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

by Joe Muto

The guy attempted to reassure me.

  “You didn’t murder anyone. It’s not like you’re going to jail.”

  Somehow it didn’t make me feel any better.

  —

  Jenny and my parents were horrified by all of it. They thought I had lost my mind. And at certain points, I wasn’t sure I disagreed with them.

  They worried about my getting into legal trouble. Fox’s lawyers had made threats about civil and even criminal action. And they worried about my future career prospects, naturally. They reasoned that crapping on one’s employer would not look great on a résumé. I pooh-poohed those concerns, since I was obviously in the midst of starting my new career as a writer for Gawker.

  This was apparently news to Gawker.

  “Is there going to be a future for me at the site when all this is over?” I e-mailed John a few days later.

  “I don’t think it’s in the cards,” he replied.

  My heart sank. It was truly the pièce de résistance, the last little morsel in the feast of my own stupidity. I’d broken the number one rule of quitting my job—I hadn’t secured a new one first. In my ego-driven haste to leave Fox and ingratiate myself with the Gawker people, I’d misinterpreted vague promises and reassurances as an ironclad guarantee that I’d have a soft landing with them.

  A week after it all went down, they’d virtually forgotten me.

  At least it can’t get any worse, I thought.

  Once again, I thought wrong.

  —

  The knock came at six thirty in the morning.

  It was two weeks to the day after I’d outed myself as the Mole, a name I was already sick of and had just about pushed out of my mind.

  Of course, three cops at your front door has a way of pushing things back into your mind.

  They were from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and they had a warrant. It said I was being investigated on suspicion of larceny, both grand and petty, and that the bearers were allowed to take my phone, my laptop, and any other device that could send and receive e-mail.

  I chitchatted politely with the head detective while his two underlings turned my bedroom upside down. I figured his job was probably already hard enough without my making it tougher by being a dick to him.

  Plus, I kind of liked him. When he came into the apartment, the first thing he said to me was, “Look, I believe there are three sides to every story: your side . . . their side . . . and the truth.” I liked that. It had a nice ring.

  They left after about forty-five minutes, taking with them a box of electronics, including the iPad I had gone out of my way to keep safe, and a stack of notebooks and other papers that weren’t going to tell them anything of consequence.

  None of it was going to tell them anything—or at least anything I hadn’t already revealed to the world myself.

  After the cops left, I flipped on the TV, which was at that very moment showing Rupert Murdoch—the same man who got all of Great Britain to start their day with a giant pair of D cups to go along with their bangers, eggs, and tea; the man who gave a GOP operative a dump truck full of money and said, “Build me a conservative news network that will absolutely murder CNN”; the man who was, up until two weeks before, my boss’s boss’s boss—testifying in London in front of a panel that was investigating the widespread use of phone hacking by reporters working for News Corp. papers. Employees had used various means to tap into the voice mails of politicians, celebrities, members of the British Royal Family, relatives of dead soldiers, victims of terrorist attacks—even of a thirteen-year-old girl who had been abducted and murdered.

  Meanwhile, I had leaked some photos of a bathroom, and a video of Mitt Romney talking about his fancy horses.

  My roommates came downstairs a few minutes later and exchanged worried glances as I laughed and laughed and laughed at the television.

  EPILOGUE

  What Have We Learned?

  I guess it’s still an open question as to what, if anything, this whole sordid ordeal accomplished. I got a tiny bit of Internet notoriety. Fire-crotched celebu-chef Bobby Flay basically called me an asshole during a Today show segment discussing my firing. I got my picture in the paper, something I hadn’t accomplished since my hometown Cincinnati Enquirer profiled my dentist when I was eleven and sent a photographer while I was in the chair getting my teeth cleaned.

  I certainly didn’t bring Fox down from the inside, as I’d half-jokingly vowed to myself eight years earlier. If anything, it was stronger than ever. Mere weeks after my firing, Fox announced that they had re-upped O’Reilly’s contract, along with Sean Hannity’s. My public temper tantrum hadn’t done anything to slow down either of them.

