An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (10 page)

8:00
P.M.
–9:00
P.M.

The O’Reilly Factor
with Bill O’Reilly kicked off the network’s prime-time lineup. Bill, as the most powerful, controversial, and highest-rated host on Fox, was also the network’s most well-known personality, a mascot of sorts. He was who most people thought of when they thought of Fox News. As someone who didn’t watch the channel that much before I took the job, he was most recognizable to me as the guy who picked a fight with George Clooney over the funds raised by the 9/11 celebrity telethon (Bill was mad because he thought the cash wasn’t being disbursed fast enough); the guy who cut off the microphone of a guest, Jeremy Glick, the son of a 9/11 victim (Bill was mad that Glick was opposing the invasion of Iraq); and the guy who got rapper Ludacris fired from a Pepsi endorsement deal (Bill was—wait for it—mad because Ludacris used dirty words in his songs).

9:00
P.M.
–10:00
P.M.

Hannity & Colmes
was the second-highest-rated show on the network, and don’t think that Hannity or O’Reilly ever forgot the pecking order, a source of constant tension between the two.

Alan Colmes was largely an observer from the sidelines for the eternal dick-measuring contest that the network’s two superstars were locked into. Presumably Colmes, who was a fairly smart, pragmatic guy, realized that despite the decent chemistry he exhibited with his conservative cohost, he was completely expendable—easily replaced with another liberal to be determined. Consequently, he didn’t waste any time playing ratings-based, power-trippy mind games with O’Reilly. He was just happy to be allowed in the building.

As the most openly partisan Republican show on the network,
H&C
attracted a fair amount of scorn and derision from the rank and file: “Goddamn, Hannity is completely unwatchable lately,” I heard one daytime producer say in the control room during one of my first few weeks. “You’re acting like it was ever watchable in the first place,” one of the techs responded. (And these were two conservatives I’d heard casually trashing John Kerry a week earlier. Even they were bored with the constant repetition of Republican talking points that the show had devolved into.)

10:00
P.M.
–11:00
P.M.

On the Record
with Greta Van Susteren was the final live show of the day. Greta, a lawyer/pundit who ascended to fame in the 1990s based on her analysis of the O. J. Simpson trial, had been a CNN host until Ailes poached her in 2002. She was an odd fit for Fox. She ran in conspicuously Democratic circles—her husband was a big Clinton donor and supporter. And even worse, she was plain-looking, a poor fit for a network teeming with sparkly blond prom queens in the anchor chair. But Greta’s focus was not political; she was much more interested in legal and crime stories, and rarely let her own political opinions slip into the show. And in the months before her new show started, she opted for a mind-boggling amount of plastic surgery, which, to her credit, she openly admitted to, appearing on the cover of
People
magazine in before and after photos.

After Greta signed off at eleven
P.M.
every night, the schedule went into repeats, re-airing the prime-time shows until the morning, when
Fox & Friends
picked things up again.

—

Aside from all the first-day excitement surrounding the death of Don Corleone, my time running scripts had flown by with little incident. Even though I got the hang of it after a day or two, Camie stayed on as my “trainer” for a full two weeks. We’d spend all day shoulder to shoulder at our cramped little workstation, taking turns sprinting the printed pages down the hall to the studio. We fell into an easy rhythm, keeping conversation to a minimum while the shows were on air, communicating in glances, gestures, flicks of the head, or arches of the eyebrows. She had a habit of fiddling with her jewelry while staring at the screen—absentmindedly twisting her strand of pearls until I thought they might break, or fingering the silver charms dangling from the bracelet on her wrist—as if the fidgeting itself might cause the senior producer’s initials to pop up next to the script’s slug line, allowing us to print. And then her sigh of relief, the sharp exhalation of breath when she saw initials finally appear in the rundown, followed by a flurry of hitting
CTRL-P
on the keyboard, the laser printer spitting out pages, the brief, mutually deferential tug-of-war over whose turn it was to run (“I’ll go.” “No, you went the last two times. I’ll go this time.”), then the hustling through the convoluted route that brought us to the studio, and finally depositing the bundle of paper onto the desk in front of the anchor, who was usually only half paying attention, waiting for the commercial break to end.

