbing: that I felt myself slowly sinking deeper into the foxhole, or that I was no longer worried about it.

  April 11, 2012—11:55 A.M.

  I hung up the phone with my Gawker contact and tried to calmly, rationally assess the situation. If they didn’t suspect me already, I figured I had fifteen, twenty minutes max before my absence would start to raise the alarm.

  My bag with the telltale iPad was still hanging off one shoulder. I had to stash it somewhere. But where? My apartment in Brooklyn was too far away, at least an hour’s round trip. I flipped my mental Rolodex through various possibilities. Ask a newstand guy to hold it for me? Bribe a cabbie to drive it back to my apartment? Put it under a bench or some other out-of-the-way spot and just pray that it didn’t set off a security panic, or simply get taken?

  Then it came to me: Rufus.

  CHAPTER 5

  A White Devil in Brooklyn

  New York City was always the place for me.

  My decision to throw over any misgivings I had about working for Fox was spurred almost entirely by my intense desire to live in New York. I had been infatuated with the city from a surprisingly young age.

  My first glimpse of New York must have been the movie Ghostbusters, which I saw on home video at a family friend’s First Communion party when I was five years old. While the adults were in the backyard drinking and chatting, the kids were in the den watching movies. I wasn’t a brave child—the film’s climactic rooftop scene with the androgynous lady demon Gozer absolutely scared the training pants off me. But after the dust—and the melted, flaming Stay Puft Marshmallow goop—had cleared, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: move to New York City and work as a ghostbuster.

  My dream-crushing mother kept insisting that it wasn’t going to be a viable career option, but I would not be deterred. All I knew was that somewhere in America was a city where wisecracking paranormal-expert scientists, sarcastic mayors, Hasidic Jews, and binge-eating slime ghosts all existed in relative harmony, and I was going to live there when I was a grown-up.

  My first visit was with my family when I was twelve years old. I’d been urging my parents to make the trip for years, but it was only after the invention of the Nintendo Game Boy and its child-distracting narcotic effect that they had agreed to load up the minivan and make the six-hundred-plus-mile trek. It was the summer of 1994, just a few months into the Rudy Giuliani administration, and well before his vaunted cleanup of the city’s grit and grime. While I was disappointed that there were no Slimers hanging around, I was transfixed by the squeegee guys and three-card monte dealers, whom Giuliani hadn’t yet chased out of Times Square.

  The most indelible part of the trip for me is an incident that probably should have, in retrospect, scared me away from the place. I was walking with my family in midtown. We were on our way to see FAO Schwarz or Rockefeller Center or one of those other things that tourists dragging children around Manhattan are always on their way to see.

  Moving as a family unit down the sidewalk, we approached a guy with dreadlocks, perched on a little stool on a street corner, hawking novelty umbrella hats out of a duffel bag. His business model was suspect, since it wasn’t raining out, nor particularly sunny. (Though, to be fair, visitors to New York will buy all kinds of stupid headgear, as my eight-year-old sister’s foam Statue of Liberty crown attested.)

  “Umbrella hats! Five dollars!” the man called as we walked past, quickly and accurately pegging us as tourists. If my sister’s pointy green foam visor hadn’t tipped him off, my father’s neck-strapped camera, calf-high white socks, khaki shorts, and neon-orange fanny pack probably did the trick.23

  Now, the correct “New York” thing
to do is to cruise past street vendors, panhandlers, and other annoyances without pausing or making eye contact. But my dad, polite to a fault, couldn’t do it.

  “No, thanks. None for us today, sir,” he replied cheerfully, and kept walking.

  I was a few paces behind him and the rest of my family, so only I heard the vendor’s response.

  “White motherfucking devil,” the man grumbled angrily, scowling at my dad’s back, which was by then twenty feet down the sidewalk. I stopped and stared goggle-eyed at the cursing umbrella-hat man. He looked at me and shrugged.

  I ran to catch up with the family. “Hey, Dad,” I said, tugging at my father’s shirtsleeve. “That umbrella-hat guy just called you a . . . ‘white mother effing devil.’”

