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

by Joe Muto

  And the hair and makeup. Oh, God, the hair and makeup. Kimberly was strikingly beautiful in person—disconcertingly so, as a matter of fact—but if she wasn’t coiffed and primped and painted properly, her severe features would warp under the harsh studio lights, making her look like the world’s most glamorous transsexual. And even on some days when the makeup was right, the hair people still went overboard, giving her a shellacked beehive that the Second Floor worried made her look like a Fembot.

  But that’s not what Suzanne was asking about that day. She was probing us for weakness, testing us to see if we’d dare diagnose what was ill about our fledgling show.

  “Is there anything you think we could do to improve the show?” Suzanne said, urging one of us, any of us, to break the awkward silence that had settled over the meeting.

  There was only one person in the room dumb enough to rise to the bait.

  “Well, . . .” I started, and all heads in the room swiveled toward me. I met Lizzie’s eyes. She had a what the hell are you doing look on her face.

  Undaunted, I stupidly pressed on. “I’m not sure that we’re doing a good job of emphasizing the whole ‘victim’s advocate’ angle that we discussed.”

  During preproduction for the show, that had been the buzzphrase tossed around by everyone—victim’s advocate. Kimberly will be a victim’s advocate! Or: This segment idea is great, but how can we approach it from more of a victim’s advocate angle? It’s the hook that would supposedly separate her from Greta, her weeknight counterpart, though I never knew quite what they meant by it.

  It was only later that I figured out it was all just a euphemism for Be more like Nancy Grace. Grace was a CNN Headline News host with a grating personality who had her own inexplicably popular crime show. A former prosecutor herself, she had juiced the ratings of the formerly moribund also-ran network by creating her own brand of angry perp-berating Southern charm. That’s what the Second Floor wanted from Kimberly.

  But after a month of shows, I wasn’t seeing it.

  It was only after I opened my mouth to say so that I realized I wasn’t offering constructive criticism so much as throwing our whole team under the bus. After all, any failure to emphasize the agreed-upon theme reflected as poorly on the staff as it did on the host.

  When we got back to the seventeenth floor, Lizzie wasn’t quite mad. But she wasn’t thrilled with me, either.

  “Hey, Muto,” she said. “In the future, if someone asks you if you can think of anything about the show that sucks . . .”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “How about you just keep your friggin’ trap shut next time, okay?”

  —

  A few weeks later, when Lizzie got back from something like her sixth meeting on the second floor, where the topic was solely Kimberly’s makeup, she flopped down at her desk in exasperation.

  “Can somebody friggin’ shoot me?” she said, miming a gunshot to the head. “If I have to go to one more of these meetings about her makeup . . .” She trailed off. “You know, if we spent half the goddamn time planning what’s going to go on the show as we did talking about how she friggin’ looks, we’d have the number one show on the friggin’ network.”

  Ratings were actually pretty decent at that point, due to a resurgence in a type of story that we began referring to as “MPWW”—Missing Pretty White Women. This had always been a fertile topic for the network (remember Laci Peterson, the murdered pregnant lady I’d almost botched my job interview over), but the spring of 2006 was sort of a renaissance of the genre.

  Leading the charge was Natalee Holloway, who I began to think of as Queen of the MPWWs. Natalee was an eighteen-year-old from Alabama who disappeared on the final night of her high school senior trip to Aruba. The last people to see her alive were three local boys with whom Natalee had hitched a ride after leaving a bar. From a crime show producer’s standpoint, the story had it all:

  The victim was a beautiful blonde who was seemingly the picture of teenage innocence.

  Her mother, Beth, was telegenic, wildly sympathetic, and extremely candid in interviews, which she gave frequently to almost any outlet that asked.

  The local authorities came off as cartoonishly incompetent buffoons who were clearly bungling the case, arresting and releasing almost a dozen different suspects during the course of the investigation.

