An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (35 page)

—

I spoke to my dad a few days later. He was nominally a Republican, and had voted for McCain. He was a little annoyed that his guy lost but was interested in getting my reaction.

“How do you think Fox will take it?” he asked.

“I think they’ll take it okay,” I said. “You know, give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Are you sure?” My dad sounded skeptical. “I think it’s going to be like
Blazing Saddles
, when the black sheriff arrives and all the townspeople panic.”

“No, I think you’re wrong,” I said.

But, as it turned out, I was the one who was wrong.

April 11, 2012—6:39
P.M.

I paced back and forth in the small conference room while the grown-ups in the office next door discussed my fate. I’d played dumb for almost a full half hour. Seeing that no confession was forthcoming, they’d banished me to the room by myself to let me stew in my own juices.

It had already been ten minutes. If their plan was to drive me insane with fear and uncertainty, it was working.

The conference room was a corner one. I’d never been in it before, but the view somehow looked familiar. It dawned on me that the vista of Times Square spreading out in front of me was identical to what could be seen from Bill’s office, exactly two stories above the spot where I was standing.

Finally, I could take no more. I opened the door a crack, peeking outside into the hallway. It was empty, the two security guards nowhere in sight. Diane’s office was to my right, the door closed. I could hear muffled voices coming from inside.

I spotted my iPhone sitting on a secretary’s desk, white and shiny and tantalizing. It would be so easy to just snatch it and make a run for it.

I pushed open the door and stepped into the hall.

That’s when the voice came from behind me.

“Mr. Muto, could you come back in here?” Diane the lawyer was standing in the doorway of her office. I hadn’t gotten more than two steps toward my unguarded phone when her door popped open. I don’t know if they’d heard me emerge from the conference room and rushed to intercept me, or if I just had lousy timing, but there was nothing to do but meekly shuffle into her office.

“We obviously can’t prove you did this,” she said. “But it doesn’t look good for you, either.”

“That, it does not,” I agreed.

“So we’re going to suspend you. With pay. Until we can sort out what exactly went on here.”

And that was that.

   CHAPTER 16   

Rhymes with “Cat Bit Hazy”

F
ox News responded to the inauguration of Barack Obama with a surprising, uncharacteristic amount of restraint.

That is to say, they waited until he was in office for at least thirty-six hours before calling him a socialist.

Very sporting of the network, actually, to give him that much of a head start.

The various conservative pundits and hosts of Fox probably should have taken the 2008 election loss as a chance to reflect, to learn from the mistakes of the Bush era, graciously giving the new president a bit of breathing room to begin to fix the economic and geopolitical wreckage that Dubya left behind, littering the American landscape like so many empty kegs and trampled Solo cups cluttering the floor after a frat party.

Instead, they did the exact opposite, as the entire network lost its fucking mind.

The hackery was led, as usual, by Sean Hannity. The host was newly unfettered following Fox’s first prime-time lineup change in almost a decade: Alan Colmes, the liberal half of
Hannity & Colmes
, had left the show shortly after the election. His replacement: No one. The show was renamed simply
Hannity
.

Colmes and the company brass put a sunny face on it, pointing out that he would stay with the channel as a commentator and that he wanted to “develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network.” But there was something undeniably fishy about the channel’s most prominent liberal receiving what was effectively a demotion when the country was on the cusp of a Democratic presidential administration. Conspiracy theories spread through the office. One popular rumor was that Colmes was forced out by a Second Floor that wanted to consciously move the network to the right in reaction to the new administration. A later theory—one that I suspect is the accurate one—held that Colmes was simply tired of playing second fiddle on his own show, taking abuse from Hannity, the viewers, and even some fellow liberals who were mad at him for continuing to appear on the network.