  “He did what?” My father shot an alarmed glance back at the vendor, who was still glaring after us. “All right, let’s just keep moving, Joseph,” my father said, shooing me along. “Where are your brother and sister?” He circled to round up my younger siblings, lest they, too, have racial invectives hurled at them by crazed, novelty-hat-peddling street people.24

  Perversely, the incident made me want to live in New York even more. I wasn’t scared. I was fascinated by the raucous, chaotic mashup of culture and people. Every other place I went to seemed sleepy and boring by comparison.

  —

  Ten years later—almost to the day—I’d finally made it to the city, albeit as a couch crasher. Sloane was a gracious host, and insisted that I could stay as long as I needed to. But after two weeks, I started to sense that her patience was wearing thin. I got the hint after the third time I borrowed her laptop only to find the Web browser suggestively cued up to the Craigslist apartment rentals section. I figured I had two options: find my own place, or seduce her. Since an awkwardly botched flirtation freshman year had convinced Sloane and me that we were better as friends, and only friends, I quickly settled on the former.

  That being said, after ten minutes of online perusing of the terrifying apartments that were in Manhattan and were actually in my price range, prostituting myself for lodging was looking like an increasingly attractive option. The only thing stopping me was that I was already basically whoring myself out in my day job, so it seemed ill advised to follow the same path on the domestic front.

  For the second time in a few months, Rufus Banks came to the rescue. He e-mailed me with the news that he’d gotten the job with FoxNews.com and would be moving to New York within the week. He proposed that we become roommates.

  Since Rufus had spent the previous summer in the city and knew the lay of the land better, he took the lead in our apartment search. I told him that my budget was eight hundred dollars a month for my half of the rent. So we agreed that we’d look for a two-bedroom apartment for no more than sixteen hundred dollars a month in a cool Manhattan neighborhood like the West Village or SoHo. The first real estate broker we talked to—once he had finished shrieking with laughter—told us that we’d either have to double our budget, find a third roommate willing to split a one-bedroom three ways, or look in another borough.

  So that’s how we ended up in the northern part of Brooklyn, in a rapidly gentrifying former industrial neighborhood called Williamsburg. The area was one of the indirect beneficiaries of the aforementioned Giuliani-era cleanup of Manhattan. As crime and garbage diminished in the late 1990s and early 2000s, demand went up—along with rents—in all of Manhattan, including the East Village, a formerly affordable haven for artists and musicians. When the bohemian element of that neighborhood was priced out, they fled to the next most logical place: directly across the East River to “Billyburg.”25

  Currently, in 2013, the gentrification is complete, and rents in Williamsburg rival and sometimes exceed those in Manhattan. However, when Rufus and I moved there in the summer of 2004, the neighborhood was still a little marginal, with new construction plunked uneasily into enclaves that hadn’t seen any serious development since the Eisenhower administration. We settled into a building that—judging from the wet paint and construction detritus that still littered the halls—the builders had finished working on roughly six hours before we moved in. It was a decent-size two-bedroom, and the rent was just slightly above our budget—nine hundred dollars apiece—which we found out later was actually cheap for the neighborhood, possibly because the block was, according to the broker, “a little ethnic.”26

  The nonethnic denizens of the neighborhood were mostly skinny, artsy-looking white kids in their twenties. The men all had facial hair and wore skinny jeans, plaid shirts, and Fidel Castro–style green military caps. The women all had severe, straight bangs and wore vintagey-looking dresses paired with heavy boots. Tattoos and chunky-framed glasses were abundant among both sexes.

  These, Rufus informed me, having encountered them himself the previous summer, were known as “hipsters.”

