An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (15 page)

But Jim wasn’t like the rest of the bosses and producers. He was polite and soft-spoken, and naturally all the PAs and editors hated his guts for it.

“Siegendorf? The guy’s a total dipshit,” one of the video editors volunteered to me, unprompted, during a cutting session.

Most of the newsroom probably wouldn’t have been able to put it so pithily, but there
was
widespread consensus about Siegendorf’s lack of competence. The main rap on him was that he was completely worthless during crunch time. When shit hit the fan, and the control room wanted a quick turnaround on some tape, Siegendorf completely lost his head, driving everyone nuts with constant demands for status updates, when he should have just been getting out of the way and letting the PAs and editors do their jobs.

My personal impression was that Siegendorf was a little bit addled but not all in all a terrible person to work for—but I also recognized that once underlings started speaking of you with that kind of contempt, your managerial grasp on employees was pretty much nonexistent.

He was still my boss, regardless of what my colleagues thought of him, so I came running when he called me over, and listened politely to what he had to say.

“Joe, I was wondering if you could help us out with something,” Siegendorf was asking me, characteristically slow-walking the request. “We have a gap and we’d like you to do us a favor and fill in on the weekend overnights. It would just be for a few weeks. You’d really be helping us out of a jam.”

Weekend overnights? That didn’t sound promising.

“So what would my new schedule be?” I asked.

“Monday through Wednesday, you’d still be doing evening cut-ins, three to eleven
P.M.
,” Jim said. “Then you would have off Thursday and most of Friday. That would be your weekend.”

So far so bad.

Siegendorf continued: “Then you’d come in Friday night at one
A.M.
to do overnight cut-ins and do tape for
Fox & Friends
until ten
A.M.
Saturday morning. Then the same thing Saturday night into Sunday morning.”

Friday and Saturday night, one
A.M.
until ten
A.M.
? That sounds horrible,
I wanted to say. What I actually said was “Hmmm.”

“It will only be a few weeks. Month and a half, tops,” Jim said.

“Hmm,” I said again.

Jillian was somewhat less circumspect.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she asked me later that evening when I called her from my desk in the newsroom. “I never get to see you as it is. Now you’re shitting on our weekends, too?”

“I didn’t have much of a choice,” I said. “I’ve barely been here for three months. I want to look like a team player.”

“You look like a sucker is what you look like.”

“No, this will be good, baby!” I said, unconvincingly. “Now we’ll have Thursday nights all to ourselves.”

Jillian stewed silently on the other end of the phone.

“And, uh, Sunday afternoons, after I’ve slept for a few hours, of course.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

—

“I should warn you right now—they absolutely will not use any jokes that make President Bush look bad.”

Dave Krieger was looming over my shoulder, watching as I worked the controls of the video screener, fast-forwarding through a tape of
The Tonight Show
, blowing past the commercials that came between the end of the local news and the beginning of Leno’s monologue.

It was 3:07
A.M.
on a Friday night. Or was it a Saturday morning? I wasn’t sure what to call it exactly. My brain wasn’t functioning properly. Four hours earlier, I had been at a bar with Jillian and some of our college friends, enjoying myself thoroughly. And now I was at work, struggling with the temperamental shuttle wheel of a shitty, broken-down, Soviet-surplus video screener. I was already not a happy camper. And Dave’s revelation, which he tossed off nonchalantly like he was just explaining where the office supplies were kept, wasn’t helping my mood.

Dave was one of the younger writers for
Fox & Friends
and had obviously drawn the short straw and been assigned to supervise me, the newest production assistant with the misfortune to get shunted onto the weekend overnight shift. One of my duties, he had explained, would be to go through the monologues of all the late-night talk shows and mark down five or six jokes that the show’s senior producers might want to use as bump-ins when coming back from commercial.

“Wait,” I said. “What happens if a Bush joke is really funny?”

Dave shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t use it.”

“Well, what exactly are they looking for, then?”

