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

by Joe Muto

  Obama doesn’t use the prompter any more often than any of his predecessors, yet early in his tenure, the right wing became obsessed with it. The precious, sainted Ronald Reagan used a teleprompter constantly; George W. Bush needed difficult words spelled out phonetically in his prompter. But the chorus from conservatives was still har har har Obama has to write down his words before he says them and read them off a screen like some idiot.

  O’Reilly, to his vast credit, did not chase after most of these picayune stories along with the rest of the network. He had ended his radio show in March 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration. It was a rare case of bad timing for O’Reilly, who usually had a better sense for these things. He really missed out on the wave of conservative paranoia and rage that swept the nation in the spring of 2009.

  Eric, who always was smarter than I was, took the occasion of the radio show’s demise to leave Fox, working briefly for the Democratic National Committee, of all places, and eventually the Obama 2012 campaign. Richie the engineer was simply assigned to another radio show. Meanwhile, Sam and I briefly panicked at the prospect of having to find new jobs, but Stan reassured us that we’d be absorbed into the TV staff.

  Thus in March 2009, I found myself back fully in the fold at the TV network I’d spent the last two years pretending I was only tangentially associated with.

  And I was just in time for an exciting new era in Fox News’s political activism, as the channel climbed fully on board with the nascent Tea Party movement. Fox hadn’t created the Tea Party (that honor belonged to the conservative CNBC personality Rick Santelli, whose on-air rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went viral), but it embraced the movement to a degree that surprised even me. Some shows began promoting Tea Party gatherings, and the Second Floor made the decision to fan talent across the country on April 15, promoting it networkwide as FNC Tax Day Tea Parties. It represented a turning point for Fox, a complete raising of the veil—the network that had always at least attempted to maintain the pretense of being “Fair and Balanced” was suddenly openly advocating in favor of a protest movement against the Obama administration.

  It was distressing to me that the whole network seemed to be moving rapidly to the right. The whole network, that is, except my boss. Something different was going on with O’Reilly. Something very curious indeed.

  —

  Usually when Bill asked a question at a pitch meeting, we’d all scramble to jump in and answer him, jockeying for position to prove ourselves more indispensable than our colleagues. Brown-nosing the boss was practically a contact sport at The Factor.

  But not that day. That day we all stared awkwardly at our shoes.

  “So what exactly is this ‘teabagging’?” he’d just asked. “Why is it such a bad thing?”

  He was reacting to a video someone had just pitched, of CNN’s Anderson Cooper giggling over the phrase. It wasn’t Anderson’s most mature on-air moment; but in his defense, it was the Tea Partyers who had started calling themselves “teabaggers,” apparently not aware during the earliest days of their movement that teabag was a euphemism for a sex act involving a man dunking his testicles into another person’s mouth.

  On the Internet, liberals (who naturally were more savvy about any and all sexual euphemisms) gleefully noticed that naive Tea Partyers were inadvertently outing themselves as ball dippers, and roundly mocked them. And now the mockery had jumped from the Internet to CNN. O’Reilly—ever vigilant for liberal media slights against the honest, hardworking Americans who only wanted smaller government and whiter presidents—was on the case.

  But first he had to figure out what teabagging actually was.

  “Well, what the hell does it mean?” Bill demanded when no answer was immediately forthcoming.

  Emmy, our line producer, finally broke. “Oh, God, I can’t,” she said, laughing. “I can’t do it.” She buried her face in the sleeve of her fleece jacket, trying to smother her laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s a sex thing,” Stan said quickly.

  Bill’s eyebrows shot up. Now he was really curious.

  “You don’t want to know,” Gayle, our fact-checking executive producer added.

  “It’s pretty vile,” Eugene said. “I don’t think we should get into it here. I can tell you privately after the meeting if you want.”

  Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

  O’Reilly had decided to not go on location to attend a Tea Party rally on tax day. He wasn’t interested in becoming part of the story himself. In doing so, he showed a restraint that many of his fellow hosts lacked. Neil Cavuto, the Hooters-enthusiast financial anchor, had jetted to Sacramento, probably hoping to make a side trip to snag some beach bikini footage for his show. Sean Hannity went to Atlanta. Greta Van Susteren attended the rally in her native Washington, DC—an odd right turn for the former suspected Democrat.59

  One more anchor represented Fox on a field trip during that first Tax Day Tea Party in 2009. Deep into the heart of Texas, down to San Antonio, Fox had sent their newest secret weapon.

  —

  Glenn Beck premiered his Fox News show on January 19, 2009, the day before President Obama was inaugurated.

  Nobody in the building really knew what to expect. His previous show had been on CNN Headline News—the low-rated, cable news equivalent of the witness protection program—so we were mostly unfamiliar with his shtick. But nothing could have prepared us for what came next.

  Beck exploded out of the gate. His mix of goofy prop-comedy, apocalyptic predictions of doom, and thinly sourced conspiracy theories apparently spoke to our audience. Something about the ascension of Obama made our viewers especially receptive to Beck’s toxic brew, and ratings soared, reaching numbers unprecedented for the usually lackluster five P.M. hour.

  The other on-air personalities at first had no idea what to make of Beck. He was a new creature to them, someone undeniably talented but also obviously a little bit unstable, and potentially dangerous. At the very least, his high ratings threatened to usurp the power structure that had been cemented over the years: Bill was number one, with Sean just behind him, and Greta in third. That was the ratings hierarchy for as long as anyone could remember, and it was remarkably consistent no matter what topic was in the news, or which guests were on which show.

  But Beck blew that all away. When the numbers came out every afternoon at four thirty, he was handily beating Greta, often topping Hannity, and even some days coming close to O’Reilly. Whispers started in the hallways that a big change was coming in prime time.

  “Roger sees these numbers,” a producer for Greta’s show said to me one day in early 2009, at the beginning of the Beck phenomenon. “He can’t ignore them. And Beck is pulling these at five in the fucking afternoon. They’ve got to be thinking about what kind of damage he could do in prime time, at ten P.M., or nine . . .”

  “Or eight,” I said, finishing his thought for him.

  These musings were not lost on the talent. A few weeks into Beck’s tenure, O’Reilly decided his best course of action, the best way to protect his flank, would be to co-opt the potential usurper, giving him a weekly segment on The Factor.

  “Get with Beck’s people,” O’Reilly said at the pitch meeting. “Tell them I want a segment, every Friday. We’ll call it”—he leaned back in his chair, thinking—“the At Your Beck and Call segment.” He chuckled quietly to himself, pleased with his pun.

  The other on-air talent were not as welcoming. Once O’Reilly had claimed Beck as his own, the newcomer was basically shut out by the other two prime-time shows. And I didn’t blame them. Sean and Greta wanted no part in promoting the man who could potentially take their jobs.

  I personally didn’t quite know what to make of Beck at first. He must be a bullshit artist, right? No way someone who seems as smart and business savvy as he does could believe all the nonsense he was peddling on a daily basis. But one incident in particular made me wonder.

  In the summer of 2
009, Beck had been given an office near my desk on the seventeenth floor. It wasn’t anything special, but it was in a power location, a couple of doors down from O’Reilly’s corner office. Two or three Beck staffers had stopped by to decorate it, festooning the door with art his fans had sent in—a charcoal sketch of a smiling Beck holding the Constitution, a child’s Magic Marker drawing of a stick-figure Glenn waving an American flag, a watercolor of Beck with a bald eagle perched on his shoulder.

  I was wary of my new neighbor, not wanting my relatively quiet corner of the building disturbed by the Beck circus, but it became obvious after a few days that the office was just some sort of contractually obligated bauble and that Beck had no intention of using it on a regular basis. Word was he preferred instead to work out of his (much more lavish, I was told) radio offices, which were located a few blocks down Sixth Avenue.

