An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (5 page)

But obviously the interview was no time to voice that sentiment, so I smiled broadly as Jessica laughed heartily at her own anecdote.
I’m really nailing this,
I thought.

I thought too soon.

We had come to the end of the interview, the part where the interviewer asks if you have any questions. Feeling cocky from the smoothness of the proceedings up to that point, I decided to open my dumb mouth.

I had noticed on her TV at that moment that a reporter was doing a piece on
the
tabloid story of the moment: the Scott Peterson trial.

Scott was a smug-looking guy in his early thirties whose eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci, had disappeared on Christmas Eve. Cops became suspicious of him when it turned out he was having multiple affairs behind his wife’s back. His laughable alibi for the day his wife disappeared was that he had been alone in his boat, out on the San Francisco Bay, fishing. When Laci’s body washed up on a nearby shore several months later, cops arrested Scott, who appeared to be in the midst of preparing to flee to Mexico.

Almost a year after his arrest, his trial was huge news and was getting wall-to-wall, breathless coverage on Fox, coverage that I’d noticed while watching the channel the week before, studying up for the interview.

It was, understandably, an irresistible story for a certain segment of the population—there would always be an audience for salacious murder trials involving attractive, well-off white people. But it struck me as a little odd that the sordid details were being covered so extensively by a “news” channel while the country was in the middle of an increasingly bloody war in Iraq and was also about five months away from a presidential election.

So when Jessica asked me if I had any questions, it turns out I did—a really unwise one, in fact: “Do any of the journalists here complain about having to cover stories like the Peterson trial instead of, you know,
real news
?” I asked.

The atmosphere in the room changed instantly. The smile dropped off her face. The laughter went out of her eyes. And I don’t know how she did it without touching them, but I swear the blinds lowered a little, darkening the room.

Realizing my mistake, I instantly felt like throwing up.

“No,” she said in a voice that was suddenly quiet and pinched. “Our viewers love that story. It gets great ratings. We cover stories that our viewers want to watch. And we wouldn’t want to hire anybody who would second-guess our viewers like that.”

I wish I could tell you what the rest of the interview was like, but I have zero recollection of it. I’ve totally blocked it out of my mind—a defense mechanism, no doubt, against the trauma of that moment. All I remember was that she ended it very quickly after my question. I was out on the plaza, already starting to sweat again, in what felt like ninety seconds later.

I’d blown it. My only job interview. My one chance to get to New York, to escape the infamy of being a college graduate with parents for roommates. Loads of potential, squandered, because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut.

Oh, well,
I thought,
at least I have the rest of the weekend in the city to enjoy myself before I have to go back to the Midwest to start the rest of my sad life
.

Six days later, they called and offered me the job.

—

“This is Jim Siegendorf, an executive producer at Fox News Channel,” the voice on the phone said. “We want to hire you as a production assistant.”

I cradled the phone against my ear in my childhood bedroom in Cincinnati, rendered momentarily speechless. I had been rushed out of the interview so quickly after I dared to question the journalistic soundness of a salacious murder trial, that I was absolutely certain I’d blown it.

In my despair I’d gone full Bridget Jones and immediately started depression eating. I bought and devoured a giant lamb pita sandwich from a food cart advertising itself as halal
⁹
parked outside the Fox building. The food helped, but it still felt like a long nine-block walk of shame back to my hotel to peel off my interview clothes, which were now drenched with flop sweat in addition to heat sweat, and speckled with lamb grease.

So, yeah, I was a bit surprised to be offered a job. But I managed to hold it together and not betray my utter shock.

“Production assistant? What’s that?” I asked.

“You’ll be helping out with the TV shows we produce,” Jim said. “I don’t know yet what show we’ll put you on. It depends on what slots we have to fill.”

TV? I had only applied for a website job, but this was actually even better.
I’m going to be a rich television producer!

“The job pays twelve dollars an hour,” Jim said.

I’m going to be a frugal-living television producer!