  The main suspect, a local boy named Joran van der Sloot, was sleazy-looking and politically well connected, with a father who was in line to become a local judge (and was later accused of aiding his son in a cover-up).

  There was an endless parade of salacious rumors about the victim (She was high on drugs that night! She was secretly a slut!) and her ultimate fate (She was sold into white slavery! She was murdered and fed to the sharks! She decided to go for a night swim alone and simply drowned!). The rumors were completely unverifiable, entirely unable to be disproven, and endlessly discussable.

  And most important, there was a ton of video: Natalee looking cute performing in color guard at a football game, on the dance team at a basketball game, and in a car chatting with her friends; perp walks of all the suspects in handcuffs with their heads bowed; and hours of footage of searchers combing the beautiful beaches of Aruba.

  The Holloway case was pure, uncut cable news crack cocaine. And despite having almost no new substantial developments, we managed to cover it for several months, some nights giving up as much as two-thirds of the show to the topic.

  But even we were amateurs compared to Greta Van Susteren. We had only two nights a week to fill. Greta managed to talk about little else besides Holloway for five nights a week, and even ventured down to Aruba on several occasions. (“I hear Greta’s buying a friggin’ time share down there,” Lizzie cracked.)

  Mindful that the Natalee Holloway story could (and probably should) peter out at any moment, we scoured the news every day for other missing-girl cases that could possibly catch fire and become our next ratings bonanza. There were a few that seemed promising, but none of them ever took off the way Natalee did.

  We (the media, I mean) took a lot of flack at the time for focusing only on the missing girls who were pretty and white, but the fact of the matter is that we covered plenty of cases that involved the homely and minorities. The ratings just never followed.

  And we were shameless ratings chasers.

  I’d never realized the full extent of it until I was on The Lineup. When I was just a production assistant in the newsroom, I was completely insulated from all the hand-wringing over ratings. PAs were left out of those meetings. We were transients anyway—free agents who shifted from show to show based on the needs of the day’s schedule. It didn’t concern us one iota if the ten A.M. hour beat the eleven A.M. by 15,000 viewers. Who gave a shit? But when I joined The Lineup, I was on a true team for the first time in my career. The number of viewers suddenly became one of my paramount concerns.

  Fox has an entire department devoted to doing nothing but crunching the ratings data. The unlucky souls who toil there—constantly wrestling with columns of numbers destined to be glanced at by about three dozen people—would e-mail us every Tuesday with spreadsheets breaking down our viewership into fifteen-minute increments, as well as breaking down the proportion of our audience that was in the coveted age twenty-five to fifty-four demographic (very attractive to advertisers) or the dreaded, shunned fifty-five and older grouping (might as well be corpses propped in front of the TV). It was crude and imprecise at best, but it was the only tool we had to gauge our success or lack thereof, and we clung to it like a drowning man grasping for a life preserver.

  And what the ratings told us in early 2006 was that viewers were just not interested in any missing women who weren’t young, pretty, and white.

  “It’s racism, pure and simple,” Amy, one of the bookers, posited on a Wednesday morning as we all looked at the previous weekend’s ratings. We’d done three segments on Natalee, followed by one on a missing black girl, and the numbers had plummeted
when we made the switch. “The viewers just don’t care about someone not like them,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s what it is necessarily,” I chimed in. “There’s something special about the Holloway story. It’s like they can picture her as their daughter.”

  “Nah, it’s that they want to fuck her,” Lizzie said, laughing. “You know these horny old farts at home are getting off on that video of her in the cheerleading outfit.”

  “Want to fuck who?” a voice said loudly from the hall next to our pod. We all looked up and it was David Asman, an anchor, who’d apparently overheard while passing by.

  “Natalee Holloway. You know, the Aruba girl,” Lizzie said, wonderfully unperturbed to get caught by an anchor working blue in the office.

  Asman rolled his eyes. “Oh, brother, that thing is still going on? The poor girl is clearly dead. Can we stop talking about it already?” He walked off, shaking his head.

