An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (9 page)

Essential to O’Reilly’s narrative was the pretense that he was an independent; the claim was that he wasn’t partial to the Republicans or the Democrats, the right or the left—he went after both sides, doling out scorn to whomever deserved it more. It
just so happened
that those on the left were the ones who deserved rebuke 95 percent of the time. The remaining 5 percent of the time when he went after the conservatives—on certain carefully chosen issues like the death penalty and climate change—gave him plausible deniability.
I’m fair, I’m balanced. I call it like I see it.

Fox launched just a few months after MSNBC, which—due to the backing of Microsoft and NBC News—was deemed by media critics as a more credible competitor to CNN. But Murdoch had given Ailes a mandate: Do whatever you can to beat CNN. And Ailes thought he had a solid strategy to do so, reasoning that the conservative hordes who flocked to talk radio were being underserved by CNN, which had a perceived liberal bias.
Give those conservatives a home on cable TV,
Ailes’s reasoning went,
one that serves up both openly conservative opinion and conservative-slanted reporting that is thinly veiled as “straight” news, and they’ll become habitual watchers.

The first turning point for the network came during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Fox News had started broadcasting only about a month before the ’96 elections, too late in the game to make much of an impact. Having missed a chance to beat up on Bill Clinton then, Fox made up for lost time, hammering Bubba for his illicit blowjobs. O’Reilly and Hannity were especially tenacious, and their spirited denunciations of Clinton juiced the ratings to the point where Fox’s prime time was nipping at the heels of CNN.

Ailes’s strategy was working. He was proving that a fiercely loyal niche audience, one that watched so fervently that they literally ruined their TV screens (as I was reminded repeatedly), could bring in higher ratings than the wishy-washy broad audience that CNN was pursuing. As if to punctuate the point, in 2000, O’Reilly for the first time topped Larry King in the monthly ratings, becoming the most-watched show on cable news.

He’s never been beaten in a monthly rating since.

If the Lewinsky scandal was good for Fox’s ratings, the 9/11 attacks were nothing short of great. With the whole country traumatized, viewers had little patience for middle-of-the-road nuance, and even the staunchest liberals found themselves drifting a little bit rightward.

All the news networks went the full patriotic route following the terrorist attacks—plastering their screens with flags and red, white, and blue graphics—but Fox did it with the most relish and conviction, and the ratings soared. In January 2002, the 9/11 bump led to another ratings milestone—Fox’s network-wide numbers passed CNN’s for the first time.

Again, the network has not been beaten since.

Another benefit of 9/11 for Fox—it helped the network ratchet up support for the Bush agenda while maintaining plausible deniability.
We’re not being partisan—we’re simply being patriotic!
Consequently, Fox ended up being one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq War, with, in the words of
The New York Times
, “anchors and commentators who skewer the mainstream media, disparage the French and flay anybody else who questions President Bush’s war effort.”

And this was the place I found myself working.

When I started in summer 2004, the Iraq War had just started to go bad but was still at the
Hmmm, this could be a problem
stage (as opposed to the later
Holy shit, what in Christ’s name were we thinking?
stage). Meanwhile, the election was heating up, and the Democrats, apparently not having learned their lesson with Michael Dukakis, were serving up yet another aloof, effete Bay Stater to be shredded by the Republican attack machine. The difference is that in 1988, Roger Ailes was skewering Dukakis from within the Bush campaign—where he was alleged to be the mastermind behind the infamous Willie Horton TV ads that portrayed Dukakis as soft on crime
¹³
—while in 2004 he found himself as the head of the highest-rated cable news network in the country, able to push whatever narrative he wanted for free.

—

I suppose that, as a godless liberal, I should have been more concerned about this, but on that first day of work, watching my new colleagues spring into action, frantically leveraging the full resources of a multimillion-dollar global news-gathering operation in order to break news of a celebrity death to the world a full half minute before the competition, I was too fascinated by the spectacle of it all to register any qualms I had with the tone of the political coverage.

