An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (11 page)

“Yeah, I guess so,” John agreed. “Okay, maybe you’ll think of something else. In the meantime, I’ll get this post up saying you’re still a free man. Is there anything else tying you to us?”

I patted the bag slung over one shoulder, containing my iPad with its reams of incriminating text.

“There’s still one thing. But I’m taking care of it right now.”

   CHAPTER 4   

Paradise by the On-Air Light

Y
ou’ve been here, what—a month?” Marybeth asked, looking back over her shoulder at me. I nodded, and she turned back to her computer screen, shaking her head with a smile.

“One month, and you’re already training to cut tape?” she said. “You know what you’d be doing at CNN after a month? Coffee runs. And not even on your own. They’d still be
training
you on coffee runs.”

It was my first day in the videotape department, and Marybeth, the slim, pretty brunette PA that Siegendorf had tapped to get me up to speed, was attempting to
lay down some truth
. She sounded like a grizzled veteran, despite having less than six months on the job under her belt.

As near as I could tell, her knowledge of conditions at CNN was based entirely on rumor and hearsay, both of which were rampant in the PA pod, the small area in the back of the newsroom where all the tape production assistants sat. For example, it was
common knowledge
that MSNBC paid production assistants much better than Fox; the downside was that working for them, you’d be forced to commute to their headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey.
¹⁵
CNN was also
known
to offer higher compensation, but allegedly didn’t trust their production assistants with anything aside from menial tasks.

Marybeth kept up a monologue about how lucky I was to be in the position I was in as other PAs swarmed around us, going about their business. The others were cutting for the hours; the nine
A.M.
newswheel had two production assistants assigned, the ten
A.M.
had a different two, the eleven
A.M.
had yet another pair, and so on, all day long. The pairs of PAs were picked out from the pool and scheduled by Jim Siegendorf and his deputy, Nina. But Marybeth and I weren’t in that pool; our job was to produce tape for the daytime cut-ins, short two-minute news updates that hit in the middle of other shows (
cutting into
their programming).
¹⁶
I was watching over her shoulder as she looked at the rundown for the cut-in, a short list of five or six stories and their corresponding videotapes.

“One of the upsides of working here,” Marybeth was saying, “is that they give you a lot of responsibility right away.”

“What are some of the downsides?” I asked.

She pursed her lips, thinking. “I’ll show you.” She stood and grabbed a tape off her desk, some footage of President Bush that we needed for the next cut-in. “Follow me.”

She led me over to a row of edit rooms that lined one of the newsroom walls. We paused outside one of the rooms. The door was closed, but through the glass partition, I could see a backward-baseball-cap-wearing video editor hunched over a sandwich, watching the small TV next to his editing rig, which he’d switched from Fox News to ESPN. (Editors generally flouted the rule that our televisions, which received most of the basic cable channels, had to be tuned to Fox—or at least one of our competitors—at all times.)

“They
love
to understaff here,” Marybeth said. “So that means we don’t get an editor assigned to us. We either have to interrupt a PA who’s cutting for one of the other shows and ask to borrow their editor, or scrounge up an editor on his lunch break and convince him to do it for us.”

“How do you do that?”

She smiled. “Just watch.”

She rapped on the door lightly with her knuckles, then turned the knob, easing the door open a crack and poking her head in.

“Go away,” the editor said, without even looking up from his sandwich to see who was intruding. “I’m on lunch.”

“Chris . . .” Marybeth cooed. “That’s no way to talk to your favorite PA
in the world.
” He sat up and swiveled around in his chair as she pushed the door open all the way and glided into the room. His face lit up when he saw her.

“MB! How’s it going, girl?”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Oh, you know me. Can’t complain.” She made a pouty face. “But I can’t find any editors to cut this tape. And it hits in
ten minutes.
Could you cut it for me?
Please please please?
”

Chris wiped his hands on a napkin and sighed. “What is it?
I guess
I could probably do it for you.”

Marybeth beamed. “Oh, could you? Thank you, thank you! It’s just Bush talking. It’ll be
so quick
.”

“Sure. Give me the tape.”

She handed it to him. “You’re the best.”

He slid the source tape into the deck, twisting dials and punching buttons. As President Bush’s face popped up on-screen, Chris seemed to notice for the first time that I was in the room.

“Who’s this kid?” he asked Marybeth.

“This is Joe. He’s a new PA. I’m training him this week.”

“Hey, Joe,” Chris said. “Where you from, man?”

“Hi,” I said. “Cincinnati.”

“Ohio!” he barked with a laugh. “How big is your family’s farm?”

I frowned. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

A few minutes later, we were back at Marybeth’s desk, freshly cut tape in hand. I watched as she labeled the cassette and the box with a numbered label, and typed the corresponding digits into the rundown on the computer.

“So that’s your method?” I asked. “You just flirt with the editor until he does what you want?”

She grinned. “Yup. It gets the job done, right?”

“That’s fine for you, but what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“I dunno,” she said, shrugging. “Just go to the girl editors?” She yawned and stretched in her chair. “That, or grow a pair of tits.”

—

The Fox News hierarchy was dead simple: Roger was in charge.

The man who a startling number of employees referred to only as “Mr. Ailes” was something of a mythic figure in the company, especially among those who had been there in the early days. To listen to some of them, Roger had single-handedly built the network from the ground up through sheer force of will.

