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

by Joe Muto

  Sam was middle-of-the-road politically, not a hard-core conservative like some of the other staffers. But he was absolutely in awe of O’Reilly, and terrified of disappointing him.

  Also in the radio unit was Richie, the sound board operator and engineer. Thin and bespectacled, he was in his fifties, but through some sort of bizarre Dorian Gray/Benjamin Button supernatural intervention, he appeared to be not a day over thirty-five. I asked him his secret once. “Clean living,” he said, taking a bite of the apple that most days was the only thing he ate for lunch.

  And finally there was Eric, another associate producer, who was brought on a few months after I came in. (His predecessor, in an ill-fated career move, had left the show in early 2007 to work on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.) Eric’s background was in sports radio; dealing with the irate maniacs who’d call into those shows made him almost overqualified to handle our tame-by-comparison callers.

  We were a merry little band, tight-knit in a way that can only come from being locked in a small enclosed space for several hours a day—it’s a miracle none of us went nuts, as in The Shining, and ax-murdered our compatriots, the foamy walls dampening the sounds of our screams and the sickening wet thuds of the ax cleaving human flesh.38

  —

  The secret to Bill’s success, the reason why he’s such an imposing interviewer, is something that doesn’t fully come across on television: He’s one of the most physically intimidating people on the planet. Cameras don’t do him justice; all the HDTVs in the world can’t replicate the experience of standing in his presence; the sheer size of him cannot be limned from mere pixels.39 He’s a force of nature that has to be experienced in person to be appreciated, like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon.

  He’s six feet four but somehow seems taller the nearer you stand to him. He’s equipped with the classic anchorman’s giant head, but unlike many of his colleagues, it doesn’t look odd on him—probably because it sits upon equally giant shoulders. A former athlete, he still carries himself with that unmistakable jock swagger. He’s softening around the middle ever so slightly but is otherwise in remarkably good shape for a man in his early sixties. I have no doubt that I, three decades his junior, would lose a fight with him, and lose badly.

  And that voice. That golden voice, powerful and terrible, thick, rich, and warm like butterscotch syrup fresh off the stove, deep and smoldering like a lion’s growl, sounding as if he’s perpetually on the verge of breaking into a shout, even when he’s whispering.

  Everyone on the staff did the voice. Never in front of him, of course. And not to make fun of him, either, not really.40 It’s just that the voice was so infectious, so pervasive in the workplace, that it became simply impossible to tell a story about the boss without dropping your voice a couple octaves while reciting his dialogue.

  Sam was a particularly gifted mimic and would have the whole control room howling, recounting the various times Bill had dressed him down.

  “So Bill looks at me and he goes ‘MARTINEZ!’” Sam would say, nailing Bill’s clipped staccato delivery. “‘ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN HANDLE THIS JOB? IF YOU’RE NOT, TELL MANSKOFF AND WE’LL GET SOMEONE IN HERE WHO CAN.’”

  Sam took a lot of heat in my first few months, most of it unfairly, because Bill was big on assigning blame for things. If there was an issue, no matter how small, he always wanted to know whose fault it was. As the new guy, I was still under O’Reilly’s radar (I wasn’t sure he actually knew my name until at least my third month on the job), so Sam took the brunt of the punishment for any of my minor transgressions.

  And I do mean minor. The issue with Bill wasn’t that he flew off the handle for no reason—there was always a reason. The problem was that he had no sense of scale. In his book, every foul-up, no matter how big or small, was an occasion for a shouting jag. He’d get just as mad at the producer who had failed to book a desirable guest as he would at his assistant if she forgot to get mustard on his sandwich. He’d get just as angry about being given a stat that turned out to be wrong, leading to his embarrassing himself on the air, as he would about being given a research packet with the wrong font.

  And when he turned on the rage, all six feet four of him towering, red-faced, wild-eyed, and screaming, jabbing a finger in the face of whoever was unlucky enough to have provoked his ire, it was a truly terrifying experience. It was also oddly exhilarating—thrilling, even—as long as you weren’t the target. One of my fellow producers compared it to watching a tiger at the zoo mauling someone who’d wandered into its enclosure.