“John Kerry jokes are good. Lately they’ve been liking stuff about his wife, too,” Dave said. “Oh, and Bill or Hillary Clinton jokes? They’ll take those every time. Especially . . .” He looked around for eavesdroppers, and lowered his voice a notch. “Especially ones about Bill being fat or horny, or Hillary being a pain in the ass.”

I frowned, just as a fast-forwarded Jay Leno popped up on the monitor in front of me, shaking hands with audience members in the front row at quadruple speed. I hit
PLAY
, knocking him back to his normal rate.

“Look,” Dave said, apparently picking up my annoyance, “if it makes you feel any better, throw a Bush joke in there, but don’t be disappointed when it doesn’t make it on air. Because it won’t. Ever.”

He checked the red digital clock on the wall, one of dozens scattered throughout the newsroom, synchronized down to the second.

“You’d better get cracking,” Dave said. “The show starts in less than four hours, and Leno’s monologue is like forty-five minutes long every night.”

He started to walk away, but stopped and doubled back.

“Oh, and one more thing,” he said.

I looked up from the screen. “Yeah?”

“No Cheney jokes.”

—

A month later, I was an absolute basket case, so addled by sleep deprivation that I barely had the energy to care that Jillian was mad at me. Working the graveyard shift five days a week is obviously not ideal, but that would have been a piece of cake compared to what I was doing—bouncing back and forth between second and third shift. I never had a chance to adjust my sleeping to either schedule, so I ended up just feeling tired at all times, every day of the week. Sometimes when I was transitioning between shifts, I’d be awake for thirty hours straight, the lack of sleep making me feel half drunk.

And it probably didn’t help that I
started
some of the shifts three-quarters drunk. When I began the schedule, I told myself that I wasn’t going to let it totally ruin my social life. So on Friday or Saturday nights, I’d go to dinner with friends, go out to a bar with them afterward, stay for a drink or two, then hop in a cab around midnight and head for the office. I didn’t ever show up
completely
wasted for a shift—I was
clearly
too much of a professional for that—but the sleep schedule was starting to have strange effects on my body, and I wasn’t always a great judge of knowing when to stop. My college-honed tolerance for alcohol was still pretty high at the time, so I set myself a limit of three drinks before work. But three beers can end up feeling like seven when your head is already clouded from getting only a handful of hours of fitful daytime sleep.

Dutywise, I actually enjoyed the overnight shifts. They had a certain inmates-running-the-asylum feel to them. The ship was manned by a skeleton crew, a swashbuckling band of loners and misanthropes fueled by coffee, Red Bull, cigarettes, and greasy food delivered by nearby twenty-four-hour delis. There was a light workload, and a lot of downtime; though we were technically a twenty-four-hour news network, between eleven
P.M.
and seven
A.M.
we ran nothing but repeats, interrupted only by the two-minute cut-ins at the bottom of each hour. The cut-ins were largely unneccesary, of course—just a way to keep us on our toes and to prevent us from sneaking off to one of the employee lounges scattered throughout the building and napping the night away on a beat-up couch. Ostensibly, we were there to deal with any breaking news; but realistically, news stopped breaking after ten
P.M.
, except on the very rarest of occasions.
²⁹

I quickly figured out that the overnights were for three kinds of people. The first type was like me—reluctantly and ostensibly temporarily on the shift, unlucky enough to be assigned to the overnight because they were new to the job and didn’t have any say in it, or a veteran under the impression that a stint on the graveyard shift would eventually advance his or her career. Those people were putting in the time, unpleasant as it was, and looking forward to eventually moving back to a better shift. The overnights were a necessary evil to them.

The second type you’d find working overnights were those sick bastards who actually
liked
it. They had
requested
the shift, and in some cases had remained on it for years. These people tended to be misanthropes, people haters who would have been miserable on the day shift.

Billy Lenhardt was the first one of this type that I met. A video editor, he was a few years older than I and had a thick New Jersey accent. He’d been on the night shift for three years. He was a heavy smoker and hated to indulge his habit alone; I was a social smoker and was willing to keep him company as long as he was willing to let me bum a cigarette. We hit it off right away.