  I did get an opportunity to write a book, as the brilliant, attractive people at Dutton decided against all odds that the barely coherent ranting I’d scrawled out for Gawker deserved to be expanded to 100,000 words or so. I’m very grateful for the opportunity, not only for the money it put in my pocket to help me stave off eviction and starvation, but also for the therapeutic effects. Writing for several months gave me the opportunity to reflect on my eight years at Fox.

  I came to the conclusion that if I could change one thing about Fox News, I’d like to see them remove the veil.

  I’d want Roger Ailes to come out and say, “You know what? This whole ‘Fair and Balanced’ thing is total bullshit. We’re a conservative network. We totally admit that. We’re going to take a conservative stance on the news most of the time, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as we’re up front about it. It’s harmful to the discourse, and harmful to our viewers, when we pretend we’re the fair ones and everybody else is biased. I see that now, and I admit my mistake.”

  He’ll never do that, of course, and it’s a shame. There are a lot of good people at Fox News Channel—hardworking, talented journalists who just want to do their jobs and could not care less about putting a partisan spin on things.

  About a month after I left, Fox & Friends played a video on their show. Four minutes long, it was a slickly produced package featuring sound bites and graphics, and absolutely throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama—hitting him on everything from the debt to unemployment, to food stamps, to gas prices. It played like an attack ad that had been created by the Republican National Committee. There was a massive uproar after the video aired, with repeated cries that Fox News had finally shed its last vestige of objectivity.

  For the first few hours after it aired, Fox seemed poised to stand behind the video, featuring it prominently on the Fox Nation website. Then they reversed course and disavowed it, with an opaque statement that read, in part: “The package that aired on Fox & Friends was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network.”

  The associate producer in question was a guy named Chris, a guy who I came up with, a guy who started as a production assistant on the overnights around the same time I did. A good producer, and an honest one. And Fox was letting him twist in the wind, with a statement that left the door open to the interpretation that he had been acting alone when he put the piece together.

  But that’s not how Fox operates. Something that long and elaborate would have taken at least three or four long days in the edit room to put together, days when a producer would be unable to do any other work. So unless Fox & Friends changed their operating procedures drastically in the month or so that I had been gone from the network at that point, I believe that Chris’s work on the package had to have been authorized by a senior—or even the executive—producer of the show. Someone had pulled Chris off his regular duties, and said, “Spend all your time the next few days making this tape and we’ll air it when you’re done.” I believe there’s no way that he was acting alone, but that became the narrative: the rogue Fox News producer who created an Obama hit piece! Reports surfaced that CNN—the high-paying promised land we’d all fantasized about as young PAs—had offered Chris a job shortly before the incident, but rescinded
the offer following the controversy.

  Chris, to his vast credit, maintained his silence throughout the ordeal, apparently possessing a discipline that clearly eluded me.

  In a way, though, I’m glad the incident happened. It just reaffirmed my decision to leave. It made me happy that I had gotten out when I did, no matter how ignominious my exit strategy.

  Ironically, the video incident may have been a net positive for Obama. The backlash that Fox received seemed to chasten them, and they were on their best behavior for the rest of the election year. Sure, almost every host on the network railed against the president on a nightly basis, but there were no more shenanigans as outlandish as the Fox & Friends attack ad—with one exception: In early October, Sean Hannity hyped a new “bombshell” video he had unearthed. It turned out to be a video from 2007 featuring then-Senator Obama speaking with—gasp—a slightly more black-sounding accent!

  Hannity was rightfully laughed at by all corners of the media world, his failure becoming emblematic of Fox News’s overall failure in 2012 to ultimately influence the election results—as indicated by the president who will have been re-sworn in by the time you read this.

