Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
All is well,
I hoped my grin said.
I’m mere minutes away from having a total nervous breakdown
is what it probably broadcast, in retrospect.
Back at my desk I tried to concentrate on my duties. If, as I hoped, management was bluffing about having found me, I needed to act normal and do my job. Shirking my duties in panic was a surefire way to draw attention to myself.
Calm and casual,
I told myself, and leaned back in my chair, my foot kicking the duffel bag under my desk, which had slipped my mind until that very moment. I had spent the previous night at my girlfriend Jenny’s apartment and headed straight into the office from her place, carrying my soiled clothes with me to the office.
That brought two things to mind immediately. One: I hadn’t told Jenny a thing about any of this. She’d flown to Pittsburgh that morning to visit her family, and arguably would not react well to an over-the-phone revelation that I’d decided to make a career transition from cable news producer to potentially criminal corporate espionage agent without consulting her first. (You know how women are. They hate when you do that.)
Two: More pressing, I had something else in the bag, something nestled up against my dirty undies—an iPad filled with the
Gawker
posts I’d written and copies of the behind-the-scenes videos I’d leaked. I’d been so busy congratulating myself for my cloak-and-dagger tactics that I’d completely forgotten I had brought into the building all the proof they’d ever need to nail me, sitting in a bag under my desk, marinating in my day-old crotch sweat.
Okay, maybe
now
is the proper time to shirk my duties in panic
.
I grabbed the duffel and popped out of my chair. I knew I needed to get the evidence out of the building. The prospect of getting fired was scary enough, and something that I (wrongly, as it turns out) thought I had mentally prepared myself for, but it occurred to me that my company
did not fuck around
. While I didn’t actually
believe
Fox News had a hidden subterranean dungeon that they’d stash me in while a crack antiespionage team went through all of my personal possessions, I didn’t completely dismiss it as a possibility, either.
Tim and I were a little bit separated from the other members of the O’Reilly staff, a seating arrangement left over from the days when O’Reilly was still doing a radio show, on which I had originally been a staffer before transitioning to the TV side. We had the unique experience of having desks immediately outside O’Reilly’s office, yielding hours of fascination and entertainment; but the separation from my peers
could
feel a bit isolating at times. That day, however, I was thankful that the dozen or so other producers were located fifty feet down the hall and couldn’t see me indecisively pacing holding a duffel bag.
My floor was arranged into three concentric rings. Anchors, reporters, and a few high-powered producers occupied the coveted window offices on the outer ring. The middle ring, where I was, consisted of lower-level producers scattered among desks separated by chest-high cubicle walls. The inner ring was a few windowless offices, video editing suites, break rooms, janitor closets . . . and the elevator bank.
It was that elevator bank I needed to get to, walking along the middle ring straight past the other O’Reilly producers—a potentially risky move, since, with the realization that I was in possession of the incriminating iPad, I was guessing that my briefly absent Victorian lady complexion had returned; and if my appearance didn’t give me away, the fact that I was leaving the building with a bag a good seven hours before quitting time was bound to raise a few eyebrows.
There was another way, though. If I followed the ring in the opposite direction, I wouldn’t have to pass my colleagues; I wouldn’t even have to use the seventeenth-floor elevators. It’s true that was a longer route, weaving through the base camps of several of the other shows that were stationed on the seventeenth floor; but it also led to a little-used, virtually unknown stairway that would allow me to climb to the much less populated eighteenth floor, where I could use the elevators to escape to the ground floor. The longer route would potentially bring me in contact with more people, but, hopefully, they wouldn’t think a sweaty, pale-faced O’Reilly producer making a beeline for the exits was anything out of the ordinary.
As I started down the long way out, I passed O’Reilly’s office. The door was open, but he wasn’t inside; in fact, he wouldn’t be there for a few more hours. Though the man was intimately involved in every aspect of his show’s production and started his workday at seven
A.M.
, he spent roughly four hours a day actually
present
in the office.
