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

by Joe Muto

  Jillian and I had been dating since junior year. She was a student at Saint Mary’s College, the small all-women’s school across the street from Notre Dame. SMC girls—often shorthanded as Smick Chicks, or Smickers—had a partially deserved reputation for being faster and looser than their ND counterparts (the shuttle bus that ran back and forth between the two campuses had been derisively christened the “Sluttle”), but Jillian wasn’t like that. She was sweet, from a good family in rural Illinois.

  Jillian wanted us to stay together after graduation, but New York City held no appeal for her. She argued that Chicago had some of the same big-city feel but was closer to home for both of us, cheaper, more livable, and just generally more within our respective wheelhouses.

  But I didn’t want to hear it. The Windy City left me cold. Yes, it shared certain characteristics with New York, but for me it would always be less than. It felt like a cop-out, a compromise. Plus, I argued (not completely inaccurately) that almost any media gig worth having was in New York. In the end, I didn’t bother applying to a single Chicago job. Jillian, who’d studied to be a grade school teacher, reluctantly found a position at a charter school in the Bronx. With all four Catholic parents frowning at the idea of our cohabiting, she rented an apartment in Greenpoint, a neighborhood just to the north of Williamsburg.

  Greenpoint had a bit of the same hipster cred as its southern neighbor but was slightly less gentrified, quite a bit cheaper, and overwhelmingly Polish. Jillian found a large one-bedroom for twelve hundred dollars a month, with a landlord who spoke broken English, and a grueling hour-and-a-half subway commute to her job in the Bronx.

  She was miserable at first, a fact that I was totally, stupidly oblivious to. How could she not love the greatest city in the world? Didn’t she know how lucky she was that I had dragged her kicking and screaming out of the Midwest?

  “For what I’m paying here, we could rent a huge two-bedroom in Chicago,” she pointed out one day when we were waiting for the subway. “Joe, we could rent a house in my hometown for this kind of money.”

  “Oh, please. You know that Streator, Illinois, doesn’t have the same cultural advantages that we have here,” I said, gesturing to the subway platform, which was empty aside from us and a middle-aged wino passed out on a bench.

  Compounding Jillian’s misery, I was barely around. I worked until eleven P.M. every night. She was in bed well before that, preparing to wake at five A.M. to start her lengthy trek to the Bronx. But since she “didn’t move to goddamn New York freaking City just to see [me] on the goddamn weekends,” I agreed to at least sleep over occasionally on weeknights. So a few nights a week, I’d take the train from the office to her place instead of mine, squeeze past the old Polish men in ribbed white tank tops, smoking pungent Marlboro Reds while sitting on her building’s front stoop, and let myself into the apartment with the copy of the keys she’d made for me.

  It would sometimes be after midnight, if the Subway Gods were working against me, so I’d creep into her apartment as quietly as I could, not turning on any lights, attempting to pull off my shoes and clothing in the dark of her bedroom.

  My efforts were usually for naught, of course, as she’d stir awake when I slid under the covers next to her. We’d talk in whispers for five or ten or fifteen minutes, exchanging battle stories about our workdays, before she drifted off to sleep again. I’d lie awake, still too keyed up to end my day but grateful to be in a city I loved with a woman I loved and a job that, thankfully, hadn’t yet asked me to turn into a storm trooper for the right or to swear allegiance to a portrait of Ronald Reagan in an occult ritual involving robes, masks, and a ceremonial chalice of pig’s blood.

  I was counting my chickens before they were hatched, in more ways than I realized.

  April 11, 2012—12:01 P.M.

  “Come on, Rufus, pick up, pick up,” I said, holding the phone to one ear and plugging the other with a finger, struggling to hear over the tumult of Times Square.

  His voice mail picked up for the third time in a row.

  I cursed, filthily and loudly enough to draw a sharp look from a nearby mother who was otherwise engaged with ushering her two young kids away from a street performer in a ragged-looking knockoff SpongeBob SquarePants costume.

