An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (22 page)

He was in full yelling and backslapping mode when I bumped into him one night in late 2006, at an after-work happy hour at (where else?) Langan’s, celebrating the birthday of another PA with whom we were both friendly. I was still on
The Lineup
, and he had left
DaySide
for a position with Bill O’Reilly’s radio show.

“Muto!” he yelled as I walked into the bar, raising his beer glass in a salute. “Get over here and take a shot with me!”

I bellied up next to him. “I’m in. What are we doing? Tequila?”

He looked at me with mock outrage. “Why do you think I want tequila, huh? Is it because I’m brown?”

Sam was Mexican American, one of the few minorities in a newsroom that was heavily white, and he didn’t let anyone forget it.

“A Mexican guy always has to drink tequila, is that it?” he continued, laughing, punching me good-naturedly on the shoulder.

“Mexican? I thought you were Samoan,” said a woman’s voice behind us. We both turned. It was Camie.

“Okay, now I’m offended for real,” Sam said. Though with his bulky build and the thick black goatee he was sporting, he
did
look a little like he was from Samoa.

“Aww, quit being a baby and let’s take a shot,” Camie said. Then to the bartender, “Three shots of Patrón.”

The barkeep lined up three shot glasses and filled them from a squat bottle of clear liquid. We picked up the glasses and clinked them together.

“Viva Mexico,” I said, and we knocked back the smooth, pleasantly burning elixir.

An hour later, nicely buzzed, Sam and I were nursing beers at a table.

“How do you like your job, man?” he asked. “I walk past your desk sometimes. It looks like you’re not really doing much.” I almost got indignant but realized he was probably right.

“I like the people,” I said. “But I have jack shit to do during the week. And I’m pretty bored of the crime beat.”

“You know . . .”—Sam lowered his voice conspiratorially—“we have an opening coming up on Bill’s radio show. I could put your name in. I think you’d be good for it.”

And just like that, it was moral dilemma time for me again.

Working for
The Lineup
, I could at least pretend I wasn’t involved in promulgating the worst of Fox’s conservative tendencies. I gave myself plausible deniability.
After all,
I told myself,
there was no ideology in the crime stories. There’s no liberal or conservative—just guilty or innocent.
But if I started working for O’Reilly, that fig leaf I’d been grasping on to for the sake of my own conscience would disappear entirely. There’d be no pretending anymore that I was somehow separate from the Fox News right-wing outrage-manufacturing complex. Instead, I’d be at the very center of it.

Then again, was there really that much difference in what I was doing and what Sam was doing? I’d already compromised by taking the job with the company in the first place. Once I was in the building, taking a paycheck, did it really matter what specific show I was affiliated with? Wouldn’t it actually be better to be on a show with some clout instead of stuck on a dead-end weekend show that was slowly bleeding viewers and was on the verge of going down the tubes? And couldn’t I, as I’d originally vowed when I took the job, change the network from the inside a lot more effectively if I was in the belly of the beast? Wouldn’t keeping the famous, feared Bill O’Reilly honest actually be a much higher calling than tracking down missing blond teenagers?

“Yo, you still with me, man?” Sam snapped his fingers in front of my face. “You drifted off or something.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“Fuck, yeah!” Sam yelled, pounding the table. He jumped out of his chair, waving his hands over his head to get the bartender’s attention. “Shots! Now!”

Two weeks later, I was sitting in Stan Manskoff’s office. He was quizzing me on my duties for
The Lineup
, feeling out if I was going to be a good fit for the O’Reilly team. It wasn’t an ideological litmus test like the Kool-Aid Conference two years earlier. It felt more like an assessment to see if I was competent enough to handle the pressure of working for a demanding, high-profile host. Stan must have liked whatever it was I said, because another week after that, he called me back into his office.

“We’d like to offer you the job as the new production assistant on Bill’s radio show,” he said.

