Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
Rufus waved me over, putting his Kindle down and eyeing me quizzically.
“You’re probably wondering what’s going on,” I said.
I hadn’t told Rufus about my plans to leak the video. Standing in front of him, I realized I’d kept it from him expressly because I knew he would have tried to talk me out of it.
He was always smart like that.
“I can’t go into it right now, but I can’t have my duffel bag with me at work anymore. Can you stash it at your office? Or better yet, bring it home with you tonight?”
Rufus broke into a knowing smile. “What are you up to?”
I unslung the bag from my shoulder and handed it over to him.
“I can’t tell you right now.”
He laughed. “Why do I have a feeling I’m going to find out soon enough, whether you tell me or not?”
CHAPTER 7
Moonwalking into the Light
T
he theme song for NPR’s
Morning Edition
jarred me awake at seven
A.M.
My eyes snapped open, and I mentally cursed the tune’s smooth jazz guitar licks for interrupting my precious slumber.
Like any good New York liberal, my clock radio alarm was permanently set to WNYC, the local public radio station. But in March 2005, after only a few weeks on the regular daytime shift, I’d grown to resent the National Public Radio show and its dulcet-voiced anchors.
Fuck you, Steve Inskeep. And fuck you, Renee Montagne. Let me sleep, for chrissakes.
But silencing them would involve climbing out of my wonderfully warm and cozy bed, which I was loathe to do. My Evening Self, knowing that my Morning Self was not to be trusted, had cleverly placed the clock radio not on the nightstand but on the other side of the room, requiring a slog across the cold floor to turn it off. As a result, I generally spent the first ten minutes of my day lying in bed, hoping that overnight I’d somehow developed the telekinetic powers necessary to turn off the alarm remotely. And every morning, after those powers had stubbornly refused to manifest themselves, I reluctantly climbed out of the sack, smacked the
OFF
button, and stumbled into the bathroom.
Some mornings I’d sleep right through the alarm, and the voices on the radio would work themselves into my dreams, to often disturbing results. The average NPR news update is not something you want incorporated into your dream life on a regular basis. I don’t want to go into too many details, but let’s just say at age twenty-three, I’d had more nocturnal threesome fantasies involving foreign world leaders than was natural or healthy for someone my age.
I probably should have just switched over to music, except one thing was holding me back—those ten minutes in the morning listening to NPR with a pillow clamped over my face actually gave me more real news, more substantial information, a better grasp of the day’s events, than my entire eight-hour shift at Fox.
—
I was pulled off the overnight shift in early March 2005—roughly four months after my meeting with Nelson—as suddenly and unceremoniously as I’d been placed on it. A hiring surge early in the year had flooded the newsroom with new blood, and as they covered slots in the cut-ins and overnights, my services were needed elsewhere—namely as a production assistant for the hourly shows. The duty was the same, but the rhythm was different. Instead of a handful of tapes every hour, it was an absolute deluge of tapes twice a day, once in the morning for one of the newswheel hours, and again in the afternoon for
The
Big Story
with John Gibson. It was nominally a promotion, though it came, in typical Fox fashion, without a bump in title or money. The real benefit was that my day-to-day schedule was much more sane and normal, and my weekends were my own again for the first time in months, my head no longer shrouded in the fog of sleep deprivation.
A lot had happened in the months that I’d been among the walking dead.
First, John Kerry had lost. I was on duty election night. There was a festive atmosphere in the newsroom when I showed up to start work at six
P.M.
—not necessarily because Bush was narrowly favored to win, though that was probably contributing to the high spirits for a lot of people—but because for politics nerds and cable news jockeys, election nights were like Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. They were the culmination of months of work and anticipation, a glorious hours-long orgasm after the foreplay of the endless months of primaries, debates, and campaign ads.
Also, the bosses had ordered pizza for everyone.