  “You’re powerless to stop it,” she said. “All you can do is watch and hope that he eventually loses interest and wanders away.”

  —

  The radio crew was an autonomous unit, separate from the TV staff, but we were all under the O’Reilly umbrella, so there was some crossover. We were all in on the same morning conference calls and the same twice-weekly pitch meetings. Also, about once a week, I was roped into producing a TV segment in addition to my radio duties. The associate producer was responsible for every aspect of a segment from start to finish: booking the guests, arranging transportation and a studio space, researching the topic and assembling all the information into a concise, neatly formatted document for Bill to look at, and finally cutting any tape that was needed. It was much more involved and challenging than being a production assistant, and required a lot more effort; I liked it but was also relieved to have to do it only a couple times a month, usually on days when TV was short-staffed.

  Otherwise, most of the time, Sam, Eric, and I were left alone to run the radio show as we saw fit, which was fine with us.

  I backed up Sam on the call screening as often as I could, because sparring with the crazies was the most fun way to spend the show’s two-hour length—but my main job was to wrangle sound bites, using digital recording and editing software to chop words from politicians and newsmakers into palatable twenty-second morsels for Bill to play and comment on. I’d start at seven A.M.—an ungodly early hour for me, but one I found myself enjoying because I had the whole seventeenth floor almost to myself—scouring the morning’s news for anything that caught my ear, whatever I thought was interesting or funny or that Bill might want to hear.

  At nine A.M. we’d all pack ourselves into Stan’s small office, and he’d dial Bill’s house on the speakerphone. O’Reilly would tell us what he wanted to focus on that day, picking a different topic for each hour of the show, making guest suggestions, and requesting any specific sound bites relating to the topics. After the call, I’d scramble to assemble any extra bites he’d asked for, and half an hour before the show’s noon start time, I’d print out a multipage sound sheet with transcriptions of each bite.

  Making the sound sheet was a trial-and-error process, especially the first few months. Sound bites that Bill had specifically asked for were obviously on it, but you couldn’t stop there. You had to find extras, ones he hadn’t asked for, to pad out the total number of bites on the sheet. If you didn’t have at least twelve for him to choose from, he’d complain, not to me, who had put the sheet together, but to Stan—making sure that Sam and Eric and I were in earshot when he did so.

  “Sound sheet’s a little light today, Manskoff,” he’d say. “What’s the problem?”

  He’d actually do this a lot, complain to Stan about a specific producer’s work while seemingly oblivious to the fact that the producer could very clearly hear him. I could never figure out if the oft-used move was indicative of some sort of subtle, genius, next-level management/motivational technique or rather a sign of a passive-aggressiveness so severe that it was on the autism spectrum. Either way, we’d overhear his complaint and fly into a panic, overcompensating and grabbing sound bites at a frantic pace, delivering him a supplemental sound sheet that was three times longer than the original, and setting him off with even more complaints: “You’re giving me too much information,” he’d fume. “Look at all this paper I have on my desk!”

  T
oo little information was bad; so was too much. He was the Goldilocks of cable news.

  Another obstacle with the sound sheet was figuring out which bites to give him. I knew the ones I found interesting were not necessarily going to be the same ones that would grab Bill’s fancy, and vice versa. I had to attempt a mind meld with him, anticipating what he’d want. And asking him was out of the question—he hated to be bothered with requests for information or clarification, even ones that were entirely pertinent to the task at hand. Nothing bugged him more than questions he assumed you should know the answer to, even if knowing the answer would have required telepathy. The entire staff was terrified to ask him anything, and would do so only as an absolute last resort. Over the years, I watched my colleagues jump through multiple hoops, spending hours of work tracking down answers to questions that could have been satisfied with a ten-second phone call, or a quick head-pop into Bill’s office.

