Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
One incident in particular sticks out in my mind, a late-night argument that started at a house party, carried over to a bar, and finally came to a boil on a subway platform. Truthfully, we’d both had a decent amount to drink. While alcohol made me more docile and good-humored, it tended to have the opposite effect on Krista, especially in those months.
“What has Obama ever done?” Krista was screaming at me, her voice echoing throughout the mostly empty subway station. “What has he done, huh? What makes you think he’d be any good as president?”
“He’s pretty good at running a campaign,” I shot back. “You know how I know that? Because he’s currently beating the shit out of Hillary.”
Her wordless scream of rage startled a hobo from his slumber on a nearby bench.
—
After the run-in at the New Hampshire rally, O’Reilly seemed uncharacteristically uncertain about how best to approach Obama. He was absolutely
dying
for an interview with the candidate, an interview that the Obama campaign was understandably reluctant to agree to. (Bill’s reputation as an unpredictable interviewer who sometimes went nuclear on his guests often worked against him in that way.) But, ever hopeful that the campaign would relent, Bill mostly pulled his punches on the senator in January, February, and March, hoping that softer coverage would entice the reluctant Obama to give an interview.
In the
Factor
pod, some of the more openly conservative producers began to grumble that the Old Man was losing his fastball.
“Bill needs to go after this guy, to really expose him,” Steiner Rudolf said one day. “Obama is a fraud, and a far-left thug.” He started trying to single-handedly push Bill toward harder coverage, raising all sorts of specters and innuendo during pitch meetings.
But Bill resisted.
“I don’t want to get into that ideological crap, Rudolf,” Bill would say when Steiner tried to convince him for the umpteenth meeting in a row that an Internet rumor about Obama deserved further scrutiny on
The Factor
. “Let Hannity do that stuff. We deal with
facts
on this show.”
So Bill continued going relatively easy on the Democratic front-runner—until a story cropped up that could not be ignored.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright had for months been a minor figure in the Obama-conspiracy-mongering industry. Hannity, in fact, had been railing about the pastor for a full year, first exploring the issue in February 2007, barely two weeks after Obama kicked off his presidential campaign.
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But in the absence of compelling video clips, O’Reilly wasn’t interested.
“I’m not going to go after some black reverend that nobody’s ever heard of,” he’d say.
As it turns out, lack of notoriety was not going to be a problem for Reverend Wright for much longer.
On March 13, Brian Ross of ABC News unveiled some video that had been hiding in plain sight. It turned out that DVDs of Wright’s sermons had been sold by his church for years. Ross and his team simply viewed the tapes, digging out inflammatory tidbit after tidbit and crafting them into an explosive
Good Morning America
segment.
One clip showed Wright accusing the U.S. government of introducing drugs into the black community: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America!”
Another clip from the sermon on the Sunday after 9/11 featured the reverend reminding his congregation about the thousands killed by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then going on to say, “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
A more recent clip showed Wright talking about the Democratic primary: “Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger.”
The clips set off a round of panic in the Obama camp, expressions of glee from the Clinton and McCain camps, and a positively orgiastic feeding frenzy at Fox News headquarters. Even I, weepy Obama lover that I was, had to admit that the video was so explosive it would have been cable news malpractice to
not
use it. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the extent that the footage was absolutely wallpapered across our air for the next few months.
The day it first broke, Bill played a long montage, a sort of mashup of Wright’s greatest hits, at the top of the show. If he was on the fence about Obama up until that point, he certainly wasn’t anymore.
The Wright tapes injected into the campaign an ugly racial edge that had previously been hovering just below the surface. Screening phone calls for the radio show, I was on the front lines.
“Why won’t Bill ever say his middle name? It’s Hussein, you know,” a caller said.
“I know, sir,” I said. “Bill knows, too.”
“Then why won’t he use it? People need to know how much this guy hates America, and if they hear his name is Hussein, they’ll realize it.”
Other callers were obsessed with the candidate’s exact racial makeup. “How come I never hear anyone say that he’s only
half
black?” another caller asked me.
“I don’t see why that matters, sir,” I said.
“It’s just that the lady on the news always says he’s black, but he’s not. The blacks won’t accept him because they hate white people, and he’s half white.”
“Okay, sir, thank you for your opinion, but I don’t think I’ll be putting you on air today.”
Click
.
As the election approached, we also started getting more and more callers asking us to investigate Obama’s real birthplace. I did my best to personally strangle the Birther movement in its crib, explaining to each caller individually that the senator was born in Hawaii, and that there was
literally
zero proof that he was born anywhere else, and that they should stop believing everything they read in chain e-mails that had been forwarded to them by their racist uncles. But my words fell on deaf ears. As the persistence of that particular movement proves, stupid people—be they talk-radio-loving truckers or tacky, flaxen-haired billionaires—do not easily change their minds, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
—
It was about this time that I started “coming out” to some of my coworkers.
There were other liberals at Fox.
Of course
there were other liberals. Even with all their weeding out, the self-selection, the interrogation during the Kool-Aid Conference, it was still New York City, and it was still the field of journalism. You do the math. You could round up every conserva-journo on the Eastern Seaboard and still barely be able to staff a weekend shift at Fox; it was inevitable that plenty of moderates, and more than a few liberals, squeaked by.
But the liberals at Fox were a minority, and a silent one at that, racked with distrust and paranoia. I was at the company for almost four years before I revealed to Sam, who I trusted implicitly by that point, through casual conversation where my feelings lay. Word slowly percolated to the rest of the O’Reilly staff. No one told Bill, that I’m aware of. I don’t even think Bill would have cared, had he known. The only political opinions he ever cared about were his own. Those were the only views that made it to air, anyway.