  But Beck did, on occasion, hold staff meetings in his Fox office, and that’s when the crazy really came out.

  The meeting I overheard was shortly after President Obama had come under fire for criticizing the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer who had arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates in his own home. Beck had gathered about a half dozen staffers in his office, and the door was open a crack. But he was talking so loudly, even shouting at some points, that I probably would have been able to hear him perfectly, even if he had bothered to keep the door shut.

  “Obama did it on purpose,” Beck was saying. “He knew going after that cop would cause a controversy. He wanted the controversy. He’s trying to distract us from something. But what? What is he tying to distract us from? That’s the question.”

  For the next hour and a half, he lectured his staff, exhibiting impressive stamina even for someone who spent several hours a day talking on radio and TV. His employees seemed as if they were used to such tirades, and endured it with minimal interruption. Eventually, Beck settled on an obscure provision in the pending health care bill as the real thing the administration was trying to distract the American public from with the “fake” cop gaffe and the ensuing Beer Summit. He seemed to think the provision would somehow allow the federal government to take children away from their parents if the parents let the kids get fat.

  I was amazed by the whole incident. Up to that point, I had assumed he was putting on a show, stirring up the crazies for ratings. I never imagined that he truly believed his own insane conspiracy theories. But the rant I heard in his office was repeated on the air a few hours later. And, if anything, it was toned down from what he had said in private.

  Oddly enough, it was an on-air incident stemming from the Gates scandal that helped derail Beck’s prospects at the network.

  Shortly after the meeting I’d overheard, he went on Fox & Friends for a guest spot. And with one disastrous statement, all the chatter and speculation that he would soon be taking over one of the prime-time hours ground to a screeching halt: He declared that Obama had a “deep-seated hatred of white people.”

  Given a chance by the shocked and incredulous Fox & Friends hosts to retract, he instead doubled down: “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

  The incident set off a months-long, surprisingly successful boycott effort by liberal groups. It meant that Fox was unable to capitalize on Beck’s sky-high ratings, because the number of sponsors who would pay to be associated with him eventually dwindled to almost nothing. His commercial breaks turned into sad parades of hucksters touting investments in gold doubloons, reverse-mortgage hawkers looking to prey on senior citizens, and denture-cream manufacturers.

  Also hurting Beck was discomfort from his colleagues. Howard Kurtz wrote a piece in March 2010, quoting anonymous staffers within the Fox News DC bureau claiming that they thought Beck’s shenanigans were hurting the credibility of the entire network.

  I can report that there were similar sentiments in the New York bureau. I, for one, had come to the conclusion that Beck was ultimately bad for the network, high ratings or no. Most of the producers I spoke to—even the ones who liked him and shared most of his opinions—agreed that his on-air performances had become increasingly unhinged. One anchor on my floor repeatedly, loudly and openly, referred to Beck only as Crazy—as in “What’s Crazy up to today?” or “Why does Crazy have a birthday cake on the set with him?” or “Did you see Crazy playing around with a dead fish yesterday? What the fuck?”

  O’Reilly, for his part, was sticking with the man he’d nicknamed the Beckmeister, though even Bill sometimes seemed uncomfortable with the strange positions Beck was taking.

  In the beginning, the formula for Beck’s weekly Factor segment involved the two hosts chatting about whatever Beck had been covering on his show that week. But as time went on, and Beck went further and further off into the weeds, we’d have to brainstorm during pitch meetings to come up with more innocuous topics, topics that wouldn’t set him off on a rant that would have to be edited out later.

  We still ended up cutting quite a bit. The pieces, which aired on Fridays, were taped a day in advance. Bill intentionally let them run long so they could be edited for time and content. Anything that made Beck sound too unhinged hit the cutting-room floor. Some days, it was hard to get the bare-minimum four minutes of non-crazy out of him. He was one of the only guests we ever did this with.

