An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (16 page)

In just a month with Seth, I saw up close much of the behavior that had led the other PAs who had worked with him to solemnly inform me that they believed he was insane (he’d cackle to himself sometimes for no reason, and had an irrationally strong fear of spiders), a cokehead (he’d disappear from the control room for long stretches and return jittery and manic, sweating profusely and wiping his nose), or both.

But aside from that circumstantial evidence, I could never find any definitive proof of mental illness or drug use. He was eccentric, to be sure, but the night shift was starting to make me loopy as well, so who was I to judge? And in fact Seth was a hell of a good producer, routinely picking offbeat stories, quirky items that were interesting and unexpected, and actually seeming to have a little fun with his slice of the network’s time.

“No one’s fucking watching, anyway,” he’d say. “Who’s paying attention to the news at four thirty in the goddamn morning?”

—

I got the call a week before Thanksgiving 2004.

I’d been expecting it, actually. Once you started nearing your six-month mark—once the bosses determined that you weren’t a total fuck-up, that you could get tape on the air with a respectably low mistake rate, that you were surprisingly willing to tolerate the shitty hours and laughable pay, that you might have
a
future
with the company—the call (or, in this case, the e-mail) came down from on high (or, rather, from Siegendorf):

Nelson wants to meet with you.

Nelson Howe, the news director and a company vice president, was a tall, serious-looking man. Before I even realized what his position was, I knew he was important because he inhabited one of the only real offices in the entire newsroom. While Siegendorf, who was in charge of the entire production assistant department, and pretty important in his own right, had to suffer the indignity of hunkering down at a desk in the middle of the PA pod, Nelson had a door and four walls separating him from the unwashed rabble of the newsroom.

The older PAs had filled me in, like camp counselors telling ghost stories: A meeting with Nelson was the last hurdle of the trial period at Fox, and the most important. Siegendorf and his deputy, Nina, were the ones who decided whether you were competent. But it was Nelson, unsmiling, his eyes piercing from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, who looked into your soul and decided whether you were
a believer
, whether you bought into the whole Fox thing wholeheartedly, without reservation. Only then could you move to the next level.

The older PAs had a nickname for the meeting that was only partially in jest: the Kool-Aid Conference. As in,
Are you fully prepared to drink the Fox News Kool-Aid?

Aside from nostalgically conjuring up images of TV commercials from my youth—commercials featuring a bulbous, anthropomorphic drink pitcher bursting through a wall, screaming, “OH, YEAH!” as frightened children scattered to avoid the debris—the Kool-Aid Conference made me nervous. For starters, I was almost certainly going to have to hide my true feelings in order to keep my job.

Aka, lie through my teeth.

And it’s not that I’m exactly Mr. Morals over here. I’ve long been a firm believer that a well-timed, tightly spun fib can work wonders in certain situations. But it seemed at least a tiny bit cynical of me to build my still-budding career on a bed of lies. Not to mention Nelson was supposed to be notoriously good at sniffing out the liars.

So I had a knot in my stomach the afternoon of the meeting as I trudged toward Nelson’s office. I passed the War Room,
³⁰
a glass fishbowl of a conference room where the
Fox Report
staff was meeting. I spotted my old pal Marybeth taking notes while listening to the senior producer speak.

Marybeth, a few weeks after finishing training me on cut-ins, had been snatched up by Shepard Smith’s crew.

Frankly, I was jealous.

If Fox News was like high school (and in many ways it was), Shep and his gang were totally the cool kids.
³¹
The staff had a swagger that the other shows just couldn’t match. They sat in the newsroom and wrote their show together, bantering wittily about the stories. Shep would sit with them, grabbing a desk in their pod, writing along with them in his shirtsleeves.

There was no parking lot available for them to retreat to for between-class cigarettes, but the host and a half dozen of his producers made do with the next best thing and could be spotted on a daily basis enjoying a preshow smoke outside the back entrance of the News Corp. building.