They sent out a group e-mail when the pies arrived, triggering a stampede of perpetually perk-deprived producers, editors, and PAs toward the break room to gorge on the free food, a mass of starved humanity clamoring and grabbing and piling slices onto flimsy paper plates, two and three at a time, or snagging entire boxes to carry triumphantly back to the newsroom, and in general acting as if they’d never seen food before.
Anchors and producers from DC had come up to New York for the occasion because the network had decided to run election coverage from NYC’s larger studios. There was a long-simmering tension between the two factions. The DC bureau produced the six
P.M.
Special Report
show and generated the majority of the network’s political coverage, while New York did almost everything else. DC thought of themselves as an elite offshoot, a more journalistically credible team of heavyweights that outclassed the populist muckrakers and ratings chasers in Manhattan. They happened to be
right
; but we New Yorkers still resented them for their attitudes.
The visiting snooty Washingtonians had taken over large chunks of our newsroom real estate. I joined a contingent of PAs who had gathered in the back corner by the vending machines to voice their displeasure.
“Some punk kid from DC is sitting in my regular desk,” Camie was complaining as she fed a dollar bill into the machine.
“He says his producer said he could sit there, and he’s ‘way too busy’ to move seats. Jerk-off.” She jabbed a button, and a can of Diet Pepsi clunked and clattered its way down to the slot.
“What are you complaining about?” I said. “You’re not even supposed to be here tonight.”
It was true. After training me on scripts, Camie had gone on to do tape for one of the newswheel hours. She was strictly daytime and hadn’t been called in for duty that night, but she’d shown up at seven
P.M.
and asked Siegendorf if she could just hang out, off the clock, and help where needed. It was a bold move, but I was happy to have her there, if only to have someone else with whom to bitch about the interlopers from the Beltway.
“They act like all we do here is cover car chases and murder trials,” I said.
Even the always polite Southerner Red Robertshaw was put off by the DCers, whom he admitted were being “a little pushy.”
The DC people may have had a point, however, about the New Yorkers being relative lightweights. The usurpers did almost all the heavy lifting the entire night, leaving nothing for the home team to do except cut b-roll of victorious members of Congress—tapes that went mostly unused as the bulk of the night’s coverage focused on the biggest prize: the presidency.
Around one
A.M.
, Fox was the first network to declare Bush the winner of Ohio, giving him 269 electoral votes, just one shy of victory. But after getting burned in 2000, inadvertently awarding Bush the win over Gore with Florida still very much in doubt, Fox and the other networks were understandably gun-shy about calling the race, and the extremely close tallies in New Mexico and Iowa meant the winner would not be known until the morning.
I left work at three
A.M.
with the victor still undetermined, though it was looking decidedly grim for John Kerry. I invited Red to walk over to Rockefeller Center with me, where NBC News was finishing up their coverage for the night.
As a certified Bush hater, I probably should have been more bummed out. But I’d never been a huge Kerry fan, preferring Howard Dean—even after his campaign-destroying scream speech. Kerry had run a lackluster campaign and had never really made a strong case for himself outside of “I’m not Bush.” And as Mitt Romney found out in 2012, if you want to unseat an incumbent president, you have to give people a reason to vote
for
you—not just
against
the other guy. So I couldn’t get too worked up at the prospect of the Massachusetts senator losing.
Also, a nagging voice in the back of my head was telling me that even though I’d been with Fox only for a few months at that point, I was at least partially complicit for mounting the network’s case against Kerry. I shoved that voice down and tried to enjoy the sights in front of me. Fox’s coverage was relatively bare bones, old dour white guys in a windowless studio, but NBC had gone all out, lighting up 30 Rock’s limestone facade with red and blue spotlights, and painting a fifty-foot-wide map of the United States on the famous ice-skating rink below. A team of workers had spray-painted each state red or blue throughout the night as the winners were called.
I don’t know if I was punchy after being cooped up in the newsroom all night, or if my anguish at having to endure another four years of Bush was manifesting itself in strange ways, but I suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all, and began to geek out as only a politics nerd could.