The O’Reilly empire at the time consisted of three distinct teams that worked closely together: TV, radio, and website. TV was the biggest, and in Bill’s eyes the most important, employing about fifteen people. Radio was smaller—only five people at its peak. And the website team was basically just two guys, with some additional support staff on the West Coast. The three staffs were intertwined, all attending the same meetings, all under Stan’s supervision, and all expected to do whatever they could to further the O’Reilly cause. Stan was offering me a chance to join the team. The Dream Team, really. It was the pinnacle of working for Fox. If I was going to go all in, this was my chance.

I thought for a few seconds.

“Thanks for the offer, Stan, but I’m going to have to say no.”

—

The next day, I was in a meeting with Brigette, our head of HR, in her second-floor office.

“I’m confused,” she was saying. “I thought you wanted this job. You interviewed for it. Stan said you seemed very eager in the interview. Why turn it down?”

“I do want the job,” I said. “But not if it isn’t a promotion.”

The offer was for me to be a production assistant. It was just a lateral move. If I took it, I was guaranteed at least another year—or even two—before I was eligible for a bump up to associate producer, a title I craved desperately by that point. If I stayed with
The Lineup
for another few months, I was virtually guaranteed to get that promotion.

I explained this to Brigette in so many words, and she nodded along as I spoke.

“I totally get where you’re coming from,” she said when I’d finished. “But this position just isn’t at that level.”

“Look,” I said. “I know that O’Reilly is the big leagues and that my show right now is basically the minors. And I want to come work for O’Reilly. It’s like getting called up by the Yankees. But I’m on the verge of becoming a cleanup hitter for my current team, and you guys are asking me to join the Yankees as a batboy. I’d love to join the Yankees. But not if it means I’m taking a step backward in my career. Or even a step sideways.”

Brigette sighed. I could tell I was losing her.

“I know that the metaphor is tortured,” I said. “But does it make sense to you?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But I’m a Mets fan.”

Ouch. Swing and a miss.

Two months passed. Sam had been so disappointed when I told him I’d turned down the job that I began to second-guess myself. Had I blown an opportunity that I’d never get another stab at? As much as it would suck to be trapped as a PA for another year or two, the position would be so high profile that it might just be worth it. And I’d at least be off the weekend shifts and get out of the increasingly toxic cycle of post-show debauchery at Langan’s that I couldn’t quite seem to tear myself away from.

The schedule and the drinking had finally taken their toll on my personal life. Jillian and I broke up, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knew us and had witnessed the increasingly ugly fighting that marred the last few months of our relationship.

In retrospect, I had been a terrible boyfriend. Jillian had never bought into the whole New York thing, and I grew to resent her for it, in essence choosing the city I was obsessed with over the woman I had once loved.

With my love life in tatters, and my career seemingly at a dead end, I pondered doing the unthinkable. Something so foul and despicable that it gives me chills to this day, knowing how close I came to the brink.

The law school brochure was actually in my hands when the call came.

I was home on a Monday afternoon (the first day of my “weekend”), trying to figure out if any law programs were craving students who had managed only a 2.8 GPA in the world’s easiest major and who were in the midst of washing out of a cable news career. My cell phone rang.

It was Max Greene, the executive producer of the entire weekend prime time. He was a great boss, mostly because he wasn’t afraid to climb into the trenches with his troops; he’d been a mainstay at Langan’s, heroically picking up rounds and thus earning our loyalty forever. But I hadn’t heard from him in weeks—he’d developed a reputation as a turnaround artist and had been temporarily pulled from the weekends and lent out to Geraldo’s syndicated show, which was floundering in the ratings. He’d never called me at home before, so I knew something big was up.

Max got right to the point: “Joe, I heard that you’ve got an offer from O’Reilly.”

I didn’t know how he’d found out. I hadn’t told anyone on my staff what I was up to.

“Max, I interviewed with them, but I didn’t take the job. It wasn’t a promotion.”

“I just got off the phone with HR. It’s a promotion now.”

I was speechless.

“Look,” Max said. “I know it’s tempting to go to O’Reilly. It’s a big deal. But if you stay with us, I’ll give you the promotion, too.”

Two minutes after he hung up, my phone rang again. It was Stan Manskoff, offering me the job. I told him I’d have to think about it, and would have an answer for him at the end of the day.