  During that time, Bill would often clash with the Second Floor over the Beck segments. Bill, ever mindful of the ratings Beck could bring, would spur him on to do increasingly wacky things when he appeared on The Factor.

  “I saw Beck with a dollhouse on air yesterday,” Bill would say. “Tell him to bring it on our show and we’ll talk to him about it.”

  The executives accused O’Reilly of attempting to make Beck look like a clown—they thought Bill was trying to further poison the well and eliminate any last chance that Beck would take over his time slot. (O’Reilly denied it, of course, but I always wondered if maybe there wasn’t something to the theory.) O’Reilly counterargued that rather than make Beck appear clownish, he was trying to pull his head out of the clouds, stop him from being so esoteric, and get him to talk about issues that viewers cared about, even if those issues were silly.

  In the end, though, even Bill O’Reilly couldn’t protect Glenn Beck from himself.

  During the Arab Spring in early 2011, Beck completely went off the rails, warning that the protests in Egypt were a secret plot by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that he claimed, with little to no evidence, was a shadowy cabal of jihadists that had financial backing from several liberal groups in the United States.

  He sounded like a complete kook. Even more so than before.

  Beck ignored repeated pleas from management—including, rumor had it, personal appeals from Roger Ailes himself—to tone it down. And a few weeks later, that was that. His time at Fox was done, just a little over two years after it had started.

  —

  Beck wasn’t the only newcomer to shake things up at Fox following Obama’s election. A certain former Alaska governor came aboard in January 2010 as a political analyst and the host of a potential series of specials, signing a three-year, multimillion-dollar deal.

  From the moment Sarah Palin abandoned her elected duties in the summer of 2009 for dubious reasons, it was an absolute inevitability that she’d end up at Fox News. She was a perfect fit for the network—beautiful, feisty, and controversial, inspiring utter devotion from her fans, and blind outrage in her critics, and, hopefully, the theory went, high ratings for the network. The Second Floor was well aware of her unfortunate reputation for being vacuous, ill-informed, and thin-skinned, but surely that was just liberal media slander—the woman had run an enormous state, for chrissakes! How dumb could she be? Also, her employment marked a continuation of a proud Roger Ailes tradition of hiring disgraced and discredited GOP pols and operatives like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ollie North, and Karl Rove.

  In the few months since the radio show had ended and I’d been put on TV full-time, I’d actually produced a few Rove
segments. It was surreal to get on the phone with him for the pre-interviews. I didn’t quite know what to expect from the man who’d earned the dual nicknames the Architect and Turdblossom from his old boss; the man who’d engineered a cynical, divisive 2004 campaign; the man who had cleverly pulled the rip cord and bailed on the floundering Bush administration midway through the second term; the man whom I’d vilified in one of my college newspaper columns; the man I was hoping would not, on a whim, Google my name and his name together. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got was an affable politics nerd who would talk for an hour during the pre-interview if you let him get going, and a tech geek who was obsessed with his iPhone and all things Apple.

  Rove was actually enjoyable to talk to—smart, with generally good analysis, and somewhat less tendency than most political operatives to revert to disingenuous, intellectually dishonest arguments and talking points.60 His biggest failing was that he was completely defensive about the deficiencies of the Bush administration, refusing to admit they had done even a single thing wrong. But maybe his biggest victory was that he refused to buy into the Palin hype, casting gallons of cold water on any talk of her becoming a viable presidential candidate—vehemently in private, and more gently and diplomatically on the air. If he had any thoughts about Palin becoming a Fox News analyst, at a reported salary that was higher than his own, he kept them to himself.

  When the Palin news was announced, the atmosphere at the office was instantly electric, with some of the more conservative producers positively gleeful about the prospect of her as a new colleague. There was an underlying tension, too, especially among the hosts and senior producers, as everyone kicked around the same question: “Who gets her first?”