In our downtime we’d chat—about what school had been like for each of us (she’d gone to a small, genteel Southern college, one where the girls wore big floppy-brimmed hats and sundresses to the football games, which went a long way toward explaining her current wardrobe), about moving to New York (she felt it was a big transition, even though her hometown was only two hours away, somewhere in Connecticut), and once, briefly, about politics. I was the one who broached the topic, actually, after hearing her scoff quietly to herself while a John Kerry sound bite was playing.

“So I take it you’re pretty into the, you know, politics of this place?” I said.

“Oh, sure,” she said, nodding. “I think everyone is, right?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I’m not really that political of a guy, I guess.” I felt bad fibbing to her so soon after meeting, but I wasn’t ready to blow my cover just yet—at least not until I’d figured the lay of the land a little better.

After two weeks, it was time to split up the band. Camie had told Siegendorf that I was more than fully trained, ready to go it alone, and he’d pulled her to start on other duties.

“You sure you’re ready?” she’d asked me on our last day together.

“Piece of cake,” I said, cockily flashing her my winningest grin. “I can do this shit blindfolded by this point.”

My first screwup came two days later.

It was during the taping of
Studio B
with Shepard Smith. I was waiting backstage for Shep to finish a segment so I could drop off his scripts. I heard him deliver the tease that meant the show was going into the break, something like “we’ll be back in two minutes.” Taking his cue, I stepped from behind the wall and began to stride toward his anchor desk. I’d barely taken two paces when I heard a voice behind me hiss quietly but insistently: “Wait!”

I glanced over my shoulder at the stage manager, a look of panic on her face, frantically beckoning me to rejoin her backstage.

I froze in my tracks, suddenly noticing that one of the jib cameras—which was on the end of a pivoting fifteen-foot-long arm, allowing it to perform swooping vertical movements—had a red light glowing on the front and was pointing straight at me.

Red light meant on-air.

The director had apparently decided to show one last wide shot of Shep as the program cut to commercial.
Studio B
did this move a lot; it was a flashy little outro to show off the gleaming high-tech set. A set that currently had a twenty-two-year-old production assistant standing in the middle of it, mouth agape, frozen in place with a wide-eyed stare directly into the camera lens.

The on-air light blinked off as I was looking at it.

“And,
now
we’re clear,” the stage manager said, stepping out from behind the wall and marching toward me angrily.

“What the fuck was that?” she said.

“Uhhh . . . I thought we were in a commercial break,” I answered.

“Well, we are
now
.”

“Was I in the shot?”

“Oh, yeah, you were in the shot.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said, horrified to have screwed up so early. “I’m kinda new here.”

“No shit,” she said, before turning and storming back to her post.

I sheepishly walked up to Shep at his desk and slid the stack of scripts in front of him.

He grinned at me. “If you’re trying to start an on-air career, you’re going about it the wrong way, pal,” he said, laughing.

Thankfully, word of my fuck-up didn’t get back to Jim Siegendorf, and two weeks later, I had my own scripts trainee, along with the promise that as soon as he was ready to go it alone, they’d move me along to other duties.

My trainee was a guy fresh off the bus from South Carolina with the unlikely name Red Robertshaw. Red was a natural script PA, and took it very, very seriously, sprinting through the halls even when he wasn’t pressed for time, sweating every single missed page, to the point where I was almost shamed by my own lack of effort.

Red also wore a tie to work, which I found excessive. I wore khakis and a button-down, which actually put me in the upper echelons of PA formal wear; this was mostly a jeans, polo shirt, and sneakers crowd. But Red’s tie elevated him another level above me, and I started to resent him for it.
Hardworking AND well dressed? Who the fuck was this kid trying to impress?