It’s good to be the boss.
And for the time being, it was good to be me. Or lucky to be me, anyway. Because my path was blessedly devoid of people. It was early lunchtime, and most of the desks along my route were empty. A few bored staffers munched salads at their desks, heads dipped as they grazed; others inhaled sandwiches, eyes glued to their screens, checking Facebook or Twitter or, alarmingly, Mediaite. I breezed past them one by one with no incident, calmly walking down the nearly abandoned hallways, past desks and cubicles and offices, until finally I was so close I could see the source of my freedom: the door that would bring me to the out-of-the-way staircase that led to the floor above.
Twenty feet to the doorway. Ten feet. Five feet.
Then a voice from behind.
“Hey, Muto!”
So close.
I turned to face the speaker. It was Nick De Angelo, a producer I’d worked with on another show a few years back.
“Where you goin’ in such a rush?” he asked, peering at me over the top of his computer monitor.
“Oh, just to get some lunch,” I lied, uncomfortably shifting on my shoulder the duffel bag that suddenly felt like it weighed seventy-five pounds.
“I have something to ask you,” Nick said, a deadly serious look on his face.
He took a deep breath, then said: “Are you the Mole?”
My heart flip-flopped.
How did he know?
And then I saw that he was laughing, his shoulders shaking, a goofy smile plastered on his face.
He was just giving me shit.
“Yup!” I replied, matching his laughter, pretending to enjoy the ball busting. “You got me!”
But I must not have gotten the tone right. Or my frantic, nervous eyes gave me away. Or maybe he already suspected, and was testing me to see how I reacted. Either way, the laughter faded from his face, replaced with a wry, curious look.
He studied me. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, more tentative. “No, seriously, though. Is it you?” he asked.
I kept up my fake dumb grin. “I told you, man. You got me!”
As he furrowed his brow, watching me thoughtfully, I turned on my heel and walked as calmly as I could through the doorway.
And it was only at this moment—long past the point when the thought could have done me any good—that the little voice in my head stated what should have been obvious to anyone who wasn’t a moron.
This might have been a terrible idea.
5 Years Earlier . . .
CHAPTER 1
Slacking Your Way to Success and Shame
T
he Old Man was angry that day.
We all knew it, too, though if you had asked us, we wouldn’t have been able to explain how we knew. No one had told us. There had been none of the usual signs—no shouting heard from behind the closed office door; no hushed, panicked
what-do-we-do-now
phone calls between the senior producers; no unlucky associate producer getting screamed at for a minor infraction. An outsider would think he or she was witnessing a calm, normal meeting.
But we knew better. It was some mysterious sixth sense that we’d all developed to pick up on his moods, something that science couldn’t explain. Maybe it was telepathy, or pheromones, or something with magnetic fields, like how a flock of birds knows to shift direction simultaneously. It doesn’t matter how we knew, but we did.
And though we would never admit it to each other, we were scared.
Bill O’Reilly was sitting on a chair in the middle of the
Factor
“pod,” the collection of low-walled cubicles where his staff was headquartered. The other producers and I were standing in a loose semicircle around him, clutching our pitches—computer printouts, articles clipped from newspapers, books from authors who were dying to get on the show—in our trembling fists.
Looming over the proceedings was The Board, a massive eight-foot-tall expanse of cork with a wooden bezel, covered from top to bottom with a calendar grid fashioned from electrical tape and studded with index cards held up with pushpins. The ragged, torn edges of the electrical tape and the sometimes illegible scrawl on the cards gave The Board a makeshift feel, one that belied its strict mathematical precision. Designed by our head guest booker, Eugene Flarmben, it was divided into rectangles: four rows, each denoting a week’s worth of shows, with the current week perched at the top and the following weeks underneath; five rectangles per row marking Monday through Friday; space for six index cards per rectangle, the proper number of segments to fill a single show. The index cards were color-coded: blue cards for firm-booked guests, pink cards for guests or topics that were tentative, green cards for segments that had been pretaped, and ominous blank spaces where there were no segments planned.