It all seemed a little much to me. There’s no doubt that Fox News’s rise was impressive, meteoric, and unprecedented; in less than eight years, it had gone from a bare-bones operation with minuscule viewership to a just-slightly-more-than-bare-bones operation with more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. But the worship of Ailes as some sort of renegade television genius was maybe giving him too much credit. Yes, he had come up with a good concept, bringing the talk radio model to cable news to attract conservatives who were underserved by the market; and yes, he had a good eye for talent, picking O’Reilly, Hannity, and Shep Smith when they were still essentially unknowns and molding them into stars. But the success of Fox News owed just as much to luck, timing, and Uncle Rupert’s dump trucks of money as it did to anything Roger Ailes had done. With Fox News he had hit on a serendipitous combination that was not easily repeatable, TV genius or no. (And even money can’t put you over the top sometimes, as evidenced by the still-anemic ratings of Fox Business Network, launched in 2008 to much fanfare.)

But I kept those treasonous thoughts to myself, wary of becoming an office apostate early in my career. Also, the PA pod was rife with rumors—only half joking—that Roger had bugged the whole building with hidden microphones and some CIA-developed software that listened for mentions of his name to weed out disloyal employees. (Another popular theory: The hidden microphones were there to snag any secret liberals. Either way, I kept my mouth shut.)

This widespread institutional paranoia was probably symptomatic of the very paranoid man at the top of the institution. A fascinating 2011 profile in
Rolling Stone
magazine
¹⁷
plumbed the depths of Roger’s apparently disturbed psyche:

Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun. . . . Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. . . . Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows—even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

Ailes made no mention of “those gays” during any of the biannual State of the Business speeches he’d give in the middle of the newsroom, my earliest contact with him. Some flunky would set up a little microphone and underpowered speaker, and producers, editors, and PAs would wander over and arrange themselves, awkwardly standing among the cubicles, some of which were occupied by annoyed people in the midst of doing their actual jobs. (At a twenty-four-hour cable news network, you were never able to schedule an event when everyone was off duty at the same time. There was always someone, or several someones, who were getting screwed by a loud, distracting corporate pep rally taking place in their laps.) Roger would speak for about half an hour, revving up the troops with stats about ratings victories, how many households and cable systems we were available on, how well the network had covered various recent events, and so on. At the end he’d open the floor to questions from the crowd, which tended to be either extremely technical (“What’s the timeline on our conversion to a digital tapeless system?”) or sycophantic (“To what factors do you attribute our continued ratings dominance?”). He’d invariably toss out an anecdote or two about his past work in television, one of his favorites being the time he worked for
The Mike Douglas Show
and had overseen the construction of a fully operational bowling alley in the studio in a matter of hours. (The moral of the story: Hard work? Ingenuity? I can’t quite remember. He told it many times, and each time it had a different point.) The funny, affable Uncle Roger who showed up at these meetings was nothing like the sharp-elbowed, cutthroat Mr. Ailes who had built the company in his own image.

The ideology at Fox was strictly a top-down affair. Roger was a conservative. All of his deputies were conservatives. Most of the hosts were conservatives, or at least were good at pretending to be while on television, if they knew what was good for them. But under that, it was a more mixed bag. The ideology varied job by job, and show by show. For example: While Hannity’s staff was mostly simpatico with him, O’Reilly plainly didn’t care one bit about the ideology of his employees. He never once in five years asked me my personal opinion. His staff’s political views were totally irrelevant to him, in fact, because the only viewpoints that ever made it onto the show were his own.

Directly under Roger were several vice presidents. Each VP had a different and somewhat vague title—VP of programming, VP of development, VP of news editorial—but in practice their roles were often quite similar: They were Roger’s hatchet-men (and at least one woman, as of this writing). The VPs, as near as I could tell, were all staunch conservatives, too. Whether by coincidence or design, Roger had effectively surrounded himself with fellow travelers.

One level below the VPs were executive producers. As I said earlier, the purview of an EP could vary. Some were in charge of a single show, some were in charge of multiple shows or entire chunks of programming, and some, like Siegendorf, were managers. This was the level where the ideological firewall started to go wobbly. There’s no doubt that most of the EPs were true believers, but a few of them seemed to be moderate, and at least one whom I knew, when he got a few drinks in him, gave several distinct hints that he was a frustrated liberal trapped in a nightmare of his own making.

The next level down was senior producer. An SP on one of the smaller shows (a newswheel, or a weekend show) was generally the boss; on one of the more important shows (a prime-time show or
Fox & Friends
), an SP was high-level but not in charge. The senior producers tended to be the most openly right-wing people in the whole building. I was confused for a while as to how SPs ended up to the right of EPs, but someone eventually pointed out to me that most of the seniors had come up through the ranks at Fox, earning their promotions by slavishly toeing the company line, while a lot of the execs had been imported from other networks.

Under senior producers were producers, the utility players of the newsroom. Producers could book guests or select stories or time out the shows, ensuring that the commercial breaks hit at the right times (this was also known as “line producing”). Producers were generally too busy and harried to be ideological, but the smart, ambitious ones who wanted to eventually be promoted to seniors knew to occasionally let their conserva-flags fly.

It was in the scrum of the bottom two levels where the ideological diversity really started to ramp up. People outside of Fox tended to assume that the whole building was filled with lockstep conservatives, but at a certain point, it was simply impossible to staff a business based in New York City, and consisting of people who were attracted to the field of journalism, without letting at least a few pinkos in.

So the ranks of the associate producers—the title generally given to guest bookers, writers, and segment producers—and the production assistants were actually quite mixed. The conservatives, who made up at least 50 percent, as near as I could tell, were naturally not afraid to speak their minds at the office—like Camie, the pearl-wearing ingenue who had trained me on scripts. Another 30 percent were professed moderates, or at least agnostics who claimed they didn’t care about politics either way. And the remaining 20 percent, the ones who tended to keep their mouths shut and roll their eyes whenever the discussion turned political? Well, those people didn’t tend to last very long at the company. To borrow Mitt Romney’s parlance, they’d eventually self-deport.