Once I had Red trained to my satisfaction,
¹⁴
I went to Siegendorf and told him that the new guy was ready to go.

“All right,” Jim said. “Camie says you’re a fast learner, so we’re going to put you on videotape.”

Thank fucking Christ.
I made a mental note to thank Camie for sparing me the indignity of the graphics department.

While she was still training me, Camie had explained that there were three types of PA duty at Fox: scripts, graphics, and videotape. Scripts was the easiest, and the first job for all new employees, stage one of a weeding-out process. Unless you were supremely stupid, or the victim of unfortunate timing (i.e., you’re the last new employee right before a hiring drought), you’d be off scripts in less than two months.

Graphics was a bit more complex. Fox had a large graphics department that churned out on-air visuals. The small pictures with the headlines underneath that appeared next to an anchor’s head as he was reading a news item were called over-the-shoulders—OTS for short. Larger graphics—anything from maps to poll results to bullet-pointed lists to photos—were called fullscreens, usually abbreviated as FS.

The job of the graphics production assistant was to act as go-between for show producers (the ones ordering the graphics) and the artists (the ones producing them). The graphics department was separated from the newsroom both physically (they were based in an airy second-floor workspace with giant windows) and temperamentally (the pace in the graphics department was leisurely compared to the frantic rush that often gripped the newsroom).

What Camie was too polite to tell me but I soon picked up from other PAs, was that graphics was not considered a choice assignment. The department was regarded as something of a joke, known for turning in work that was late and often riddled with errors. If a PA was assigned there, it was generally assumed it was because Siegendorf had determined that he or she couldn’t hack it at a more important job.

That left videotape. Video was obviously incredibly important for a TV news organization, and the vast majority of it at Fox was handled almost exclusively by PAs.

There were some feeble attempts at quality control and oversight, but most of the time the requirement for a quick turnaround and deliberate understaffing meant that roughly 90 percent of video that went on the air at Fox was seen exactly once before being broadcast to millions of Americans. These gatekeepers were, by and large, production assistants fresh out of college who were barely trained, laxly supervised, and paid dog shit.

And now I was joining their ranks.

April 11, 2012—11:51
A.M.

I waited until I was two blocks away, in the thick of Times Square, to pull out my phone. I had never before been so thankful for thick throngs of camera-toting tourists. Normally unbearable, today they were my shield, allowing me to blend in—a relief to me, just in case my paranoia was well founded and there was in fact someone tailing me.

I dialed my phone.

“This is John,” the voice said.

John Cook was a writer and editor for
Gawker
, and my main contact. Speaking in espionage terms, if I was indeed a mole, that would make him my case officer.

“Hey, it’s Joe.”

“Okay, fill me in. I assume you saw Mediaite. Is it true? Did they catch you?”

I looked around. Still no sign of any company stooges.

“If they found me, it’s news to me. I just walked unfettered out of the News Corp. building. No one tried to stop me. None of my bosses have asked to talk to me today.”

“So why is Fox saying they have you?” John asked.

“My best guess is that they’re bluffing. They’re just trying to smoke me out, hoping that I’ll panic or do something to give myself away.”

“So they don’t know it’s you?”

“I can’t imagine them letting me sit in that building even one second longer if they actually thought it was me.”

“Okay.” John paused, thinking. “I’m going to put up a post saying that they haven’t gotten you. In the meantime, can you find a way to take a picture of something from inside or near the building, something with a clock or something like that, that proves that you’re still roaming free?”

I immediately thought of the time-and-temperature sign across the street from 1211, the one I had noticed when I was sweatily awaiting my job interview.

“I might have something,” I said. But then it hit me. “On second thought, they know I’m outside right now. Anyone can see that I’m not sitting at my desk. If
Gawker
puts up a picture, it won’t be too big a leap for them to make that connection. Assuming they don’t know already.”