Marybeth wasn’t a smoker, but she’d embraced the ethos of her new colleagues. She didn’t consider herself too cool to still talk to me, however, and we’d maintained our friendship, chatting a few times a week when our schedules overlapped. In fact, she’d been one of the PAs who had clued me in about the meeting with Nelson.

She saw me then, as I was walking past the War Room, and she gave an excited little wave followed by a thumbs-up.
Good luck,
she mouthed.

Nelson’s door was closed, so I knocked, entering when I heard a muffled “Come in,” and closing the door behind me.

The windowless office was neat and tidy, much like the man who inhabited it. He wore a preppy navy-blue suit that hung loosely on his lanky frame, with a classic Brooks Brothers striped repp tie, and glasses with thin tortoiseshell frames. His hair was parted neatly to one side. He wore his ID on a lanyard around his neck, a somewhat nerdy affectation, especially for someone of his stature. (Wearing your ID badge, while technically required for entry into the building, was generally regarded as something that only newbies did. Mine had been relegated to my wallet since my second month on the job.)

His handshake was firm, quick, and bone-dry.

“So, Mr. Muto,” he began, reading my name off a printout in front of him, “Jim speaks very highly of you. He says you’re smart, you’re fast, you choose good tape. The producers all like working with you.”

“I appreciate him saying that,” I said. “I try.”

If Nelson was attempting to soften me up . . . it was
absolutely
working
, as my ego completely took over at the first sign of a compliment.

“So we want you to continue here at Fox,” Nelson went on. “But I just wanted to ask you a few things first.”

Okay. Here it comes.

“What do you think about us being”—he met my eyes with his, studying—“fair and balanced? That’s our motto. Do you believe it’s true?”

I swallowed, hesitated, choosing my words carefully.

“I think that our prime-time shows obviously have a . . . point of view . . .” I started.

Nelson arched an eyebrow.

“But that’s okay,” I continued. “Everyone knows that they’re opinion shows.”

Nelson nodded approvingly.

“I think that our daytime coverage is actually
very
fair and balanced,” I lied. “And our opinion shows just serve to balance out the rest of TV news, which is obviously
very
liberal.”

“But what about our critics?” Nelson asked. “They say that we’re biased. We’re too conservative. Do you agree with them?”

“Wellllll . . .” I started, drawing out the word to buy some time. I saw a frown begin to creep onto his face. Uh-oh.
Think of something.

“I think that our critics”—Nelson leaned forward in his chair—“probably don’t actually watch us that much,” I answered finally. And I had a good kicker, too: “Besides, they’re probably jealous of our ratings,” I said.

He smiled then, the first time since I’d come into the office.

We chitchatted for a few more minutes, before he stood to let me know the meeting was over.

“I think you’ll have a long career here, Mr. Muto,” he said while shaking my hand. “Can I give you some advice, though?”

“Absolutely.”

“Suits,” he said. “Start wearing suits.”

“Aha,” I said.

“This,” he said, gesturing to my ensemble—jeans and a rugby shirt, “isn’t going to fly for much longer. You should be wearing a suit every day. A nice, crisp one.”

“Well, I don’t exactly
own one
right now,” I admitted, suddenly feeling like a total dirtball.

“Right, well, you should buy a couple. I mean, we pay you enough that you . . .” He glanced down at the paper on his desk, searching for the correct number. He grimaced when he found it. “Oh, well . . . you can at least go to Men’s Wearhouse, right? Get a nice two-for-one?” He looked at me with a somewhat apologetic smile. “Anyway, think about it.”

Back at the PA pod, Marybeth was done with her show meeting and was gathering tape at her desk.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“I think he liked what I had to say,” I said.

“Did you give him the spiel? ‘Our opinion shows are
this
, but our straight news programs are right down the middle and blah blah blah . . .’”

I was shocked. “How’d you know that’s what I said?”

She laughed. “That’s what everyone says, dummy. That’s what I said in my meeting last month. No one actually
believes it
, but everyone says it. What else can you say?”

I thought back to some of the conversations Marybeth and I had, ones where she’d said things about John Kerry that were as disparaging as anything that had come out of Lenny’s mouth.

