An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (13 page)

“Let’s just keep this one between us,” the boss said. “I don’t think we need to stir up the Cavuto people by telling them you put a boner on their air.” None of the higher-ups ever found out.

An image hiding in the background of a shot was the culprit another time when I got into a heated argument with a
Fox Report
PA. She claimed that the video she’d cut of the aftermath of a suicide bombing
²¹
in Israel showed nothing but crime scene technicians cleaning up debris and placing it into garbage bags. I begged to differ, and grabbed an editor to zoom into one of the shots, which very clearly showed an Israel Defense soldier picking up the severed leg of the bomber.

Clearly, the displaying of aroused members or dismembered limbs was generally frowned upon for a basic cable channel. But Fox had some other less obvious rules about what we couldn’t show on air.

“You can’t use tape of the Twin Towers going down,” Marybeth told me. “The bosses think it upsets people.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So what do we use when the producer wants nine-eleven footage?”

“They like that shot of the people running down the street with the dust cloud behind them.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “There’s nothing
too
upsetting about terrified people fleeing for their lives.”

Another rule: If we were producing tape of same-sex weddings to illustrate a gay marriage segment, we had to cut away before the couple kissed.

“We showed two guys kissing once, and people at home completely freaked out,” Marybeth explained. “Hundreds of calls to the switchboard, thousands of angry e-mails.”

Yet another rule—and this one was by no means unique to Fox—if the segment was a discussion about something negative or controversial, we had to be extra careful with the generic b-roll we used to illustrate it. Specifically, we couldn’t show any faces, on the off-chance that someone featured in the footage was sitting at home watching and somehow objected to being associated with whatever the topic was.

This most often cropped up in relation to health stories. You’d see producers request videos like “PEOPLE SMOKING—NO FACES” or “EATING FAST FOOD—NO FACES” or “KIDS PLAYING—NO FACES” or, my personal favorite, “FAT PEOPLE—NO FACES” (and its spin-off, “FAT KIDS—NO FACES”).

Every so often, Siegendorf would send a camera crew out to expand our no-face footage library. The tapes would come back filled with hours of nothing but obese people walking the streets of Manhattan, secretly shot at a distance, from behind or from the neck down. We’d study those tapes, searching for the perfect shots to use, hypnotized by the jiggling guts spilling out from under too-tight T-shirts, the lumpy asses inexplicably shoved into stretch pants, the unfortunate hefty victims completely unaware that their bulk was condemned to be anonymously ambling across a cable news screen in perpetuity.

—

The Fox News business model is as follows: Hire gullible twenty-two-year-olds straight out of college, pay them next to nothing, give them minimal training, and set them loose with little to no adult supervision. You’ll have high turnover, and many, many on-air mistakes, but you’re saving enough money that it’s probably worth your while.

I was a direct beneficiary of this business model.

In the fall of 2004, when I was just a few months removed from senior year of college keg stands, there was no rational reason why I should have been given absolute control over videotape for the two-minute news cut-ins that aired during our most important prime-time shows. Yet there I was.

Luckily, I was
very
good at it—my film and television major, the one my father had worried would leave me completely unemployable, had actually left me overly prepared for the field I was in. I worked fast, I picked video that was visually interesting, and—most important—I was unflappable under pressure. I was the anti-Siegendorf. My boss tended to lose his head when the heat was on; I was the exact opposite—in times of extreme stress, I was able to achieve maximum focus, becoming incredibly calm and tuning out all distractions until the emergency was over.

At the end of a month of training, Marybeth had taught me everything there was to know about videotape. I was moved full-time to the evening cut-in unit, which was a small team consisting of two PAs, a writer, a producer, and an anchor. We’d start work at three
P.M.
, when the newsroom was still bustling with activity, and finish at eleven
P.M.
, when it was mostly empty.

My producer in those first few months was a wry, blond twenty-eight-year-old name Angie. She’d started with Fox straight out of New York University as a production assistant, and had climbed her way up the ladder from there.