Aside from the
Hannity & Colmes
intrigue, the network’s schedule had remained remarkably stable over the years.
Fox & Friends
had changed one out of three cohosts, swapping frisky housewife E. D. Hill for the even friskier former Miss America Gretchen Carlson.
DaySide
, the show with the live audience, tried retooling itself with new hosts but never managed to catch on. The program was scrapped in favor of a two-hour block starring up-and-comer Megyn Kelly. Megyn had risen through the ranks to become the Platonic Ideal of a Fox anchoress: the blondest, prettiest, most contentious host we’d ever produced.

Beyond that, all the other big network stars were still in place: Shep, Greta, and O’Reilly. They each had their own reaction to the new president and the challenges he faced, but no one embarrassed themselves quite as much as Hannity in those first few months: With a nation in crisis, he bravely chose to speak truth to power . . . by attacking President Obama’s choice of condiments.

In May 2009, Obama had just barely finished his first one hundred days in office. He went to a DC-area burger place with the press corps in tow. The outing elicited the sort of embarrassing-in-retrospect media fawning that was typical of the early Obama presidency; but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for a president still in his honeymoon phase.

Cameras rolled, capturing every word, as Obama placed his order at the counter. Most casual observers would say that his order was innocuous, but Hannity, unlike the
obviously-in-the-tank liberal reporters,
saw something insidious in Obama’s choice of burger toppings. He saw something elitist. Something
French
.

The president, when ordering, had asked for “spicy brown mustard, something like that, or a Dijon mustard.”

Quelle horreur!

“I hope you enjoyed that
fancy
burger, Mr. President,” Hannity sneered after playing a clip of an old Grey Poupon commercial from the 1980s.

Even if we set aside the fact that Grey Poupon—manufactured by Kraft Foods right here in the good old USA, and costing a whopping three dollars and change per jar—is hardly an elitist food item, this was still a dumb attack, and foreshadowed the sorts of attacks that Fox and the entire right leveled at the president from the minute he set foot in the Oval Office. MustardGate was typical of the laziest, most offensive form of partisan journalism that reared its head in those early months, and persists to this day: If Obama does it, it must be bad.

Another example—the presidential teleprompter. It’s no secret that Obama gives a good speech. When he was on the campaign trail in 2008, he almost always gave his stump speech off the cuff—no notes, no prompter. When he became president, he started using teleprompters more. Naturally, this is because, as president, your words have much more weight than they did before, and the stakes are a lot higher than when you were just a candidate. It makes perfect sense for an American president to use a teleprompter, especially when there’s the distinct possibility that a single botched sentence has the potential to trigger World War III.

Obama doesn’t use the prompter any more often than any of his predecessors, yet early in his tenure, the right wing became obsessed with it. The precious, sainted Ronald Reagan used a teleprompter
constantly
; George W. Bush needed difficult words spelled out
phonetically
in his prompter. But the chorus from conservatives was still
har har har Obama has to write down his words before he says them and read them off a screen like some idiot.

O’Reilly, to his vast credit, did not chase after most of these picayune stories along with the rest of the network. He had ended his radio show in March 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration. It was a rare case of bad timing for O’Reilly, who usually had a better sense for these things. He really missed out on the wave of conservative paranoia and rage that swept the nation in the spring of 2009.

Eric, who always was smarter than I was, took the occasion of the radio show’s demise to leave Fox, working briefly for the Democratic National Committee, of all places, and eventually the Obama 2012 campaign. Richie the engineer was simply assigned to another radio show. Meanwhile, Sam and I briefly panicked at the prospect of having to find new jobs, but Stan reassured us that we’d be absorbed into the TV staff.

Thus in March 2009, I found myself back fully in the fold at the TV network I’d spent the last two years pretending I was only tangentially associated with.

And I was just in time for an exciting new era in Fox News’s political activism, as the channel climbed fully on board with the nascent Tea Party movement. Fox hadn’t created the Tea Party (that honor belonged to the conservative CNBC personality Rick Santelli, whose on-air rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went viral), but it embraced the movement to a degree that surprised even me. Some shows began promoting Tea Party gatherings, and the Second Floor made the decision to fan talent across the country on April 15, promoting it networkwide as FNC Tax Day Tea Parties. It represented a turning point for Fox, a complete raising of the veil—the network that had always at least attempted to maintain the pretense of being “Fair and Balanced” was suddenly openly advocating in favor of a protest movement against the Obama administration.