What may have concerned Bill about having an open “left-wing loon” on the staff is that I might have tried to slip him some wrong information, or tried to embarrass him on air. I never did any of that stuff. Never, not once. I never gave him bad information. I never told him anything that wasn’t true. I never did anything to sabotage the show. Not one thing. I took pride in doing my job well, and I was pretty good at it, too.
What I
did
do, the only way I was able to maintain my sanity throughout my long run, was to just give a
slight
spin to the information I gave him, little cues to attempt to nudge him in my direction. Like if there was a poll that looked good for John McCain that Bill wanted in his packet, I’d always make sure to include right next to it two polls that looked good for Obama—whether he asked for them or not.
Or if he asked for a story about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I’d make sure to include with it a story about Reverend John Hagee, a McCain-supporting televangelist who had said controversial things about Hitler and the Holocaust.
That was the way to influence Bill.
Influence
, not manipulate. Bill cannot be manipulated. Despite some critics’ insistence that he was an empty suit, he’s actually quite smart, and always knew when someone was attempting to forcefully move him in one direction or another. It was all about subtlety.
—
The 2008 campaign was so much about Obama that it was shocking when McCain suddenly reasserted himself, unleashing a dim-bulb force of nature named Sarah Palin on an unsuspecting American public.
At first, it seemed like a brilliant move by the McCain campaign. They had completely rejiggered the race in one fell swoop. Not only did they thoroughly stomp on Obama’s convention bounce, unveiling the pick a scant few hours after his Denver acceptance speech, but they also revved up the GOP base, which had previously been depressed and demoralized by the sad, slow decline of the Bush administration and the seemingly hapless and obviously losing McCain campaign.
I’ll confess—like a lot of other liberals, though I was loathe to admit it at the time—I was initially scared shitless by the Palin pick. The wounds from the Obama vs. Clinton brawl were still pretty raw, and there was a real fear that Hillary’s fans would bolt the party in favor of the Alaskan newcomer, who was, admittedly, unbelievably charismatic and politically savvy, if not quite in the same ballpark or even zip code of intelligence as Hillary.
Luckily, women voters were not as gullible as the McCain campaign thought they’d be—at least Krista wasn’t.
“Who do they think they’re kidding?” she raged to me the night Palin was announced. “It’s insulting. Do they really believe that we’ll just think one politician with a vagina is as good as any other?”
“Does this mean you’ll vote for Obama now?” I asked.
The Obama campaign wasn’t about to let the Palin pick go unanswered. They had a plan to wrench the spotlight back, and they enlisted my boss to help.
That’s how O’Reilly ended up interviewing the Democratic nominee on the final day of the GOP convention, giving over a huge chunk of his TV show to Obama on a night when John McCain was supposed to be the focus of everyone’s attention.
I was fielding calls on the radio show that day, and had to fend off dozens of angry listeners outraged that Bill would fall for such a transparent ploy to steal McCain’s thunder. O’Reilly, to his credit, fielded a couple of critical calls to defend himself, pointing out that only half of that night’s show would be given over to the Obama interview, while the rest would be dedicated to covering the RNC.
The callers howled that the defense was weak, but Bill didn’t really care. He never admitted it on the radio, but he was fully aware that the Obama campaign was using him to crash the Republicans’ big celebration, brilliantly invading the GOP’s favored network on what was supposed to be their special night. The benefit for O’Reilly, in addition to the surefire ratings bonanza that his long-awaited clash with Obama would bring, was that every extra minute he spent on the interview was one less minute he would be forced to spend covering the increasingly dull McCain, who appeared even more boring than before when compared to his charismatic running mate.
Obama more than held his own in the interview that night, uncapping that now-familiar mix of charm, good humor, and policy wonkery, but O’Reilly still came away unimpressed. After months of chasing the elusive candidate, the thrill was gone, and he felt free to take off the gloves.
The next week in a pitch meeting, he got apocalyptic, announcing a new segment he’d conceived called the Obama Chronicles.
“It’s going to be a twenty-five-part series,” he said, explaining that it would examine the senator’s background and associations. “And if it works like I think it will, by the end of it, I’ll have
saved this country
.”
He had a far-off look in his eyes when he said that, and the assembled producers shifted uncomfortably on our feet and made fleeting eye contact with one another.
Was he being serious? A twenty-five-part series? Save the country? Why did our boss suddenly sound like a crazy person?
No one said anything aloud, of course.
The Chronicles started the next week, with a look at Obama’s birth and upbringing.
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If anything, instead of exposing Obama as the crazed radical the right wing had caricatured him as, the segment made him appear sympathetic, highlighting all the hardships in his life that he’d overcome. If Bill’s intention was to save the country from Obama, he was going about it the wrong way.
The series limped on for a few more installments afterward but never caught on with viewers, and Bill cut it short less than halfway to the promised twenty-five. Given a choice between ratings and “saving” the country, it was no contest.
On election night, as the returns came in, state by state, it was becoming obvious that Fox’s attempts to make Obama a terrifying socialist bogeyman had failed. Krista and I were at a party in Brooklyn, the rancor of the past few months mostly forgotten.
Like any good gathering of New York liberals, we were watching the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert coverage. At the stroke of eleven
P.M.
, when California’s polls closed, Stewart announced Obama’s projected victory. Krista and I hugged, tears in our eyes, as the party erupted around us.
I didn’t catch the understated, almost funereal Fox coverage until the next day, when I watched the replay at my desk. When Brit Hume read the results, he seemed as if he was about to cry, too, but for a different reason.