  I’d decided that Rufus—whom I had belatedly remembered worked nearby at his Web developer job—was my one option for ditching the iPad. I figured I only had about fifteen minutes left before someone noticed that my “lunch break” more closely resembled a prison break. If I couldn’t get in touch with Rufus, my only other choice was to abandon my gym bag on the street. I sure as shit couldn’t go back into the News Corp. building with it. Who knew what kind of mole-sniffing forces had been marshaled in my absence? There was a good chance a corporate security team was going through my work computer at that exact moment.

  I was mentally kicking around my previous idea of bribing a newsstand guy or a hot dog vendor to hold my stuff, when my phone buzzed in my hand.

  It was a text from Rufus: What’s up?

  I texted back, pecking out my response with shaking thumbs: I need your help.

  CHAPTER 6

  Red Bull and Kool-Aid

  I could tell right away when Jim Siegendorf called me over to his desk in the newsroom that it was going to be bad news. He had a sheepish, almost apologetic look on his face. After four months on the job, I had figured out that Siegendorf, though he meant well, was a bad manager. Almost every other figure in the newsroom with any authority was brash, curt, matter-of-fact—not because they were jerks, but out of necessity. It was a matter of efficiency; they just didn’t have the luxury to beat around the bush. Time was always of the essence, and we were on constant deadline, so it was expected that when orders came, they’d be barked at you, and that you wouldn’t have a problem with it because that’s just how things were done. Pleases and thank-yous were for people with boring jobs.

  But Jim wasn’t like the rest of the bosses and producers. He was polite and soft-spoken, and naturally all the PAs and editors hated his guts for it.

  “Siegendorf? The guy’s a total dipshit,” one of the video editors volunteered to me, unprompted, during a cutting session.

  Most of the newsroom probably wouldn’t have been able to put it so pithily, but there was widespread consensus about Siegendorf’s lack of competence. The main rap on him was that he was completely worthless during crunch time. When shit hit the fan, and the control room wanted a quick turnaround on some tape, Siegendorf completely lost his head, driving everyone nuts with constant demands for status updates, when he should have just been getting out of the way and letting the PAs and editors do their jobs.

  My personal impression was that Siegendorf was a little bit addled but not all in all a terrible person to work for—but I also recognized that once underlings started speaking of you with that kind of contempt, your managerial grasp on employees was pretty much nonexistent.

  He was still my boss, regardless of what my colleagues thought of him, so I came running when he called me over, and listened politely to what he had to say.

  “Joe, I was wondering if you could help us out with something,” Siegendorf was asking me, characteristically slow-walking the request. “We have a gap and we’d like you to do us a favor and fill in on the weekend overnights. It would just be for a few weeks. You’d really be helping us out of a jam.”

  Weekend overnights? That didn’t sound promising.

  “So what would my new schedule be?” I asked.

  “Monday through Wednesday, you’d still be doing evening cut-ins, three to eleven P.M.,” Jim said. “Then you would have off Thursday and most of Friday. That would be your weekend.”

  So far so bad.

  Siegendorf continued: “Then you’d come in Friday night at one A.M. to do overnight cut-ins and do tape for Fox & Friends until ten A.M. Saturday morning. Then the same thing Saturday night into Sunday morning.”

  Friday and Saturday night, one A.M. until
ten A.M.? That sounds horrible, I wanted to say. What I actually said was “Hmmm.”

  “It will only be a few weeks. Month and a half, tops,” Jim said.

  “Hmm,” I said again.

  Jillian was somewhat less circumspect.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” she asked me later that evening when I called her from my desk in the newsroom. “I never get to see you as it is. Now you’re shitting on our weekends, too?”

  “I didn’t have much of a choice,” I said. “I’ve barely been here for three months. I want to look like a team player.”

  “You look like a sucker is what you look like.”

  “No, this will be good, baby!” I said, unconvincingly. “Now we’ll have Thursday nights all to ourselves.”

  Jillian stewed silently on the other end of the phone.

  “And, uh, Sunday afternoons, after I’ve slept for a few hours, of course.”