  —

  True story: I joined Facebook specifically to befriend an accused rapist.

  Back in 2006, years before Mark Zuckerberg’s little experiment became your aunt’s favorite way to share pictures of her cats, Facebook was still mostly for college kids. In fact, it was strictly limited to those with .edu e-mail addresses. Since I was the only one on the staff who had one, it was decided that I’d join.

  The mission: Convince members of the Duke lacrosse team to spill their guts.

  In March 2006, an exotic dancer named Crystal Mangum claimed she had been raped while she and a colleague were performing at a house party attended by several members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team. She picked three players out of a photo lineup, telling police they had trapped her in the bathroom and sexually assaulted her. The story was an instant media sensation, thanks partially to the overzealous Durham, North Carolina, prosecutor Mike Nifong, who denounced the lacrosse players in several interviews, and vowed to secure convictions. It was also irresistible cable news fodder—a powder keg of race and class issues: The accuser was black and poor, while the suspects were white and from affluent families.

  I had a mixed opinion of the case. On the one hand, the players came across as total dickheads—fratty, entitled jocks who had mistreated the performers they’d hired. (One of them reportedly yelled, “We asked for whites, not niggers,” as the strippers drove off. Another wrote a nasty e-mail to his teammates after the party, vowing to hire more strippers but this time “killing the bitches” and “cut[ting] their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex”—apparently an ironic reference to the book American Psycho, a nuance that was lost on most cable news viewers.) My alma mater, Notre Dame, actually had quite a bit in common with Duke: Both were academically well-regarded schools whose student bodies primarily consisted of well-off white kids; both were situated in economically depressed towns with large minority populations that had a sometimes tense relationship with the university; both schools aspired to cultivate an Ivy League reputation but were hampered by powerful athletic programs that sucked up all the oxygen on campus, giving rise to a drunken, privileged jockocracy that was worshipped by the other students and given free rein by the administration. So I could sympathize with those who said the chickens had come home to roost for the Athletes Gone Wild.

  But on the other hand, the case stank to high heaven.

  The accuser had been extremely intoxicated on the night in question; cops had found her passed out in a parked car. Then she had picked the suspects out of a photo spread that consisted only of members of the lacrosse team, with no random faces in the mix—a clearly illegal procedure that even the police admitted would probably not hold up in a trial. And two out of the three suspects she had identified ended up producing airtight alibis, proving that they weren’t even at the party at the time of the alleged assault.

  The evidence that the accuser was lying kept adding up, and eventually became overwhelming. Even though we at The Lineup could tell the case was bogus, our status as victim’s advocates—and the continued high ratings we were pulling—meant we had to keep pursuing it.

  And that’s how I found myself Facebook messaging dozens of college athletes, with a surely enticing proposition: We know you turned down the Today show and Good Morning America and 20/20, and dozens of other high-profile shows, but we thought you might be interested in coming on a small cable news program that no one’s ever heard of, because the host is a super-hot lady, and the production assistant is young and hip and speaks your language, as proven by his reaching out to you through Facebook, a site he joined just a few days ago for the express purpose of contacting you.

  Unsurprisingly, the responses did not come rolling in. My messages were completely ignored, with the lone exception of a freshman midfielder, who was kind enough to get straight to the point:

  dude fuck you. seriously.

  If only he had seen my sweet tie, he probably would have changed his tune.

  —

  On Saturday night, Geraldo Rivera strutted down the center aisle of the newsroom as if he owned it. Which, for all intents and purposes that evening, he did.

  Flamboyant, and more than a little eccentric, the seasoned anchor and reporter stood out in the buttoned-down world of Fox News. In 2006, he was in his early sixties but looked barely a day over forty. He had a thick, jaunty mustache, a luscious head of hair, a smoking-hot wife, a fully stocked bar in his office, and a waterfront mansion in New Jersey that he sometimes commuted from in a speedboat. Basically, he was James fucking Bond. The rank and file adored him in all his ridiculous glory. That Saturday night, he wore a skintight black muscle shirt, the better to show off a pair of powerful guns that put my flabby, decades-younger arms to shame. Even though it was nighttime, and he was indoors, he was wearing sunglasses with lenses tinted an absurd shade of bright amethyst.