  —

  So why did I do it? Why didn’t I just leave quietly? Why make a big stink on my way out the door, destroying friendships, soiling my good name, napalming every last bridge I’d built?

  Good question. I’m sure a therapist will be asking me the same thing in twenty years.

  In all seriousness, I have a few theories, if you’ll forgive the indulgence of psychoanalyzing myself. One theory: It was my last-ditch attempt to karmically inoculate myself, to make up for eight years of working for the enemy. In the same way that I gave money on the street to the DNC guy collecting for John Kerry, or bought Bill Clinton’s book, or ordered all that Obama merchandise, I thought that if I could pull some sort of dumb prank on my way out the door, I’d be somehow able to erase any bad vibes I’d garnered over the years. By becoming the Mole and sticking a finger in the eye of my employer, I’d thought I’d be pulling some sort of cosmic mulligan, publicly telling the world “never mind” about the previous eight years.

  Another theory: Maybe I wasn’t really out to hurt Fox News. I was subconsciously trying to hurt myself, to self-flagellate for all the wasted years I spent at a company I knew, going into it, I would never be happy within.

  When I took the job, I never thought it would last that long—it sort of took on an inertia of its own after a while. And I did dabble in looking around for other jobs over the years, sending out résumés here and there, but I eventually grew comfortable with my discomfort with Fox, if that makes any sense.

  I certainly never expected to go out like I did. I don’t know that I’d describe it as a blaze of glory. More like a Roman candle of mildly amusing infamy?

  There was at least one other good thing to come from it all—it brought Jenny and me closer together. We’d already dropped the L-bomb several months before, on a rocky, windswept beach on Lake Michigan, where we were attending my brother’s wedding. I knew I loved her, which is why I was so scared of how she’d react. I’d already lost a job, and friends, and my reputation; if I lost her, too, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it anymore. I would have spiraled completely out of control.

  But that’s not what happened. She became my rock, telling me I had screwed up, but it wasn’t the end of the world. She comforted me at my lowest points, assuring me I wasn’t a bad person. She admitted she was scared by the legal ramifications, by the shambles I’d made of my career, by the horrible things people on the Internet were saying about me—but that she still loved me.

  And against all reason, all common sense, all instinct that said she should have run screaming in the other direction from a jobless, prospect-free, minor Internet celebrity with twenty-eight hundred Twitter followers and little else to show for his efforts—against all those things, on a warm August evening on the terrace of my Williamsburg apartment—Jenny agreed to marry me.

  I was as surprised as everyone else.

  Something tells me Bill O’Reilly won’t be sending a wedding present.

  But I might keep a spot for him at the buffet, just in case.

  Acknowledgments

  I am greatly indebted to many without whom this lump of wood pulp and ink (or, more likely, plastic and pixels) you’re now holding in your hands would not be a reality.

  First, I’d like to thank my indefatigable and talented editor, Jill Schwartzman. Her early enthusiasm for the project helped give me the confidence to go forward with the most frightening and exhilarating undertaking of my entire life. It was Jill—along with the brilliant assistant editor Stephanie Hitchcock—who read the dismal early drafts and improved the book immeasurably with an unlimited supply of advice, guidance, and hand-holding.

  For that matter, thanks to the entire Dutton team, including Brian Tart, Ben Sevier, and Christine Ball. Special thanks to publicist Amanda Walker, production editor Erica Ferguson, copy editor Joy Simpkins, proofreader Lavina Lee and lawyer Elisa Rivlin.

  Next, I owe a great deal of gratitude to my agent, Anthony Mattero, a tireless advocate and someone I was lucky enough to have in my corner throughout this entire process. He’s a straight shooter who gives his profession a good name, and—along with his boss, the legendary David Vigliano—a formidable negotiator.

  Thanks to my friend Claire Kelley, a fellow Ohioan and a fellow Domer, who helped me early in the process to navigate the then-unfamiliar world of publishing. I would have been wandering in the dark without her.