  “Hmmm,” she said.

  —

  “I should warn you right now—they absolutely will not use any jokes that make President Bush look bad.”

  Dave Krieger was looming over my shoulder, watching as I worked the controls of the video screener, fast-forwarding through a tape of The Tonight Show, blowing past the commercials that came between the end of the local news and the beginning of Leno’s monologue.

  It was 3:07 A.M. on a Friday night. Or was it a Saturday morning? I wasn’t sure what to call it exactly. My brain wasn’t functioning properly. Four hours earlier, I had been at a bar with Jillian and some of our college friends, enjoying myself thoroughly. And now I was at work, struggling with the temperamental shuttle wheel of a shitty, broken-down, Soviet-surplus video screener. I was already not a happy camper. And Dave’s revelation, which he tossed off nonchalantly like he was just explaining where the office supplies were kept, wasn’t helping my mood.

  Dave was one of the younger writers for Fox & Friends and had obviously drawn the short straw and been assigned to supervise me, the newest production assistant with the misfortune to get shunted onto the weekend overnight shift. One of my duties, he had explained, would be to go through the monologues of all the late-night talk shows and mark down five or six jokes that the show’s senior producers might want to use as bump-ins when coming back from commercial.

  “Wait,” I said. “What happens if a Bush joke is really funny?”

  Dave shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t use it.”

  “Well, what exactly are they looking for, then?”

  “John Kerry jokes are good. Lately they’ve been liking stuff about his wife, too,” Dave said. “Oh, and Bill or Hillary Clinton jokes? They’ll take those every time. Especially . . .” He looked around for eavesdroppers, and lowered his voice a notch. “Especially ones about Bill being fat or horny, or Hillary being a pain in the ass.”

  I frowned, just as a fast-forwarded Jay Leno popped up on the monitor in front of me, shaking hands with audience members in the front row at quadruple speed. I hit PLAY, knocking him back to his normal rate.

  “Look,” Dave said, apparently picking up my annoyance, “if it makes you feel any better, throw a Bush joke in there, but don’t be disappointed when it doesn’t make it on air. Because it won’t. Ever.”

  He checked the red digital clock on the wall, one of dozens scattered throughout the newsroom, synchronized down to the second.

  “You’d better get cracking,” Dave said. “The show starts in less than four hours, and Leno’s monologue is like forty-five minutes long every night.”

  He started to walk away, but stopped and doubled back.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he said.

  I looked up from the screen. “Yeah?”

  “No Cheney jokes.”

  —

  A month later, I was an absolute basket case, so addled by sleep deprivation that I barely had the energy to care that Jillian was mad at me. Working the graveyard shift five days a week is obviously not ideal, but that would have been a piece of cake compared to what I was doing—bouncing back and forth between second and third shift. I never had a chance to adjust my sleeping to either schedule, so I ended up just feeling tired at all times, every day of the week. Sometimes when I was transitioning between shifts, I’d be awake for thirty hours straight, the lack of sleep making me feel half drunk.

  And it probably didn’t help that I started some of the shifts three-quarters drunk. When I began the schedule, I told myself that I wasn’t going to let it totally ruin my social life. So on Friday or Saturday nights, I’d go to dinner with friends, go out to a bar with them afterward, stay for a drink or two, then hop in a cab around midnight and head for the office. I didn’t ever show up completely wasted for a shift—I was clearly too much of a professional for that—but the sleep schedule was starting to have strange effects on my body, and I wasn’t always a great judge of knowing when to stop. My college-honed tolerance for alcohol was still pretty high at the time, so I set myself a limit of three drinks before work. But three beers can end up feeling like seven when your head is already clouded from getting only a handful of hours of fitful daytime sleep.