“Isn’t this great?” I said to Red, feeling myself get misty-eyed and swallowing a lump in my throat. “I mean, I don’t even care who wins at this point. America is just so
great
. We’re so fucking lucky to even
be here
.”
Red eyed me skeptically.
“Maybe you should go home and get some sleep,” he said.
Another development in the months that I’d been on the overnights: Jim Siegendorf, executive producer in charge of all the production assistants, had been fired in late January. They’d done it very publicly, too, in the middle of the day, in the most humiliating fashion imaginable. I showed up for my three
P.M.
shift to find the PA pod buzzing. I’d missed the whole sordid spectacle by an hour or two.
“Dude, I saw the whole thing go down,” Frankie, a wiry, Eminem-looking PA was telling me. “It was the most awkward shit I’ve
ever
seen. Siegendorf got up to go to a meeting, then came back, like, an hour later with two security guards following him. They watched him pack up all his shit, then escorted him out of the building.”
I stared at Frankie in shock. “What were you doing the whole time? You were just watching this?”
He shrugged. “I was still working, actually, the whole time. I was crashing on tape for the two
P.M.
I couldn’t just stop cutting. Meanwhile, Siegendorf’s ten feet away, cleaning out his desk.” He shook his head, cringing with the memory. “It was fucking awkward.”
Word filtered down that Siegendorf had been the fall guy for our lackluster ratings during the coverage of the Southeast Asian tsunami aftermath. We’d still beaten the other networks, but just barely. Meanwhile, CNN had seen their ratings explode, and the boost in viewers and publicity had helped launch a new star, Anderson Cooper. Ailes was furious that we’d failed to capitalize more on the event, and blamed the video department for not getting more compelling footage of death and destruction onto the screen. Since Siegendorf was responsible for the production assistants, and we were responsible for picking and choosing the video, it was his head on the chopping block.
There was an unseemly amount of jubilation in the PA pod following Siegendorf’s sacking. I hadn’t loved the guy myself, but I thought he’d gotten a raw deal, especially for someone who’d been with the network almost from its founding. Also, even though video was technically ultimately his responsibility, it wasn’t his fault that CNN was eating our lunch. They had more than eighty people on the ground in the region, and were able to dig up all the best video and keep it exclusively for themselves. Meanwhile, we had sent fewer than a dozen producers and correspondents, and were almost entirely reliant on whatever footage the wire services fed us.
On the plus side, they’d replaced Siegendorf with his deputy, Nina, who was universally beloved and wise enough to realize that a man of my talents was being wasted on the overnights. When she told me that I was being switched to daytime for good—no more evenings, no more weekend overnights—I almost cried with relief.
My girlfriend, Jillian, when I told her the good news, actually did cry a little. She was thoroughly tired by that point of spending her Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching me snore in her bed ’til four
P.M.
, poking at me occasionally to get me to wake up and pay attention to her.
—
“Are you ready for this?” I asked the video editor. “It’s going to get
really
loud
.”
He looked up from his edit rig, turning his head to glance back at me over his shoulder.
“Do your worst,” he said.
“Okay. You asked for it.”
I clicked
PLAY
on the computer, and the iconic guitar riff filled the edit room, rattling the small pair of speakers arranged on either side of the monitor.
“This is too good!” I yelled. “We’ve got to share this with everyone.” I reached over and flung the edit room door wide open. Heads started turning as the music spilled out into the newsroom.
Then the singing kicked in—that familiar high pitch, alternating between smooth as silk and rough as a cat’s tongue, somehow both masculine and feminine at the same time.
Michael fucking Jackson.
I took my baby on a Saturday bang.
. . .
Nina bounded over, poking her head into the room.
“Muto, what’s going on in here?” she shouted.
“It’s verdict day! I’m getting everyone psyched up,” I shouted back, clapping along with the music.
If you’re thinkin’ ’bout my baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.