“But I thought you were a conservative?”

“I am, I guess,” she said. “But I also have eyes and ears.”

And that’s when it hit me.

No one believed it.

Fair and Balanced. We Report, You Decide.
Everyone knew it was bunk. A sham. Over the next eight years at Fox, I never met a single employee, not the truest of the true believers, who wasn’t cynical about what our main purpose was.

“We all know the ‘Fair and Balanced’ thing is bullshit,” a very conservative
O’Reilly Factor
producer told me once, late at night, after we’d had a few drinks. “We’re not here to be fair. We’re here to give red meat to our viewers.”

“To stir up the crazies, you mean,” I said.

He laughed. “Yeah, to stir up the crazies. Because outrage equals ratings.”

—

I was home for a few days around Thanksgiving when Jim called me with the good news: “Joe, we’re going to bump you from freelancer to full-time!”

I felt elated and slightly nauseated at the same time.

“You’re getting health benefits!”

At least that would take care of the nausea if it turned out to be something serious.

“And a raise!”

Well, that was an added bonus.

“So you
were
at twelve dollars an hour. You’ll be at twelve seventy-four now. Congratulations!”

Better than a sharp stick in the eye, as my grandmother liked to say.

Later that night, at a gathering with some of my friends from high school, I was talking to my friend Matt, a liberal who was in his first year of law school. He was planning on a career in some field of law or other that would help save the world, and was still aghast at my job choice.

“Frankly, I can’t believe you’re still there,” he said. “It’s been almost six months. I thought for sure you’d have run out of there screaming by now.”

“I have a high tolerance for pain, I think. Or maybe I’m just a masochist.”

Matt was even more aghast when I described to him how I’d lied about my opinion on Fox’s bias to advance my career.

“So what do you think,” I asked, “did I just completely trade away my integrity for some health benefits and an extra seventy-four cents an hour?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Matt said, taking a swig of his beer. “You did that already, when you took the job in the first place.”

April 11, 2012—12:14
P.M.

New York is filled with hundreds or even thousands of compelling, dramatic locations for spy meetings: dark secluded bars, shadow-filled parking garages, remote park benches next to mist-covered ponds.

Meanwhile, my little pathetic flirtation with espionage had led me to a crowded, brightly lit Times Square fast-food joint. It was the first New York City branch of the Midwest stalwart burger chain Steak ’n Shake. And three months after opening, it was inexplicably mobbed—as if New Yorkers had never before encountered something as exotic as griddled ground beef stuck between two buns.

Amid all the chaos, I found Rufus at a counter seat, calmly working his way through a cheeseburger and fries and reading a book on his Kindle.

Rufus had lasted nearly three years at FoxNews.com. Unlike me—who found them at turns mildly irritating and rage-inducing—Rufus found the network’s right-wing politics highly amusing. He’d laughingly tell me about his standing orders to “Foxify” stories that came across the Associated Press wire—that is, replace the headline and rewrite the first paragraph to something that was more suited to the website’s conservative audience. If the AP had audaciously seen fit to bury a slightly unflattering tidbit about John Kerry in the later paragraphs of an article, Rufus would Foxify it, making the damaging portion the headline and the lede.

What eventually did Rufus in at Fox was the overnight shift, that great widow-maker, which he’d been pushed onto for the full five nights a week. But unlike TV, the dot-com overnight shifts were strictly one-man affairs—Rufus was the lone person on the job for a full six hours. Without any of the bleary-eyed camaraderie—the only thing I’d enjoyed about the otherwise godforsaken schedule—Rufus began to slowly descend into madness. All the blackout curtains and Ambien in the world couldn’t make him a fully functioning member of society. So he’d left, bouncing around to jobs with various other media heavyweights—AOL,
The New York Times
—until finally settling into a well-paying gig programming the website for a premium cable movie channel.

His Times Square office left him only a few blocks from where he’d started his career, barely a five-minute walk from where I was in the process of destroying mine.