  Dutywise, I actually enjoyed the overnight shifts. They had a certain inmates-running-the-asylum feel to them. The ship was manned by a skeleton crew, a swashbuckling band of loners and misanthropes fueled by coffee, Red Bull, cigarettes, and greasy food delivered by nearby twenty-four-hour delis. There was a light workload, and a lot of downtime; though we were technically a twenty-four-hour news network, between eleven P.M. and seven A.M. we ran nothing but repeats, interrupted only by the two-minute cut-ins at the bottom of each hour. The cut-ins were largely unneccesary, of course—just a way to keep us on our toes and to prevent us from sneaking off to one of the employee lounges scattered throughout the building and napping the night away on a beat-up couch. Ostensibly, we were there to deal with any breaking news; but realistically, news stopped breaking after ten P.M., except on the very rarest of occasions.29

  I quickly figured out that the overnights were for three kinds of people. The first type was like me—reluctantly and ostensibly temporarily on the shift, unlucky enough to be assigned to the overnight because they were new to the job and didn’t have any say in it, or a veteran under the impression that a stint on the graveyard shift would eventually advance his or her career. Those people were putting in the time, unpleasant as it was, and looking forward to eventually moving back to a better shift. The overnights were a necessary evil to them.

  The second type you’d find working overnights were those sick bastards who actually liked it. They had requested the shift, and in some cases had remained on it for years. These people tended to be misanthropes, people haters who would have been miserable on the day shift.

  Billy Lenhardt was the first one of this type that I met. A video editor, he was a few years older than I and had a thick New Jersey accent. He’d been on the night shift for three years. He was a heavy smoker and hated to indulge his habit alone; I was a social smoker and was willing to keep him company as long as he was willing to let me bum a cigarette. We hit it off right away.

  “I love the overnights,” Billy told me once at four A.M. as we stood in front of the building just outside the entrance, puffing Camels. “No one’s around to bother you.”

  “But who on the day shift bothers you?” I asked.

  “Pretty much everyone,” Billy said, laughing. “But especially Siegendorf. That guy’s a fucking idiot.”

  “But don’t you hate working at night? Doesn’t it suck to be basically nocturnal?”

  “I’ve got blackout curtains at home, so it’s easy enough to sleep during the day,” he said. “Also driving in from Jersey when I do, I’m reverse-commuting. The traffic is way better.”

  Another night-shifter who shared Billy’s misanthropic leanings was Jeremy, a middle-aged video editor who’d been with the network since day one.

  “They keep trying to stick me back on the daytime,” he told me, explaining that
the bosses didn’t like that someone with his experience—and the high salary that went along with it—was slumming it on the easiest possible shift. But Jeremy had enough seniority that he could basically tell the bosses to go fuck themselves, which he did every few months in so many words. “After a while I guess they just figured it’s easier to let me work when I want than it is to argue with me,” he said.

  He was a great editor, one of the best I ever worked with, but was laid-back to a maddening degree. There wasn’t a ton of urgency on the overnights, but every once in a while, we’d get some footage in that needed a quick turnaround.

  On a typical night, I’d burst into his edit room in a panic, tape in hand.

  “Jeremy, this hits in five!”

  He’d look up from the Minesweeper game he was playing on the computer and smile, all innocence: “Oh, I don’t know if we’ll make it, then. You’d better call the control room and tell them the bad news.”

  “Come on, I’m serious.”

  “All right, give me the tape.”

  He’d edit it, picking the shots slowly and deliberately as I watched over his shoulder and shuffled my feet impatiently.

  “Hmm, I don’t like that transition,” he’d say, frowning at the monitor. “Do I have time to go back and fix it?”

  I’d glance at the clock on the wall.

  “No.”

  “Fine,” he’d say, hitting the EJECT button and handing me the tape. “Here you go. It’s a piece of shit. Just like most of the video they put out here.”

  Jeremy was the most openly cynical person I met in my time at Fox. I’d come across others who had misgivings about the place, but they would rarely give voice to their qualms—nothing more, at least, than a sarcastic muttered aside, or the occasional eye roll. Jeremy, meanwhile, would rail at length against everything about the company. He hated the incompetent management, he hated the conservative politics, he hated the fact that they kept trying to put him on the day shift—even though he explained to them that he loathed being around too many people at once.