  I hadn’t run into this particular subculture before. My college had skewed heavily toward the preppy/jock end of the spectrum. Hipsters at Notre Dame would have been regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

  But now the tables were turned. I was the outsider. Walking to the subway in the morning in my work clothes, I suddenly felt like a corporate stooge in a way I never had while staying with Sloane. In Murray Hill, I was just another working stiff. In Williamsburg, I stuck out like a narc at a rock show.27

  It’s generally against the hipster ethos to rise early, so while I was still on the early shift, I had the streets mostly to myself during my five-minute walk to the subway. But after I transitioned to the afternoon tape shift, I’d head toward the subway at two P.M., passing three invariably packed coffee shops on my walk. I could sense the disdain of the customers as they gave me withering glances and eye rolls from behind the screens of their Apple PowerBooks. (If they had known who I actually worked for, they probably would have spilled into the street en masse and throttled me with their wallet chains in an angry rage.)

  The weekends were a little less fraught with anxiety about fitting in. My college T-shirt collection served me well in this regard, giving me at least some faux-hipster cred. I wouldn’t fool anyone up close, but from a distance, at least, I didn’t immediately scream “Sellout.” I even briefly flirted with wearing an ironic trucker hat, shamefully giving in to a trend that in the summer/fall of 2004 still had about ten minutes of popularity left. I’m proud to say that I never did give in to the skinny jeans trend, though that probably had less to do with any aversion to being a fad chaser, and a lot more to do with my having chubby legs.

  Brooklyn wasn’t quite where I had envisioned myself, and there was nary a ghostbuster in sight, but none of that could detract from the fact that I’d made it: I was a New Yorker.

  —

  It’s a cruel twist of fate for the employees of Fox News to be headquartered in New York City, the East Coast capital of smug liberalism—and I say that as a proud, out-of-the-closet smug liberal. It’s terribly damaging to the psyche to have to live and socialize in a city where the vast majority of residents absolutely despise your livelihood. Strangers I met at parties or dinners were surprisingly quick to criticize my employer. Innocent, polite inquiries about my profession could suddenly turn on a dime and become angry, haranguing sermons on the evils of Fox News.

  “Ugh, how can you work for those people?” someone I’d met only minutes before would ask, scowling into her wineglass. “They’re, like, practically fascists.”

  The above exchange falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of reactions that I’ve gotten. The worst response I ever had was from a girl who just stared at me, horrified, then shook her head and wordlessly turned and walked away. Usually, the best I could hope for was a startled “Oh!” followed by a cautious “That’s so . . . interesting . . . Do you like working there?”

  The honest answer to that question was, for most of my tenure at Fox, “You know what—it’s not so bad! And screw you for judging me.” But try telling that to an angry liberal wielding a champagne flute
just one bash on a countertop away from becoming a deadly weapon. So over the years, I practiced a variety of deflections:

  Apologetic (“Don’t worry, I’m not one of them.”)

  Cynical (“Hey, I’m just doing my part to make sure the misinformed people stay misinformed.”)

  Jokey/conspiratorial (“Don’t tell anyone, but I’m secretly bringing the place down from the inside.”)

  Resigned to my fate (“Ehh, it’s a living!”)28

  Finally, I figured out that my best strategy was simply vagueness from the very beginning. “I work in TV news,” I’d say to anyone asking about my livelihood, hoping there weren’t any follow-up questions.

  Rufus, in the years that he worked for Fox, was much more confrontational whenever he got a hostile questioner. Argumentative by nature, he loved when people dared to question his employment.

  “Oh, yeah?” he’d say. “Where do you work?”

  When the person answered, invariably with some inoffensive but soulless corporate job, Rufus would grin and hit them with the kicker: “So you’re not exactly saving the whales either, are you?” he’d say, cackling devilishly as the unwitting victim sputtered with indignation.

  I found Rufus’s strategy more satisfying than my own, but I usually tried too hard to be affable to follow his lead. I did love watching him execute it, though. I would smile and watch in silence as he reeled the victim in and then sprang the trap with relish.

  I was unspeakably disappointed when Rufus eventually left Fox before I’d had the pleasure of seeing him get confronted by someone who actually worked for Greenpeace.

  —

  Rufus and I lived together, worked for the same company, went to the same bars on the weekends, had the same taste in movies and television and food; our bromance was almost perfect. But one thing got in the way: my girlfriend.