“Well, that was intense,” I said to Camie once the Marlon Brando fuss had tailed off. “Is it always like that in here?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah. It gets real wild when there’s breaking news.”

“But I mean with, like, all the cursing and whatnot. Is that normal?”

She nodded again. “Sure is. It’s like a frat house. You’d think they’d tone it down a bit with me around, but no.” She paused for a second, a thoughtful look on her face. “Of course, the women are just as bad as the men. Maybe worse, in some cases.”

That was true, I found out soon enough. Most of the female producers were tough as nails, and just as profane as the guys. They had to be, really, or they’d get eaten alive because they were vastly outnumbered; while the ranks of producers were fairly evenly split between male and female, the tech guys—who filled half the slots in the control room—were almost exclusively men.

So, much to my delight, the control room was filled with constant shit-talking. They talked shit about everyone.

They talked shit about the bosses:

“When are they going to fix that fucking smell in here?”

“Those cheap asses would probably have to pay a contractor to put in more drainage . . . so my guess is never.”

They talked shit about the guests on the air:

“Mike, this guest we have on right now is not exactly a looker. Can you throw up some b-roll to cover her face? I don’t want to scare away viewers.”

“Want me to get on the headset with the stage manager and see if she can scrounge up a paper bag real quick?”

They talked shit about the anchors:

“They told me Brit isn’t sitting for the six o’clock tonight. What gives?”

“I heard he had an appointment to get the bolts in his neck tightened.”

I’d listen and laugh so hard that I’d get distracted from doing my actual job, and then they’d talk shit about me:

“Hey, kid, I’m glad you’re finding all this so amusing, but why don’t you get off your ass and bring Rick his scripts so he isn’t just sitting there with his dick twisting in the wind?”

On a typical weekday, Fox News is live from six
A.M.
to eleven
P.M.
Seventeen hours a day. For seven of those hours, Camie and I huddled at our tiny workstation in the back of the control room, printing scripts for anchors and taking turns running them into the studio. Here’s the lineup as of 2004, when I first started running scripts:

6:00
A.M.
–9:00
A.M.

Fox & Friends
, the morning show, featured three grinning jackasses sitting on a couch, bantering about the news. The format called for one of the anchors to introduce the story, often getting the basic facts wrong, then for the other two to join in and chat about it for a few minutes, making opinionated pronouncements that were as emphatic as they were ill-informed. They didn’t need me to deliver scripts for this show, as they had their own production assistants who worked exclusively for them. In any case, the anchors (smug blond former weather guy Steve Doocy, not-too-bright sports guy Brian Kilmeade, and uptight conservative-but-still-sexy housewife E. D. Hill) veered away from the prepared text so often that any written words were rendered essentially meaningless, lost in the verbal diarrhea of stupidity.

9:00
A.M.
–1:00
P.M.

These were four interchangeable hours that, in theory, each had their own names. (
Fox News Live
?
Fox Newsroom
?
World of Fox
? Something like that, I think.) They were generic by design, the closest thing that Fox had to “straight” news—meaning news delivered without a strong POV. Each hour had its own staff and own anchor, and each was free to pick its own stories; but all of them still somehow ended up with an almost identical lineup of stories and guests. This was probably a testament to herd mentality more than anything. Because of their generic nature, it was considered less prestigious to be a producer on one of these shows. All the producers wanted to get off these shows and land one of the higher-profile assignments, and they figured the best way to do this was to toe the company line and do the same stories that every other show was doing. The repetitive nature of these hours led to the unflattering moniker “newswheel.” I had to run scripts for all the shows, one of which broke the Brando news.

1:00
P.M.
–2:00
P.M.