The writer was a crusty old-timer, a salt-and-pepper-bearded former
National Enquirer
reporter named Lenny. In his downtime—when he wasn’t griping about how much he hated John Kerry and his wife, Teresa—he’d regale me with stories about digging through the trash cans at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch during the King of Pop’s first molestation trial, or digging through trash cans at Gianni Versace’s Miami mansion after the fashion designer’s murder, or digging through trash cans at John Bobbitt’s house after his de-penising.

“Believe it or not, I miss it a little,” Lenny said wistfully one night. “It was a dirty job, but it was real investigative journalism, you know? Not like this mindless repackaging of crap that we do now.”

I actually found
this crap
to be pretty interesting, at least as far as the process went. I suppose it wasn’t
journalism
, per se, in that we didn’t do any original reporting or investigating. We’d simply take the reporting of others—most often the wire services, Associated Press or Reuters—and compress it into tidy, two-minute updates that aired once an hour.

Angie, as the producer, got to pick the stories. Two minutes was enough time for about four or five items of twenty to thirty seconds apiece. She’d pull stories from the wires and copy the text into the rundown. Lenny would go through and reword them, condensing and simplifying them so they’d sound good when read aloud.

“The key is to be concise,” Lenny told me. “No big words, or words with lots of syllables. Leslie tends to trip over those.”

Leslie Stuart was the anchorwoman in our unit. She was a statuesque blonde, with about an inch of height on me in bare feet. (Once you added high heels and the ludicrous beehive helmet that the stylist tortured her hair into every afternoon, she towered over me by almost a full foot.) Despite making six figures for what amounted to about sixteen minutes of actual work spread out over an eight-hour shift, Leslie seemed to be miserable in her job. She’d spend her downtime e-mailing her agent imploring him to convince the bosses to give her a better gig.
²²
When she wasn’t doing this, she spent her time nodding her head vigorously in agreement with Lenny’s anti-Kerry barbs and, if I didn’t know any better, flirting with me and some other male production assistants. (Yes, I know it sounds unlikely that the hot Amazonian anchor was flirting with me. Believe me, I was just as incredulous then as you probably are now. But years later, I saw her on TV, saying that she had been a serious alcoholic during the time I was working with her, so that would explain
a lot
.)

After more than three months on the job, I was content. I was pretty settled in and—dare I say—happy. The work was challenging and occasionally entertaining. My schedule was a little strange, but as the exact opposite of a morning person, going in to work at three
P.M.
appealed to me. And aside from Lenny’s constant conservative patter (“I’m so sick of this horse-faced windsurfing
ass
and his bitchy ketchup wife,” he’d complain), I wasn’t routinely being confronted with the right-wing ideology I’d been so concerned about before I took the gig. I knew it was there, of course—on the TV screen, in the newsroom, all over the executive offices of the second floor—but I was finding it increasingly easy to ignore or laugh off.

I don’t know what was more disturbing: that I felt myself slowly sinking deeper into the foxhole, or that I was no longer worried about it.

April 11, 2012—11:55
A.M.

I hung up the phone with my
Gawker
contact and tried to calmly, rationally assess the situation. If they didn’t suspect me already, I figured I had fifteen, twenty minutes max before my absence would start to raise the alarm.

My bag with the telltale iPad was still hanging off one shoulder. I had to stash it somewhere. But where? My apartment in Brooklyn was too far away, at least an hour’s round trip. I flipped my mental Rolodex through various possibilities. Ask a newstand guy to hold it for me? Bribe a cabbie to drive it back to my apartment? Put it under a bench or some other out-of-the-way spot and just pray that it didn’t set off a security panic, or simply get taken?

Then it came to me: Rufus.

   CHAPTER 5   

A White Devil in Brooklyn

N
ew York City was always the place for me.

My decision to throw over any misgivings I had about working for Fox was spurred almost entirely by my intense desire to live in New York. I had been infatuated with the city from a surprisingly young age.