“I have to tell you, it starts out freelance, so there aren’t any health or dental benefits right away.”

I’m going to be a frugal-living, disease-ridden, toothless television producer!

The salary was a bit of a disappointment, but since it represented a 50-percent raise from the eight dollars an hour I’d been making at my landscaping job the previous summer, it didn’t sound too bad.

But now I was again confronted with the same moral quandary I had been wrestling with when I sent the application in the first place. It’s true that I was desperate for a job, any job, to prove to my parents that their faith in me, their indulgence of my frivolous-in-retrospect film and television studies, hadn’t been a huge mistake. And I was eager to move to New York City, a place that I’d fallen in love with at a very young age and, to paraphrase Woody Allen, a town I idolized all out of proportion.

But it was also true that I’d essentially be working for the enemy. Could I swallow my distaste for Fox News’s conservative leanings? If I took the job, I realized with a queasy feeling, I’d be selling out at age twenty-two—and not even for a lot of money.

“So what do you think?” Jim’s voice on the phone snapped me out of my mental Hamletting. He sounded like a nice guy, polite, soft-spoken, and eager to recruit me. And he hadn’t asked for any sort of ideological purity test. Neither had Jessica, for that matter. No one seemed to notice, or care, that I was a bleeding-heart liberal. Maybe I could handle this.

“We’d
really
love to have you,” Jim’s voice urged.

My eyes swept across a map that I’d pinned to the wall just the day before. I’d bought it at a souvenir stand near Times Square shortly after my blown interview. The island of Manhattan stretched from the top to the bottom, filling the space, rendered in yellows and reds, and vaguely phallic. When I’d tacked it up, I’d been certain that staring at it every day would be the closest I would ever get to actually living there. But now the opportunity had re-presented itself, unexpectedly.

I sighed. It might be my only chance.

“I’m in.”

April 11, 2012—11:45
A.M.

I had made it past the suspicious Nick De Angelo, though the encounter had left me rattled. Rather than risk being spotted getting on the elevators on my own seventeenth floor, I’d decided to take a little-used staircase up to the eighteenth-floor elevator bank, where I was less likely to bump into someone who would find it odd that I was fleeing the building with a duffel bag at eleven thirty in the morning.

I climbed the stairs and emerged into the long narrow space that was currently being uneasily shared by the staffs of Sean Hannity’s and Greta Van Susteren’s shows.
¹⁰
The two crews, despite airing back-to- back on the same network, were, in a very real sense, competitors, with each staff independently pursuing the same scoops and the same hard-to-get guests. It was an awkward arrangement, to say the least, to have a rival producer ten feet away and able to hear your every word when you were trying to work the phones; but the two staffs had somehow made do for a few years. The room was mercifully mostly empty, with most of the late-working staffers not yet in for the day; the few people who
were
there seemed to pay me no mind.

The space was divided equally, with each show getting its own side, but the décor was pure Hannity, the walls plastered with various campaign signs for Republican candidates, and one very large fan-donated piece of art.

Now, it wasn’t unusual at Fox for some of the more zealous viewers to mail artwork and other mementos to their favorite hosts. The O’Reilly pod a floor below was studded with some of the more memorable examples—most of them of dubious artistic merit, but all of them glorifying the host: a wooden, hand-painted Bill O’Reilly bobblehead doll; a watercolor painting of Bill’s famous on-air confrontation with congressman Barney Frank; a nightmare-inducing papier-mâché depiction of O’Reilly dressed as a lumberjack, for some reason, complete with an ominous, shiny-bladed ax.

The point is, for a show to display viewer-made art wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but the piece mounted next to the door in the Sean/Greta headquarters stood out; it was enormous, and clearly done by someone who knew how to wield a paintbrush. The giant oil-on-canvas showed Sean Hannity’s massive grinning head on a TV screen with a Fox News logo, with confetti flying through the air behind him. The artist, in an inspired bit of wishful thinking, had added an on-screen graphic that read
OBAMA DEFEATED IN HISTORIC LANDSLIDE
.