  He had been mostly absent from the newsroom the past few months, working on the syndicated weekday tabloid show that had been birthed as a vehicle specifically for him—The Lineup had actually been created to take over the weekend time slot that he’d vacated. But when the war between Israel and Lebanon started in July 2006, it proved unexpectedly popular with the viewers, who were apparently suckers for the Bruckheimer-esque, explosion-filled rocket attack footage the wire services were feeding us on a daily basis. The bosses decided that a heavyweight presence was needed to handle the weekend coverage. When it turned out none was available, they went with Geraldo. The staff of The Lineup had been pressed into service to support his efforts.

  Geraldo was both widely beloved and widely mocked by the other employees. Something about his personality, his very presence, was so silly and so over-the-top that it was as impossible to dislike him as it was to not ridicule him. He was arguably the only on-air personality in the entire network who didn’t owe his success to Fox News and Roger Ailes—he had been famous long before Fox even existed. As a consequence, he was given more leeway than almost any of the other talent and was the highest-profile, openly liberal anchor we had. But he never let his personal politics trump his tabloidy love of drama and spectacle. And since nothing was more dramatic and spectacular than war, he was totally in his element with the Lebanon coverage.

  It was actually a perfect time for the Mustache Man to reclaim his weekend perch: Kimberly Guilfoyle was out on maternity leave a few months after eloping to Costa Rica with her baby daddy, the heir to a high-end furniture company fortune; and there were no compelling crime stories in the pipeline—the Duke lacrosse story had cooled off after the DA’s case had more or less imploded, and even the old standby Natalee Holloway case had entered a dormancy period.35

  After the show that night, we all went to Langan’s, a bar on Forty-Seventh Street, just a few steps away from the office. The Irish pub was a popular after-work hangout for Foxies, to the point where we’d jokingly refer to it as Studio L, as if it were an off-site extension of headquarters. The bar had garnered a reputation for being a journalists’ haunt even before Fox adopted it, catering for
years to hard-drinking New York Post writers. (The longtime columnist Steve Dunleavy, a legendary lush, had passed out in the joint so many times that they’d formally dedicated a stool to him and etched his likeness into a commemorative frosted-glass plaque that hung above the bar.) And now my staff, along with the staff of our sister show, The Big Story Weekend, which aired in the hour after us, had commandeered it as our unofficial clubhouse, heading there every Saturday and Sunday after the show was finished taping, and often staying until closing time.

  That night, Geraldo and some of his crew had come with us.

  “First round’s on me, guys!” Geraldo shouted as soon as he walked into the joint, setting off applause and high-fiving from the twenty or so producers and production assistants who had commandeered an entire corner of the room. Geraldo slid his AmEx “Black” card across the bar top and ordered a whiskey on the rocks for himself.

  It was only after I started working for The Lineup that I understood the forces that drove newsmen to drink. We sacrificed our entire weekends and any semblance of a social life, chasing down cripplingly depressing stories about murder, rape, and mayhem. We simply had to drink together after work, as a release valve more than anything. And it wasn’t that none of us had other friends, or other places to be. But more often than not, we shunned those other commitments in favor of the post-show bacchanalia at Langan’s. And our non-Fox friends, if they knew what they were missing out on, probably would have thanked us for it, because frankly, after coming off a show taping, we were downright unpleasant to be around—stir-crazy from being cooped up all day; cracking dark, demented jokes about missing teenagers; and so eager to inhale any and all booze in sight that the bartenders sometimes had to pretend they’d run out of our favorite liquor to stop us from taking yet another round of shots.