My first glimpse of New York must have been the movie
Ghostbusters
, which I saw on home video at a family friend’s First Communion party when I was five years old. While the adults were in the backyard drinking and chatting, the kids were in the den watching movies. I wasn’t a brave child—the film’s climactic rooftop scene with the androgynous lady demon Gozer absolutely scared the training pants off me. But after the dust—and the melted, flaming Stay Puft Marshmallow goop—had cleared, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: move to New York City and work as a ghostbuster.

My dream-crushing mother kept insisting that it wasn’t going to be a viable career option, but I would not be deterred. All I knew was that somewhere in America was a city where wisecracking paranormal-expert scientists, sarcastic mayors, Hasidic Jews, and binge-eating slime ghosts all existed in relative harmony, and I was going to live there when I was a grown-up.

My first visit was with my family when I was twelve years old. I’d been urging my parents to make the trip for years, but it was only after the invention of the Nintendo Game Boy and its child-distracting narcotic effect that they had agreed to load up the minivan and make the six-hundred-plus-mile trek. It was the summer of 1994, just a few months into the Rudy Giuliani administration, and well before his vaunted cleanup of the city’s grit and grime. While I was disappointed that there were no Slimers hanging around, I was transfixed by the squeegee guys and three-card monte dealers, whom Giuliani hadn’t yet chased out of Times Square.

The most indelible part of the trip for me is an incident that probably should have, in retrospect, scared me away from the place. I was walking with my family in midtown. We were on our way to see FAO Schwarz or Rockefeller Center or one of those other things that tourists dragging children around Manhattan are always on their way to see.

Moving as a family unit down the sidewalk, we approached a guy with dreadlocks, perched on a little stool on a street corner, hawking novelty umbrella hats out of a duffel bag. His business model was suspect, since it wasn’t raining out, nor particularly sunny. (Though, to be fair, visitors to New York will buy all kinds of stupid headgear, as my eight-year-old sister’s foam Statue of Liberty crown attested.)

“Umbrella hats! Five dollars!” the man called as we walked past, quickly and accurately pegging us as tourists. If my sister’s pointy green foam visor hadn’t tipped him off, my father’s neck-strapped camera, calf-high white socks, khaki shorts, and neon-orange fanny pack probably did the trick.
²³

Now, the correct “New York” thing to do is to cruise past street vendors, panhandlers, and other annoyances without pausing or making eye contact. But my dad, polite to a fault, couldn’t do it.

“No, thanks. None for us today, sir,” he replied cheerfully, and kept walking.

I was a few paces behind him and the rest of my family, so only I heard the vendor’s response.

“White motherfucking devil,” the man grumbled angrily, scowling at my dad’s back, which was by then twenty feet down the sidewalk. I stopped and stared goggle-eyed at the cursing umbrella-hat man. He looked at me and shrugged.

I ran to catch up with the family. “Hey, Dad,” I said, tugging at my father’s shirtsleeve. “That umbrella-hat guy just called you a . . . ‘white mother
effing
devil.’”

“He did what?” My father shot an alarmed glance back at the vendor, who was still glaring after us. “All right, let’s just keep moving, Joseph,” my father said, shooing me along. “Where are your brother and sister?” He circled to round up my younger siblings, lest they, too, have racial invectives hurled at them by crazed, novelty-hat-peddling street people.
²⁴

Perversely, the incident made me want to live in New York even more. I wasn’t scared. I was fascinated by the raucous, chaotic mashup of culture and people. Every other place I went to seemed sleepy and boring by comparison.

—

Ten years later—almost to the day—I’d finally made it to the city, albeit as a couch crasher. Sloane was a gracious host, and insisted that I could stay as long as I needed to. But after two weeks, I started to sense that her patience was wearing thin. I got the hint after the third time I borrowed her laptop only to find the Web browser suggestively cued up to the Craigslist apartment rentals section. I figured I had two options: find my own place, or seduce her. Since an awkwardly botched flirtation freshman year had convinced Sloane and me that we were better as friends, and only friends, I quickly settled on the former.