by Joe Muto
4:45 P.M.
Bill heads down to a private room in the basement to get his hair and makeup done. A device that Ailes had installed in every green room in the building methodically sucks the life force out of five adorable baby puppies and deposits it into Bill’s face, keeping him fresh and youthful-looking for one more day.
5:00 P.M.
Showtime!
6:00 P.M.
Show’s over. A quick wipe-down with a hot towel in the green room to get rid of the makeup and puppy tears.
6:05 P.M.
Back to the O’Reilly pod for the show’s postmortem meeting, where we’d discuss what went right and wrong that night. These were short and uneventful normally, consisting of nothing more than Bill looking at the big bulletin board, sighing, and saying, “That was okay tonight. I think we might get away with that.”
6:10 P.M.
O’Reilly gets into the town car to head home, warming up his vocal cords in case Carl the driver takes yet another wrong turn.
April 11, 2012—6:18 P.M.
They didn’t have me dead to rights, but they were close enough.
In the end, what did me in wasn’t my writing or an intercepted e-mail between me and my handlers at Gawker. It was the video clips.
In mid-2008, the network had finally transitioned from the antiquated physical videotape system it had been using. The tapes, which were recycled and reused over and over, were literally falling apart, disintegrating before our very eyes. The technology—which had been state-of-the-art when the network was founded in 1996—was so obsolete by 2008 that the manufacturer had stopped making both the tapes and the machines that played them.
CNN and MSNBC had transitioned to a digital, tapeless, cloud-based video system years earlier, but Fox was a holdout—most likely, the video editors all agreed, because of the cost. That was a ridiculous excuse for an organization as awash in money as Fox News, but very much in keeping with their stinginess on nearly everything else. The product making it to air was just good enough that everyone could live with it.
The eventual impetus for switching to tapeless was the 2007 launch of Fox Business Network, the ill-conceived competitor of CNBC that Rupert Murdoch tapped Roger Ailes to develop, hoping he could re-create the lightning-in-a-bottle success of Fox News.55 Fox Business was built from the ground up with a new video system, which was adopted by Fox News a few months later. The system was plagued with problems, crashing on an almost weekly basis, and was so technologically backward that it led me to stupidly believe that my activities weren’t being constantly monitored.
I’d been banking on the incompetence of our tech department. As it turns out, they were really only bad at their day jobs—keeping the video system up and running. When it came to sniffing out corporate espionage, they were, in fact, VERY, VERY GOOD AT IT.
“Do you have any idea,” Diane the lawyer asked, “why someone using your account, your username, would have accessed the clips that ended up on Gawker?”
“No, I honestly have no idea how that could have happened,” I lied.
The man from the IT department had just finished laying out his case for a full ten minutes. As I’d correctly predicted, the records—which were erased every seven days—didn’t show that I’d downloaded any clips. As I hadn’t predicted, they did show that I’d looked at them. A simple process of elimination search revealed that I was the only person in the company who’d looked at the source videos for both clips that had leaked. It wasn’t proof, but it was close enough for me to be the only suspect.
“Joe, you have to trust me on this,” Diane was saying. “Everyone in this room just wants what’s best for you. We all hope that you can give us some sort of reasonable explanation as to why someone using your account would have viewed these clips. Stan here has been sick to his stomach all day, hoping that it isn’t true, that you’re not the guy.”
I looked at Stan, who was nodding slowly, sadly, and I felt sick, too.
CHAPTER 15
I Think He Said the Sheriff Is Near
It was an article of faith among conservatives, and among the on-air hosts at Fox, that in 2008, the liberal media fell for Obama, and they fell hard—hook, line, and sinker.
And to that I say: Bullshit.
Obama didn’t even need all that fancy fishing equipment to land us. We just jumped right into his boat.
Okay, maybe I’m not being fair. I honestly can’t speak for my colleagues at other news organizations. I can only speak for myself, a liberal member of the conservative media. A few weeks into the 2008 primary season, I found myself sitting at my desk at work, welling up with honest-to-God tears, watching the “Yes We Can” video on YouTube.
So, yeah, I wasn’t a tough catch for Barack.
For those of you who don’t remember, the video featured will.i.am—the absurdly named leader of the Black Eyed Peas, America’s favorite source for wedding-and-bar-mitzvah-appropriate hip-hop—along with John Legend, Scarlett Johansson, and a bevy of C-List actors and musicians singing along with an Obama speech.
The video was cheesy and painfully earnest, with a complete lack of irony and several baffling celebrity cameos (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? The little sister from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?). It was worshipful and propagandistic in a way that the most egomaniacal, messianic third-world dictator could only dream of. And, as evidenced by the tears in my eyes, it was completely effective.
I realized at that moment: Hillary Clinton is fucked.
I had been a big Hillary supporter up until that point, mostly owing to my admiration of her husband. There was something very appealing to me about Bill. He was a rascally horndog good ol’ boy who was also a Rhodes Scholar with one of the most vibrant, brilliant political minds in American history; he could fulminate at length on the crisis in Darfur one day, then chase tail around like a drunk frat boy the next.