At least if they fire my ass,
I thought as I passed the thing,
I’ll never have to see that fucking asinine painting again.

   CHAPTER 2   

I Coulda Been a Contender . . .

S
o is this fat fuck dead or what?”

Kurt Karos, a producer in his late twenties, was barking into the phone, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the control room. We had just received a report that Marlon Brando, legendary actor, star of classic films like
On the Waterfront
,
Apocalypse Now
, and
The Godfather
, noted recluse—and alleged fat fuck—was, in fact, dead. But the report had come from just one source, Fox’s affiliate in Los Angeles, and Karos was on the phone with the assignment desk, trying to get a second source to confirm the news so we could go to air with it.

“Don’t fuck with me on this, Steve,” Kurt was shouting. “I
know
it’s still early on the West Coast. . . . Wake them the hell up, then! . . . Look, if CNN gets this first, they might as well stay in bed because I swear to Christ I’ll make it my business that they no longer have jobs to wake up to!”

I was taking this all in from my perch in the back corner of the cramped, chaotic control room, itching to do something, to help in any way I could; but I was by far the lowest-ranked person in the room, and the producers and technicians seemed to have forgotten that I was even there. So I watched, and waited, as the number one cable news network in America struggled to be the first to inform a blissfully unaware public that a Hollywood icon had dropped dead.

It was July 1, 2004, my very first day at Fox News.

I was about three hours into it.

—

Four days earlier, I had arrived in New York City with my entire life packed into three suitcases, only six weeks removed from the comforting bosom of college. My diploma was still at the framer’s in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio—which was just as well, because I wasn’t going have an office wall to hang it on anyway.

I took a cab straight from LaGuardia Airport to my friend Sloane Coupland’s Manhattan apartment. Sloane was a delightfully manic brunette I’d known since freshman year. The first time I met her, she’d brought me back to her dorm room and nonchalantly changed her clothes in front of me. For any other girl, that would have been a brazen come-on, but for Sloane, it was simply a practical matter: She needed to change, and it was rude to ask a new friend to wait outside while she did so. Of course I didn’t know that at the time, and diligently waited for a sexual entanglement that never materialized. By the time I realized that the bra and panties she’d flashed at our first meeting was the nakedest I would ever see her, it was too late: We were friends. Most recently, as seniors, we’d collaborated on a truly overwrought pro-choice student film that she’d written, I’d photographed, and we’d both directed. It didn’t win any awards in the student film festival, but it did give Sloane and me a lot of time to talk about our future plans, with both of us having aspirations to head to New York.

Sloane had arrived in the city three weeks prior. She was living in a luxury high-rise overlooking the East River, in a spacious one-bedroom that no twenty-two-year-old had any business having all to herself. Sloane was one of those lucky cases that seemed to crop up occasionally in New York: Her parents had agreed to support her for a year while she made a go of it in the film industry.

When the taxi dropped me off at Sloane’s building, one doorman helped me with my luggage while another held the door for me and a third greeted me at the front desk of the lobby, a soaring marble-clad space with a curtain of water running down one wall and gathering in a little pool. I was still taking it all in, slack-jawed like a moron, when Sloane stepped off the elevators and wrapped me in a hug.

“You’re here!” she shouted, squeezing the air out of my lungs with her surprisingly powerful embrace. “Finally!”

“You really expect me to stay in this fleabag?” I wheezed. “The doormen didn’t even offer me champagne on the way in.”

“Ha-ha, very funny, asshole. Let’s go upstairs.”

A quick ride in the elevators and we were at her nineteenth-floor apartment.

“Welcome to New York!” Sloane said with a grand flourish of her arms as we crossed the threshold. “Let me give you the tour!”

My first impression was actually that the place was small—maybe about six hundred square feet. I would soon come to realize that it was a
fucking palace
by regular Manhattan standards. But I had been tricked by years of watching New York–based sitcoms, and all I could think was that Sloane’s apartment was even smaller than Joey and Chandler’s.