An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media
Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
An
Atheist in the
FOXhole
A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media
Joe Muto
Dutton
DUTTON
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Muto
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-101-62420-3
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
For my parents, who certainly taught me better than this. . . .
And for Jenny: all the way.
Contents
Prologue: The Beginning of the End for a Middling Cable News Career
1. Slacking Your Way to Success and Shame
2. I Coulda Been a Contender . . .
4. Paradise by the On-Air Light
8. Crime Does Pay, But Not Particularly Well
11. Stand and Deliver: Rage, Ridicule, and Sexy Ladies, Twice a Week
12. Loofah, Falafel, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
13. I Loved You in
A League of Their Own
, You Far-Left Loon
15. I Think He Said the Sheriff Is Near
16. Rhymes with “Cat Bit Hazy”
Epilogue: What Have We Learned?
Everything you’re about to read happened to me. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed, and certain individuals are composites. Some events have been compressed or reordered to assist in the narrative flow. Dialogue has been re-created from my notes, or verbatim from publicly available transcripts where applicable. Otherwise, I’ve tried to reproduce the dialogue to the best of my recollection.
There’s tremendous power in television news. If you’re calling the shots, you can help someone tremendously, or you can crush that person. With a well-positioned negative word, you can ruin a career or endeavor forever, virtually unchecked. You can make the most powerful people on earth tremble.
—Bill O’Reilly,
Those Who Trespass
Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business.
—Paddy Chayefsky,
Network
Great story. Compelling, and rich.
—
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
PROLOGUE
The Beginning of the End for a Middling Cable News Career
M
y entire life, I’d always thought the phrase “my blood ran cold” was a cliché. Until Tim opened his mouth, that is.
“Oh, look, they caught him. They caught the Fox Mole.”
Boom. Just like that. Cold blood as I felt the world start to cave in around my ears.
Suppressing a shiver, I swiveled in my chair to face Tim Wolfe sitting at the desk three feet away from mine. Both of us were tucked away into a corner of the seventeenth floor of the News Corporation building in midtown Manhattan.
Like me, Tim was an associate producer for
The O’Reilly Factor
at Fox News Channel in New York City.
Unlike
me, he hadn’t spent the past two days leaking video clips, pictures, and stories from inside Fox to the media and gossip blog
Gawker
.
“They caught him.” The sentence lingered in my brain, bounced off the walls of my skull a bit, dropped into my stomach like a sandbag, sending it lurching toward my ankles.
They caught him.
They caught him?
They caught me?
So why was I still sitting at my desk, like it was a normal Wednesday? Why hadn’t a corporate SWAT team at the disposal of my secrecy-obsessed, paranoid company president Roger Ailes thrown a bag over my head and dragged me to a gulag in the basement? I must have heard him wrong.
“What’s that?” I asked, trying my best to keep my voice calm and casual.
“Check out
Mediaite
,” Tim said, pointing to the website he had up on his screen. “Fox says they’ve got him.”
I typed the address into my browser. Mediaite.com was a popular site for industry news, and it had been all over the Mole story since my first post had gone up on
Gawker
the day before. The site loaded and there it was in a screamingly large font: the headline
FOX NEWS SPOKESPERSON TELLS MEDIAITE: WE FOUND THE MOLE
.
I clicked through to find a short, disturbingly ominous statement from a network spokesman:
“We found the person and we’re exploring legal options at this time.”
Shit.
“Wow, I guess they got him,” I said to Tim, chuckling, all innocence. “Ha-ha. That was quick.” I fake laughed.
Tim laughed, too. “I’d hate to be that guy right now.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That guy is fucked.”
Thirty seconds later, I was in the bathroom. I noticed that my hands were shaking as I turned on the faucet. I looked in the mirror and saw that my face had gone totally white, while my neck was flushing a deep red. I felt light-headed. At some point during the brief walk between my desk and the commode, I’d apparently morphed into a heroine from a Victorian novel.
Did I have the vapors?
Would Keira Knightley play me in the movie version?
If I fainted in the bathroom, would it gain me any sympathy from the company goons who were no doubt on their way to apprehend me?
I splashed water on my face.
Pull it together, Joe. They’re bluffing. They don’t know it’s you. You were very careful. You took every precaution. There’s nothing they have tying you to
Gawker
. They can search your work computer, your phone, even your personal e-mail, and there’s absolutely nothing. No proof. They’re just saying they caught you to buy themselves time, or to make you panic and expose your identity. If they really knew it was you, do you think you’d still be in the building right now? Of course not. You’d have ten security guards at your desk, waiting to haul you away. Don’t do anything stupid. Just act normal.
My little mental pep talk had the desired effect. After a minute or two more of water splashing and deep breathing, my color returned to more-or-less normal and my hands stopped shaking.
Leaving the bathroom, I passed Tim, who was conferring with another producer at her desk. He looked at me with narrowed eyes as I walked by, a concerned look on his face.
Maybe I haven’t recovered as much as I thought. Maybe he’s on to me.
I shot him a reassuring smile.