Beyond my love for Bill, I had to admit that Hillary was an unexpectedly kick-ass senator, serving my adopted home state very well. Combine that with the fact that both Clintons had the unique ability to drive conservatives absolutely out of their minds, and she’d had my vote from the minute she entered the presidential race.
But all of that had changed with those first few strummed guitar chords in will.i.am’s song. By the time the song had finished playing, it was all over for me. I was an unapologetic Obamaite, through and through, and I would never look back.
—
Fox had been caught completely flat-footed by the Obama phenomenon.
When he announced his campaign in early 2007, the reaction from the network was a collective yawn. No one, myself included, thought he stood a chance against the Hillary juggernaut.
O’Reilly was one of those yawners. At the time, he was actually on a major antipolitics kick. He’d get annoyed at the meetings when we’d try to pitch him political stories.
“No one is going to care about this stuff until November or December at the earliest,” he’d groused one day. “So I don’t want to hear it until then.”
On the rare occasions that we dipped a toe into the presidential race, it was to cover John Edwards, the oily, impressively coiffed former ambulance chaser that O’Reilly had a surprising amount of personal animosity toward. (He was horrified when Edwards decided to stay in the campaign following his wife’s March 2007 cancer diagnosis, and later picked a fight with the candidate over the exact number of homeless veterans.)
It was true that the network was suffering from politics fatigue—or, more accurately, Bush fatigue. The hosts were tired of carrying water for a president whose popularity was in the dumpster. The producers were tired of covering an administration that had rudely refused to spawn any scandals that were remotely sexy (unless you count Dick Cheney unloading a shotgun into some poor senior citizen’s face a “scandal”). Most distressingly, the viewers were getting tired, and ratings sagged.
We needed something else to talk about, and Hillary was widely viewed as a potential savior for the network. She was a longtim
e favorite target of the right, which attacked her with arguably more relish than they attacked her husband. Fox—which wasn’t around until late 1996—had missed all the really good Hillary-bashing years of the early 1990s, and you could sense that some people in the building were licking their chops for another crack at her.
As 2007 wore on, it looked more and more like a Hillary cakewalk. Nobody thought the shiny-haired John Grisham character, or the skinny black guy whose last name rhymed with “Osama,” were going to be serious impediments to her dominance.
Then Iowa happened.
The Iowa caucus on January 3, 2008, changed everything. With the Christmas and New Year’s breaks as distractions, most people at the network had been ignoring the polls, the assumption being that Hillary was going to walk away with it. But Obama won, beating the second-place Edwards by almost eight points. Hillary was a few tenths of a point behind Edwards, for a humiliating third place.
“Why didn’t we know about this?” Bill said on the conference call the next morning. “No one saw this guy coming.”
“The Hillary campaign sure didn’t,” said Stan.
It was decided that Bill needed to procure an interview with the newly minted front-runner, by any means necessary. Eugene chimed in, pointing out that no one from the Obama campaign would return—or even acknowledge—his calls or e-mails.
Bill thought for a moment. “We’ll just go to New Hampshire, then. We’ll go to one of his rallies. It’ll be me and a cameraman. He’ll have to talk to me if I’m right there in front of him.”
“That’s the plan?” I said to Sam when the call ended. “What’s he going to do? Just go stand behind a rope line and shout at Obama until he agrees to an interview?”
“I’m sure he’s got a better idea than that,” Sam said.
As it turns out, no—no, he didn’t.
A few days later, Bill was behind the rope line at a weekend Obama rally in New Hampshire, cameraman in tow. He had positioned himself so that the candidate would be forced to walk past him on his way out of the arena. It wasn’t quite a Watters-style ambush, but it was close—he’d either be leaving that venue with footage of Obama speaking to him or the senator running away. The former would be great; the latter would be almost as good.
One Obama campaign staffer, a man named Marvin Nicholson—notable for his extreme height, several inches taller than Bill, even—took it upon himself to make some mischief for the Fox News crew. As the rally ended and Obama made his way toward the area where the media was encamped, Nicholson casually ambled over to O’Reilly’s position and planted himself in front of the camera, completely obscuring the shot.
“Hey, stop blocking the shot, pal!” Bill thundered at the aide, who pretended to not hear him. When the cameraman shifted, trying to shoot around the towering Democratic staffer, Nicholson simply shifted to block the shot again, this time spurring Bill to volcanic levels of rage.
“Get him out of there!” Bill yelled to a nearby security guard. “We have a right to be here to shoot the shot. Son of a bitch!” When the guard did nothing to intervene, O’Reilly shoved the campaign staffer out of the way, spurring the Secret Service to swarm the scene and calm things down.
“That’s really low-class, pal,” Bill said to the back of the retreating Nicholson. “And everybody in the world will see it.”
A few minutes later, once the on-edge Secret Service detail determined that the enraged TV host was no threat, Senator Obama came over to shake O’Reilly’s hand, promising to sit for an interview with him at some unspecified point in the future.
Bill, never one to let a good confrontation go to waste, played a long clip of his skirmish with Nicholson on Monday’s show and soon started offering DON’T BLOCK THE SHOT bumper stickers on his website.
His relationship with Barack Obama was off to a sterling beginning.