DaySide with Linda Vester
was a program with a live studio audience, sort of a low-rent, slightly newsier version of an afternoon talk show. This was a good idea in theory—the host was supposed to periodically let audience members speak, surveying them about their opinions on the day’s events. Nothing like a live audience to add energy to a broadcast, right? In practice, however, the audience was filled with bored tourists who had been reluctantly wrangled from Times Square mere minutes before the broadcast, enticed into the studio by fast-talking audience coordinators who stood on street corners promising a “REAL DEAL NEW YORK CITY LIVE TV SHOW EXPERIENCE.” This disinterested, gullible posse of onlookers was then subjected to Linda Vester, a woman who could have been a great host if only her face didn’t chronically appear to register utter contempt for the warm bodies assembled to watch her show. The end result was a tense-looking Vester stalking the aisles of the stadium seating with a handheld microphone, barking questions at obviously uncomfortable audience members and nodding impatiently, trying to maintain an appearance of interest as they stuttered out their incoherent responses. It was a glorious train wreck, but mostly I loved it because they didn’t need me to do anything, and it gave me a full hour to get lunch.

2:00
P.M.
–3:00
P.M.

Another hour of the newswheel! For Camie and me, another hour of running scripts up and down the hall!

3:00
P.M.
–4:00
P.M.

Studio B
with Shepard Smith would have been yet another hour of the newswheel except it had a secret weapon: the anchor. Shep was whip-smart, funny, and irreverent, and his presence made for a fast-paced, witty, and endlessly watchable newscast. It wasn’t an opinion show, and was tightly scripted, but the host still managed to add his interjections between stories. It’s as though somebody figured out a way to clean up the control room banter and put it on the air. I liked delivering scripts to him.

Shep was dogged by rumors—both in the building and in the rest of the media—that he was both secretly liberal and secretly gay. It’s not clear which of those two things, if confirmed, would hurt his career at Fox more.

4:00
P.M.
–5:00
P.M.

Your World
with Neil Cavuto was Fox’s daily business show, timed to coincide with the market closing. The show was mostly notable for finding gratuitous ways to shoehorn tits and ass into a financial broadcast. For example, interviewing the CEO of Hooters while he was flanked by three of his waitresses—in uniform, of course—during a segment about the restaurant industry. Or doing a piece on the “economics of spring break,” and using it as an excuse to run nonstop b-roll of co-eds bouncing around Cancun in bikinis. Cavuto was utterly shameless, and quite possibly a genius, but we did not have to deliver scripts to him. He had his own minions who did it for him, while we gathered our strength for the final push of the day.

5:00
P.M.
–6:00
P.M.

The Big Story
with John Gibson was my last script-running hour of the day. The show was sort of an O’Reilly Lite, with the white-haired Gibson offering a more low energy version of Bill O’Reilly’s cranky right-wing populism. The outrage was the same, but the wattage was lower, the shouting muted to a dull rumble, as if a dimmer switch had been slid down ever so slightly.

At this point, my day was done. But the network kept going. Let’s run through the rest of the shows, just so we’re all on the same page.

6:00
P.M.
–7:00
P.M.

Special Report
with Brit Hume was the political roundup, which was handled entirely by Fox’s DC bureau. Hume (he of the aforementioned neck bolts), a crusty veteran newsman and former ABC correspondent, had a chip on his shoulder after twenty years of being forced to sublimate his conservative impulses, and the anger sometimes seeped into his broadcasts. That being said, the DC bureau took journalism a lot more seriously than the ratings-obsessed New York crew. As a result, the six
P.M.
hour was probably the most credible, serious show on our air, and was the closest thing to “straight” news we had with the exception of any time Shep was on the air. Speaking of which . . .

7:00
P.M.
–8:00
P.M.

The Fox Report
with Shepard Smith was basically an evening version of
Studio B
. But where
Studio
was laid-back,
Report
was frantic, cramming almost twice as many stories into an hour. Shep sometimes seemed out of breath as he went from story to story, the camera constantly swirling around him and attacking him from different angles as if possessed.