“I love the overnights,” Billy told me once at four
A.M.
as we stood in front of the building just outside the entrance, puffing Camels. “No one’s around to bother you.”

“But who on the day shift bothers you?” I asked.

“Pretty much everyone,” Billy said, laughing. “But especially Siegendorf. That guy’s a fucking idiot.”

“But don’t you hate working at night? Doesn’t it suck to be basically nocturnal?”

“I’ve got blackout curtains at home, so it’s easy enough to sleep during the day,” he said. “Also driving in from Jersey when I do, I’m reverse-commuting. The traffic is way better.”

Another night-shifter who shared Billy’s misanthropic leanings was Jeremy, a middle-aged video editor who’d been with the network since day one.

“They keep trying to stick me back on the daytime,” he told me, explaining that the bosses didn’t like that someone with his experience—and the high salary that went along with it—was slumming it on the easiest possible shift. But Jeremy had enough seniority that he could basically tell the bosses to go fuck themselves, which he did every few months in so many words. “After a while I guess they just figured it’s easier to let me work when I want than it is to argue with me,” he said.

He was a great editor, one of the best I ever worked with, but was laid-back to a maddening degree. There wasn’t
a ton
of urgency on the overnights, but every once in a while, we’d get some footage in that needed a quick turnaround.

On a typical night, I’d burst into his edit room in a panic, tape in hand.

“Jeremy, this hits in five!”

He’d look up from the Minesweeper game he was playing on the computer and smile, all innocence: “Oh, I don’t know if we’ll make it, then. You’d better call the control room and tell them the bad news.”

“Come on, I’m serious.”

“All right, give me the tape.”

He’d edit it, picking the shots slowly and deliberately as I watched over his shoulder and shuffled my feet impatiently.

“Hmm, I don’t like that transition,” he’d say, frowning at the monitor. “Do I have time to go back and fix it?”

I’d glance at the clock on the wall.

“No.”

“Fine,” he’d say, hitting the
EJECT
button and handing me the tape. “Here you go. It’s a piece of shit. Just like most of the video they put out here.”

Jeremy was the most openly cynical person I met in my time at Fox. I’d come across others who had misgivings about the place, but they would rarely give voice to their qualms—nothing more, at least, than a sarcastic muttered aside, or the occasional eye roll. Jeremy, meanwhile, would rail at length against everything about the company. He hated the incompetent management, he hated the conservative politics, he hated the fact that they kept trying to put him on the day shift—even though he explained to them that he loathed being around too many people at once.

“I’ll never leave, though,” he said, “because they’re paying me too well.” His theory was that the new hires were getting hosed—he howled when I told him about the twelve dollars an hour they were paying me—and that only those who had been at Fox since the early days were getting paid what they deserved. “They hired me back when they were actually handing out some real money to people.”

The
third
type of person on the overnight shift was the saddest of them all—the ones who had been put there because daytime people couldn’t stand
them
. They were too annoying or abrasive or strange or off-putting to work with larger groups, and were pushed into the overnights by supervisors who couldn’t find cause to fire them but also could not in good conscience continue to place them with the general population.

The overnight cut-in producer I ended up working with most frequently was one of these unfortunate souls. Seth was a bit of a legend among the PAs. I had actually heard rumors of him before I even started on the overnight shift, whispers about the maniac producer who lived to terrorize rookie production assistants. He didn’t quite live up to that billing when I finally met him, but he was undoubtedly salty about his exile to the evenings.

“I don’t know who the fuck I pissed off to get stuck here,” he’d gripe. After a few weeks on the job with him, I’d surmised that the answer was “everyone.” He was one of the most abrasive people I’d ever met.

Of course like most abrasive people, Seth was wildly entertaining in small doses, especially if his ire wasn’t aimed at you. He’d periodically freak out on a production assistant over some screwup, his voice rising to a high pitch as he screamed, the sound easily carrying across the mostly empty newsroom. I could see why he’d gained such a fearsome reputation among the PAs—night shift or no, he had zero tolerance for rookie mistakes (of which there were plenty, thanks to the relatively inexperienced crew that manned the overnights, present company included).