It was distressing to me that the whole network seemed to be moving rapidly to the right. The whole network, that is, except my boss. Something different was going on with O’Reilly. Something very curious indeed.

—

Usually when Bill asked a question at a pitch meeting, we’d all scramble to jump in and answer him, jockeying for position to prove ourselves more indispensable than our colleagues. Brown-nosing the boss was practically a contact sport at
The Factor
.

But not that day. That day we all stared awkwardly at our shoes.

“So what exactly is this ‘teabagging’?” he’d just asked. “Why is it such a bad thing?”

He was reacting to a video someone had just pitched, of CNN’s Anderson Cooper giggling over the phrase. It wasn’t Anderson’s most mature on-air moment; but in his defense, it was the Tea Partyers who had started calling themselves “teabaggers,” apparently not aware during the earliest days of their movement that
teabag
was a euphemism for a sex act involving a man dunking his testicles into another person’s mouth.

On the Internet, liberals (who
naturally
were more savvy about any and all sexual euphemisms) gleefully noticed that naive Tea Partyers were inadvertently outing themselves as ball dippers, and roundly mocked them. And now the mockery had jumped from the Internet to CNN. O’Reilly—ever vigilant for liberal media slights against the honest, hardworking Americans who only wanted smaller government and whiter presidents—was on the case.

But first he had to figure out what
teabagging
actually was.

“Well, what the hell does it mean?” Bill demanded when no answer was immediately forthcoming.

Emmy, our line producer, finally broke. “Oh, God, I can’t,” she said, laughing. “I can’t do it.” She buried her face in the sleeve of her fleece jacket, trying to smother her laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s a sex thing,” Stan said quickly.

Bill’s eyebrows shot up. Now he was
really
curious.

“You don’t want to know,” Gayle, our fact-checking executive producer added.

“It’s pretty vile,” Eugene said. “I don’t think we should get into it here. I can tell you privately after the meeting if you want.”

Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

O’Reilly had decided to not go on location to attend a Tea Party rally on tax day. He wasn’t interested in becoming part of the story himself. In doing so, he showed a restraint that many of his fellow hosts lacked. Neil Cavuto, the Hooters-enthusiast financial anchor, had jetted to Sacramento, probably hoping to make a side trip to snag some beach bikini footage for his show. Sean Hannity went to Atlanta. Greta Van Susteren attended the rally in her native Washington, DC—an odd right turn for the former suspected Democrat.
⁵⁹

One more anchor represented Fox on a field trip during that first Tax Day Tea Party in 2009. Deep into the heart of Texas, down to San Antonio, Fox had sent their newest secret weapon.

—

Glenn Beck premiered his Fox News show on January 19, 2009, the day before President Obama was inaugurated.

Nobody in the building really knew what to expect. His previous show had been on CNN Headline News—the low-rated, cable news equivalent of the witness protection program—so we were mostly unfamiliar with his shtick. But nothing could have prepared us for what came next.

Beck exploded out of the gate. His mix of goofy prop-comedy, apocalyptic predictions of doom, and thinly sourced conspiracy theories apparently spoke to our audience. Something about the ascension of Obama made our viewers especially receptive to Beck’s toxic brew, and ratings soared, reaching numbers unprecedented for the usually lackluster five
P.M.
hour.

The other on-air personalities at first had no idea what to make of Beck. He was a new creature to them, someone undeniably talented but also obviously a little bit unstable, and potentially dangerous. At the very least, his high ratings threatened to usurp the power structure that had been cemented over the years: Bill was number one, with Sean just behind him, and Greta in third. That was the ratings hierarchy for as long as anyone could remember, and it was remarkably consistent no matter what topic was in the news, or which guests were on which show.