—
Meanwhile, my relationship with my girlfriend had taken a nosedive, and it was all Obama’s fault.
Krista and I had moved in together just a few months before, renting a tiny one-bedroom in the West Village, the choicest neighborhood in Manhattan. The rent was an eyeball-popping twenty-six hundred dollars a month, and the building was decrepit, with narrow, poorly lit hallways and a rickety, closet-size elevator that broke down the day we moved in, trapping us inside for a claustrophobia-inducing ninety minutes. But the location—with its high concentration of charming restaurants and coffee shops, high-end boutiques, and swarms of beautiful, glamorous, rich-looking people—was so spectacular that we decided we could handle the occasional cockroach infestation, and the uncomfortable fact that our bedroom window looked directly into someone’s kitchen, three feet across an air shaft. Who cares if the lobby smells like cat pee! You know who I saw just walking on the street today? Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen!56
We should have been at the height of domestic tranquility, and we were, at first. But after Iowa, Krista—a staunch feminist and an even stauncher Hillaryite—took it personally when I told her I had switched my allegiance to Obama.
“How is that even possible?” she asked, fuming, the night I informed her. “I thought you liked Hillary.”
“I did,” I said. “And I still do. I’ve just decided I like Obama better now.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You know they have basically the same views on everything, right?”
“Of course I do. And I will vote for her in a heartbeat if she gets the nomination.”
“No way in hell I’m voting for Obama if he takes this away from Hillary,” she said. “And you’re being a total asshole about it!” She stomped out of the living room, the cat we’d adopted together scampering out of her way in terror.
“Leaving the room when you’re mad at me doesn’t work if the bedroom is only ten feet away!” I called after her.
She slammed the door.
Her vehemence took me by surprise. I thought she would take my choice of candidate in stride, and that we’d maybe even develop a friendly rivalry over it, like when a married couple roots for two different football teams. But she was acting as if my simple personal preference was an abject betrayal of her feminist values. All I had done was express the fact that I liked Barack Obama as a candidate slightly more than I liked Hillary Clinton. But Krista was treating me as if I had suddenly declared I was opposed to women voting, or had decided that girls shouldn’t be allowed to learn to read lest they get any ideas.
I assumed Krista would eventually come around. She was too reasonable a person to take something like that so personally. But as the Democratic primary dragged on into the spring, and things started to look more and more dire for the Clinton campaign, my sex life took an equally steep downward trajectory, as my increasingly pissed-off girlfriend began to give me the cold shoulder in the bedroom.
Krista became angrier and angrier, to the point where she was completely unable to even participate in a discussion about politics—either with me or with any of our friends—without it ending in a shouting match. And with 2008 shaping up to be the most fascinating and gripping election cycle that anyone born after 1980 had ever seen, politics was naturally the main topic of conversation at every social function we went to that spring.
Needless to say, I spent a lot of Friday and Saturday nights on the couch.
One incident in particular sticks out in my mind, a late-night argument that started at a house party, carried over to a bar, and finally came to a boil on a subway platform. Truthfully, we’d both had a decent amount to drink. While alcohol made me more docile and good-humored, it tended to have the opposite effect on Krista, especially in those months.
“What has Obama ever done?” Krista was screaming at me, her voice echoing throughout the mostly empty subway station. “What has he done, huh? What makes you think he’d be any good as president?”
“He’s pretty good at running a campaign,” I shot back. “You know how I know that? Because he’s currently beating the shit out of Hillary.”
—
After the run-in at the New Hampshire rally, O’Reilly seemed uncharacteristically uncertain about how best to approach Obama. He was absolutely dying for an interview with the candidate, an interview that the Obama campaign was understandably reluctant to agree to. (Bill’s reputation as an unpredictable interviewer who sometimes went nuclear on his guests often worked against him in that way.) But, ever hopeful that the campaign would relent, Bill mostly pulled his punches on the senator in January, February, and March, hoping that softer coverage would entice the reluctant Obama to give an interview.
In the Factor pod, some of the more openly conservative producers began to grumble that the Old Man was losing his fastball.
“Bill needs to go after this guy, to really expose him,” Steiner Rudolf said one day. “Obama is a fraud, and a far-left thug.” He started trying to single-handedly push Bill toward harder coverage, raising all sorts of specters and innuendo during pitch meetings.
But Bill resisted.
“I don’t want to get into that ideological crap, Rudolf,” Bill would say when Steiner tried to convince him for the umpteenth meeting in a row that an Internet rumor about Obama deserved further scrutiny on The Factor. “Let Hannity do that stuff. We deal with facts on this show.”
So Bill continued going relatively easy on the Democratic front-runner—until a story cropped up that could not be ignored.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright had for months been a minor figure in the Obama-conspiracy-mongering industry. Hannity, in fact, had been railing about the pastor for a full year, first exploring the issue in February 2007, barely two weeks after Obama kicked off his presidential campaign.57 But in the absence of compelling video clips, O’Reilly wasn’t interested.
“I’m not going to go after some black reverend that nobody’s ever heard of,” he’d say.
As it turns out, lack of notoriety was not going to be a problem for Reverend Wright for much longer.