I called Max back. “Honestly, I’m torn,” I said.

But I wasn’t torn. The truth is, I was scared.

I knew I was very good at what I did. And I had no doubt that I’d greatly impress O’Reilly with my skills, possibly to the point where he’d declare me his successor, or write me into his will, just like a cartoon rich guy. But in all my previous positions, I’d always been secure in the knowledge that I had at least a tiny bit of leeway to be a fuck-up and a slacker; the shows were low profile, the bosses forgiving. If I came into work hungover or late, if I screwed up a tape or missed a deadline, I knew I could ultimately get away with it. I knew I’d have no such luxury with O’Reilly. The show was as high profile as it got, and the boss was anything but forgiving. That’s what was scaring me more than anything.

Taking this job meant, above all else, that I had to grow up.

“Joe, you know I really want to keep you,” Max said, “but you’ve got to do what you think is best for your career.”

I was worried he’d say that.

April 11, 2012—3:33
P.M.

“Muto, get in here!”

I jumped out of my chair and trotted the short distance to Bill’s office. Five years of working for him had put me on a hair trigger, training me to pop out of my chair whenever he called, lest he get annoyed at my tardiness.

I poked my head in. “What’s up, Bill?”

He wordlessly held up the News Quiz folder that I’d left on his desk. I walked in and plucked it from his hand.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, and beat a hasty retreat.

Back at my desk, I went through the pages of questions. He’d used his pen to scratch a neat check mark next to each of the five he wanted to use.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a grim-faced Stan Manskoff leave his office and walk into Bill’s, closing the door after him.

That wasn’t a good sign. Bill, for all his standoffishness, rarely closed his door. As the network’s top star, he knew that no one could challenge or rebuke him, and he conducted the majority of his business without regard for who might overhear. Everything from dressing down a producer to calling his wife on the phone to dictate precisely what he wanted her to cook for dinner (“Some chicken, side of potatoes, maybe a vegetable . . . let’s say green beans”) was done within full earshot of whoever was sitting outside his office or happened to be walking down the hall.

But Stan had closed the door, which meant he had something unpleasant to tell Bill.

And I had a pretty good idea what it was.

   CHAPTER 10   

Radio Days

Y
ou never see the truly crazy ones coming.

Sure, some of the crazies are easy to filter out. You can hear it immediately over the phone line; they’re nervous, stuttering, halting in their speech. They can’t make a coherent point. They curse, or use a racial slur in the very first sentence out of their mouths. You know within two seconds—
no fucking way
you’re putting this guy on air.

So you spin a little lie, and you hang up on them before they have a chance to protest: “Hey, buddy, I’m really sorry, but there’s another guy on the line who wants to say the exact same thing as you, and he’s been waiting twenty minutes.”
Click
. Or “I’m really sorry, but we’re almost out of time. We’re not taking any more callers this hour. Give us a shout another time.”
Click
.

Some of the callers will heap abuse on you. Call you an asshole, demand that you put them through to Bill immediately, accuse you of being too scared to take their call on-air. Some callers are persistent. They call back ten minutes after your little fib-and-click routine and accuse you (accurately) of wanting to get rid of them.

With those callers sometimes you get a little vindictive and just leave them hanging on the line indefinitely. Pretend that their angry harangue or their third callback has successfully led you to change your mind about them; they’ve shown you the error of your ways, and you’re going to put them through to Bill! He’ll take their call right after the commercial break, so just hang on the line and don’t go anywhere because he could take the call at any moment!

And so you end up leaving some people twisting in the wind for the entire show. Two full hours some of these poor bastards sit on the line. Then the show ends, and they’re still hanging on the line, not even getting it that there’s no way they’re making it on today, and in fact Bill has already left the radio studio and headed back to his office. Getting rid of these geniuses who think that the best way to get on a radio show is to curse at the call screener is always a wonderfully cathartic way to end your day, to wield the one small bit of power you have. Sometimes you’ll get on the line to say good-bye, maybe subtly taunt them a little with a polite and cheery “Sorry you didn’t make it on air this time. Call us tomorrow!”
Click
.