  I’m indebted to my friends Matt and Marcia Bunda, who offered support, advice, and their old cell phones after the district attorney seized mine. In fact, thanks to all the friends who reached out to me after I disgraced myself on a national stage. Your kind words have not been forgotten.

  I’m thankful to John Cook, who in January 2013 took over for the departing A. J. Daulerio as Gawker editor in chief, a well-deserved promotion. I’m continually impressed by him and the entire Gawker team for their preternatural ability to stir up controversy and attention. Thank you also to the delightfully named Gaby Darbyshire and to Gawker overlord Nick Denton.

  Thanks to my lawyer Florian Miedel, who was steadfast in the face of my periodic freak-outs and repeatedly assured me that I would not be going to jail—at least not before I finished writing the book.

  Thanks to my roommates, whom I call Rufus and Ari here. They’ve put up with reporters and legal messengers pounding on the door, a crack-of-dawn police raid, and several months of me, unkempt and unbathed, keeping weird hours and even weirder dietary habits while writing. I’m going to miss them terribly.

  There are several Fox employees, both past and present, who were gracious enough to reach out and share their recollections and anecdotes with me. I won’t name them here, for obvious reasons, but I’m grateful all the same.

  Thanks to my family: my parents, Joan and Tony; my sister, Teddy; my brother, Stephen; my sister-in-law, Maureen; and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins for their unconditional love and support, as well as their surprisingly forgiving reaction to my having soiled the family name.

  To Jenny, the love of my life, know this—I could not have done it without you. If it weren’t for you, I would have long ago lost my mind, split town, and gone aimlessly hitchhiking, Incredible Hulk–style, across the country. I can’t wait to start my life with you.

  And finally, as weird as it may sound, thanks to Bill O’Reilly, the entire O’Reilly Factor staff, and all the people I worked with over eight years at Fox News. I know this book is not terribly flattering at times for some of you, but I hope deep down you’ll agree that it’s honest, and more than a little funny. I only wish that someday we can meet at Langan’s (or Rosie’s if it’s still standing) and have a beer and laugh about all of this. Till then, best of luck. And one more time: Got ’em.

  1 Now would probably be a good time to thank him profusely for the loan he gave me to stave
off eviction when I very publicly destroyed my career at the young, impressionable age of thirty.

  2 It was a Catholic high school, so this was totally copacetic. It was all boys, too, which was probably advantageous academically, minimizing distractions in class, but was undoubtedly damaging socially. I spent my entire first year of college dealing with the culture shock, having trouble getting acclimated to an environment where students no longer received spontaneous applause from the rest of the class after farting audibly.

  3 I still maintain that I was truly ahead of my time when I dressed as Luke Skywalker for Halloween in 1995; but the knowledge of my ultimate vindication still doesn’t erase the sting of shame that lingers when I picture the cringing looks of homeowners who greeted me, a thirteen-year-old with acne and a lightsaber, shouting, “Trick or Treat!”

  4 Lorne, that offer still stands, by the way. Though now that I have eight years in television under my belt, I’m going to have to insist that you provide me with gloves for the toilet cleaning.

  5 I couldn’t tell you what specific award I was referring to, since I can’t recall, and my original résumé that listed the alleged “award” is lost to history. (I apologize in advance to my future biographer.) I know I trumped up something and made it sound important, but I can’t remember exactly what. I suspect it was not something I actually received for my writing ability, but was, rather, related to my recent participation in an off-campus Beer Olympics event.

  6 Ironically, if they had just done what I asked and given me a website job instead of a TV one, you almost certainly would not be reading this book.

  7 True story! In the early 1970s, Murdoch started the tradition of featuring a new topless model each day on the third page of his paper The Sun. The so-called Page Three girls were much beloved by readers, and the feature was eventually copied by other British newspapers in a mammarian arms race that I’m deeply disappointed I didn’t have the opportunity to live through.