  Another one of my duties before the show started was to sweep through the radio studio to make sure everything was copacetic. Other people used the studio when we weren’t in it, and they sometimes left it in disarray, which Bill hated. I checked the thermostat, making sure it was set to exactly 72 degrees, Bill’s preferred temperature. The trash can on the floor next to his chair had to be emptied of anything that might potentially give off an odor, lest a banana peel or empty yogurt container offend his sensitive nostrils. There had to be an array of his favorite pens (Bic Atlantis, blue, with the soft cushion grip) in front of him, so he could scrawl notes during the show and sign books during the commercial breaks.

  Each workstation in the control room was outfitted with a DUMP button, a glowing red rectangle about the size of a small box of matches, covered by a clear plastic flip-up safety guard to avoid accidental presses, like the LAUNCH button on a nuclear submarine. The show was on a delay of about eight seconds; each press of the button obliterated a chunk of that time. The listeners at home would most likely notice the omission, hearing a strange digital hiccup in the audio, but that was better than the alternative—allowing a burst of profanity to get on the air.

  Or even worse—Keith Olbermann’s name.

  By the time I started on The Factor, Bill O’Reilly’s feud with the then-MSNBC host had been simmering for a few years. Olbermann had started it, punching up at his higher-rated eight P.M. competition, making Bill a frequent subject of his Worst Person in the World segment. Bill foolishly took the bait, railing against Olbermann by name on several occasions. In 2006, a year before I joined the staff, O’Reilly devised an online petition to get Olbermann fired, urging his three-million-plus viewers to sign it. Keith responded with a mocking segment showing him and his whole staff lining up at a computer to sign the petition, one by one.

  The upshot of all this was that Olbermann’s ratings soared. He still wasn’t beating The Factor, but on some nights he was getting one-third or even half of O’Reilly’s audience—phenomenal numbers at the time for then-third-place MSNBC.

  Just before I joined the staff, O’Reilly seemed to come to the conclusion that fighting back was only giving material and oxygen to his hated nemesis. So he did what any rational, mature TV host would do: He stopped referring to Olbermann by name, only obliquely making references to him with the euphemism “Elements at NBC News.” As in “Elements at NBC News spew out far-left propaganda on a daily basis.” The staff obligingly played along with the euphemism, and our in-house nickname for Olbermann became simply Elements, as in “Bill, you’ll never believe what Elements did on his show last night.”

  The O’Reilly/Olbermann feud was, of course, a deeply ridiculous spectacle. Two famous millionaires who worked for multinational corporations taking petty swipes at each other on a nightly basis was profoundly embarrassing for all involved. The most amusing part is that neither man seemed to realize he was fighting a fun-house version of himself. O’Reilly and Olbermann were two sides of the same coin. They were Batman and the Joker, mortal enemies who were linked to each other through obsession but had more in common than either would admit.

  And the similarities are startling. They’re both tall men with deep voices who got their big breaks on populist entertainment shows—Bill on the tabloid show Inside Edition, and Keith on ESPN’s SportsCenter—before moving to (only slightly) more serious news programs. Both were known for abrasive relationships with coworkers and management. Both had limited self-awareness and a next to zero sense of humor about themselves.

  To give Olbermann a bit of credit, he actually did seem to be having fun poking at Bill, referring to him derisively as Bill-O and doing a mocking impression of Bill’s voice.41 When MSNBC moved their headquarters from Secaucus, New Jersey, to Rockefeller Center, just two blocks away from Fox headquarters, Olbermann procured a life-size cardboard cutout of O’Reilly (it had been used as promotional material for one of his books) and propped it up in a window of his office. The window was several floors above street level, so whatever Olbermann had scrawled in the word balloon next to Bill’s head wasn’t legible from the ground, but it was almost certainly not polite.

  While I’m not sure if Olbermann’s enmity for Bill was real, or just feigned for the ratings, O’Reilly, for his part, was completely sincere in his hatred of Elements. As far as Bill was concerned, it was not just a media feud done for show. Olbermann was O’Reilly’s obsession—his white whale—and Bill was determined to stab at him from hell’s heart with his microphone harpoon.