Our job was to fill the holes.
We weren’t particularly good at it.
The pitch meetings took place on Mondays and Thursdays. At two thirty in the afternoon on those days, the troops would all line up, reluctantly, for what usually amounted to a twice-weekly exercise in futility, a half-hour parade of failure: Bill shot down 95 percent of ideas, usually peppering his rejections with ridicule. Mockery was his standard response to a pitch he didn’t like:
How can you be stupid enough to present me with this dumb idea?
But sometimes mockery simply wasn’t enough for him to display the contempt he felt for an idea, and that’s when he turned to anger, which could manifest itself explosively, without warning, especially on days when his mood was already sour, which we sensed it was that day. So we were all on edge. Me especially.
It was the spring of 2007. I’d been on the show just a few months, having previously worked for some of Fox’s smaller, less prestigious programs. Now that I was in the big leagues, I was frustrated to find myself striking out more often than not, the boss rejecting pitch after pitch, week after week.
To be fair, the rejections that came my way in those early months were much gentler than those that came later in my career, or those that my more seasoned coworkers received. O’Reilly seemed to have an unofficial policy of going easy on the new hires, at least until they got their feet under them a little bit. (Very sporting of him, actually, like a hunter refusing to shoot a baby deer. Though after some of the more brutal pitch meetings, a quick merciful bullet between the antlers would have been a relief.)
It wasn’t 100 percent failure on my part. I’d managed to sneak a few minor pitches past the goalkeeper, but nothing to write home about—they were mostly B or C stories, small items that got thrown into the hopper to be discussed by the panel at the end of a longer segment, maybe getting only a minute total of screen time. I still hadn’t scored with a headlining pitch, something that would lead the show or, at the very least, get its own segment. That was the Holy Grail. Every producer in that semicircle was praying to Jesus, or Yahweh (or in my case, no one), that the big pitch would land in their lap, that they would not get mocked or yelled at but praised, held up to the other producers as a golden child, an example to which the others should all aspire.
My marquee story that day, the pitch I was going to lead with, was something I’d stumbled upon mere minutes before the meeting. An errant blog link had led me to an article in the
Navy Times
, a military newspaper. The piece pointed out a major error in a recent
New York Times Magazine
story about women who experienced PTSD after getting deployed to war zones. It turned out that one of the women profiled in the
Times
piece had never been in combat—and had in fact never even set foot in Iraq.
I printed out the article, then double-checked the
Drudge Report
—a conservative news-aggregating website that we all checked religiously—to see if it had picked up on the scoop yet. If
Drudge
had it, chances are that one of my colleagues had also seen it and would beat me to it, mentioning it in the pitch meeting before it was my turn to go, and stealing my thunder. But there was no mention of it on Drudge, and it looked like no other blogs—aside from the obscure one I had been reading—had posted it yet.
I was pretty confident that I was sitting on a winner—mostly because it involved
The
New York Times
. Fox News has always had a bizarre institutional animosity toward the
Times
. The newspaper was routinely caricatured by O’Reilly and the rest of the network as a liberal rag, a monolithic left-wing institution full of reporters and editors crawling all over themselves to destroy the Republican Party and promote a grab bag of progressive causes—atheism, homosexuality, Hollywood depravity, big government, and so on. In a way, Fox’s depiction of the
Times
was an exact mirror image of the left’s depiction of Fox, but that irony was lost on O’Reilly, who took delight in skewering the
Times
at every available opportunity. (With the exception of the admittedly frequent occasions that one of his books charted on their Best Sellers list, in which case he was happy to tout their wisdom and authority.) I was heading into the pitch meeting with a potential blockbuster.
But as the gathering got under way, I began to lose confidence. Our fears about the boss’s ill mood had been well founded. He was impatient, snarling at pitches that didn’t get to the point fast enough. The mockery was even more vicious than usual. Producer after producer came up empty. Pitch after pitch went down in flames.