  Olbermann’s mockery continued, and even with Bill’s strategy of not mentioning him by name, his ratings continued to rise, so O’Reilly took a new tack, ignoring Olbermann completely and going after his corporate bosses. The average O’Reilly viewer was probably confused when Bill suddenly started attacking NBC head Jeff Zucker and Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, NBC’s parent company at the time. That marked a new degree of escalation, and eventually a secret truce was arranged by Immelt and Rupert Murdoch themselves. Word came down from above: Knock off the NBC/GE attacks. After a long, closed-door meeting with Stan, and an even longer phone call with Ailes, Bill reluctantly agreed.

  The detente lasted less than two months. Word of it leaked to The New York Times, and Olbermann angrily denied it on his show, denouncing the Times, Murdoch, and O’Reilly. Bill couldn’t let the truce-breaking go unanswered, and struck back a few days later, reporting that GE was under investigation for selling parts that were ending up in roadside bombs used by insurgents in Iraq.

  The grudge match ended for good in 2011, when Olbermann flamed out in spectacular fashion, leaving MSNBC for unknown reasons (rumors were that management was simply sick of dealing with his prima-donna ways) and taking a job with Al Gore’s fledgling liberal news network Current TV. He was, in turn, fired by them less than a year after he started.

  But we didn’t know any of that in early 2007, when I started on the radio show.

  All we knew was to keep our ears on the program, our fingers on the DUMP button, and our eyes on Bill scowling at us through the glass.

  —

  The radio show ended its seven-year run in the spring of 2009. It had never taken off to become the juggernaut its TV counterpart had become. The radio industry was too competitive, and Limbaugh’s show was too strong and entrenched. But that’s not what killed The Radio Factor in the end. After all, the show was profitable—even without the powerhouse Limbaugh stations, the syndicators were still making money, and Bill was still getting paid very well. Ultimately, what killed O’Reilly’s radio show was O’Reilly himself. Or, rather, his indifference. The show was a lot of extra work for him, and not much payoff. I’m sure that the seven-figure checks it put in his pocket each year were nice, but money had long ceased being a motivating factor for him. What he wanted more than anything was to win, and when it became clear he couldn’t do that with the radio show, he picked up his ball and went home.

  April 11, 2012—4:22 P.M.

  Stan e-mailed me in the late afternoon: Intern is out today. Can you handle
green room?

  I e-mailed back: No problem.

  The O’Reilly Factor studio is a surprisingly small room on the ground floor of the News Corp. building. The windows look out onto Sixth Avenue, but they were usually covered by retractable screens. This was done mostly to disguise the fact that the show wasn’t live at eight P.M., when it’s normally dark outside, but actually prerecorded at five in the afternoon, when the sun is still shining.42 Also, unlike the Today show, which is able to attract a diverse, sizable mob of Midwestern tourists and New Jersey soccer moms to wave excitedly outside its windows, the only people drawn to the Fox windows, on the rare occasion when the screens were left open, were elderly retirees with black socks pulled up to their knees, and irate, middle-finger-brandishing locals.

  Next to the studio was an equally small “green room,” a waiting area for show guests. In keeping with the Fox low-rent ethos, it was nothing fancy—a couch, a few battered old chairs. Two tiny alcoves curtained off in the back of the room had lights and mirrors and chairs set up for hair and makeup. There was a wall-mounted TV in the front of the room, tuned to the closed-circuit broadcast of everything taking place in the studio on the other side of the wall.

  While the show was taping, there was always a producer or intern in the green room to manage the traffic of the guests passing in and out, to convey any messages from the control room, and, most important, to handle Bill’s packets—the folders of information that a producer prepared for every segment.

  The packet was a manila folder labeled clearly with a thick Sharpie, containing several printed pages of information about the guest, a bullet-pointed summary of the topic at hand, and any relevant stats, charts, or articles. As segment producers, we sweated over these packets, sending them through round after round of sometimes excruciating fact-checking with Gayle, the fastidious executive producer and fact-checker of the TV show, making sure Bill had them a full two hours before showtime—only to have the host ignore them for most of the afternoon, finally pick them up ten minutes before he headed to the makeup chair, glance at the first page of each, and toss them aside.