An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (19 page)

Also different from the newsroom—there were windows! Sort of. The outer ring of the floor was taken up entirely by offices for the on-air personalities, or the “talent,” as they were known in industry parlance. The talent all had windows in their offices, floor-to-ceiling portals that let in that rarest of commodities, sunlight. And if one of them left their door propped open, one or two precious beams might even reach us!

In practice, the talent spent very little time in their offices, and what time they did spend was mostly with the door closed, doing God knows what,
³⁴
but if we were lucky we’d get an hour or two of indirect sunlight a day. Still not great, but a huge improvement from the Morlock-like existence I’d escaped. (I’d still be spending show days, Saturdays and Sundays, slinging videotape in the newsroom, but even escaping it for 60 percent of my week felt like a small victory.)

It was strange to be on the talent floor. I’d had limited contact with the on-air people in the newsroom—they rarely ventured down there—but now I was surrounded by them. It was absolutely surreal to sit at my desk and watch Geraldo Rivera on my TV, only to bump into him ten minutes later as he politely waited for me to finish using the vending machine. (“Do they stock that thing with mustache wax for him?” Camie asked when I excitedly told her about my encounter.)

The first thing I discovered about the talent: They’re just like us! I expected diva-like behavior but saw surprisingly little. Part of this owes to the fact that most of them, aside from some of the big names (O’Reilly, Hannity, Geraldo), are virtual unknowns in the town where they live and work. Any one of these anchors, had they been in a smaller market, would have been in the top tier of local celebrities—right up there with the pro athletes and the car dealership owners who insisted on appearing in their own commercials. However, since Fox News is headquartered in Manhattan, where the attitude toward Fox News generally ranges anywhere from ambivalence to outright hostility, a huge chunk of our on-air talent could easily pull one million viewers on a daily basis, then leave the office and wander the streets of midtown in virtual anonymity.

“That guy with the giant head looks familiar,” a person passing Gregg Jarrett or Jon Scott on the sidewalk might say to their companion. “Is he the weather guy on the CBS morning show?”

And the male anchors did all have giant heads. It must be some sort of corollary of the old maxim
The camera adds ten pounds
; the camera also apparently subtracts ten inches of head circumference
.
How else to explain how anchors who, in person, had melons that looked like they should have ropes attached to them as they float above Thirty-Fourth Street on Thanksgiving, could go on TV and look totally normal? Perversely, the rare anchor or reporter with a head that was normal size in real life went on camera looking like a pinhead from a 1920s circus sideshow.

The female on-air personalities were, on the other hand, generally average-skulled. They made up the difference in hair size, however. The stylists would spend thirty minutes giving one of our ferocious blond pundits a massive beehive worthy of a John Waters film, using four cans of ozone-killing hair spray, all so the woman could walk into a studio and call Al Gore an asshole for believing in global warming.

Fox News developed, over the years, a reputation for preferring blondes, and that was an accurate assessment—we had more than our fair share. But as you can see from the chart below, hair color was relatively low on the list of criteria for female talent:

CRITERIA FOR BEING A FEMALE ON-AIR PERSONALITY AT FOX NEWS CHANNEL (IN DESCENDING ORDER OF IMPORTANCE)

• Hotness
  
• Ability to string two words together
  
• Ability to summon outrage and berate a guest at length
  
• Blondness
  
• Conservative views (or the ability to convincingly fake them)
  
• Journalistic credentials
  

That’s not to say that our ranks were filled with bimbos. I absolutely don’t want to sell the women of Fox News Channel short. Plenty of them were hardworking, smart, dedicated journalists who just so happened to be hot. (Megyn Kelly, who is as of this writing in fall 2012 an anchor of two morning hours, would be an example of that.) And although being attractive was arguably the
most important
criterion the bosses kept in mind when hiring new talent, it was by no means a deal breaker. (Greta Van Susteren, though relatively plain in appearance, remains one of the biggest stars and highest-ratings getters at the network.)

That being said, we weren’t totally devoid of bimbos, either. One former reporter springs to mind. She was literally the best-looking human being I’ve ever seen up close in real life, to the point where I temporarily lost the faculty of speech one time when she offhandedly said hello to me in an elevator. Her epic hotness eventually helped her claw her way to a relatively prominent on-air position—a surprise to at least one producer who worked with her and had acclimated himself to her looks, swearing to anyone who would listen that he was about 75 percent certain that the reporter was functionally illiterate.

It was an undeniable fact that simply being attractive could get your foot in the door at Fox to a degree that didn’t seem to be the case at MSNBC or CNN, our competitors who placed a much lower priority on flashiness.

And this was actually all part of Roger Ailes’s governing philosophy. He believed that in a world where all the networks were working from basically the same set of facts and chasing the same stories, the channel with the most exciting presentation would win. That’s why Fox had all the graphics that swirled and whooshed across the screen with beeping and buzzing sound effects; that’s why we had almost uniformly gorgeous female anchors and commentators, all with pouffy hair and heavy makeup, wearing short but professional skirt suits that revealed a ton of leg; that’s why the camera operators and directors conspired to work in as many wide shots as possible to show off said leg. Fox was sexy and exciting, in a way that the other networks simply could not match. That, I would argue, almost as much as the conservative politics, was what made Fox so popular with viewers. After all, right-wing talking points could only get you so far. There was no Republican position to take in the Michael Jackson trial. It was just a voyeuristic, sensationalistic, celebrity train wreck, and it garnered ratings that dwarfed most of the political stories we were following. Much of the time, I think flashy tabloid stories would actually trump political stories. If it ever came down to a choice between covering some dry scandal that made a Democrat look bad and covering an exciting car chase, Fox would pick the car chase any day of the week.

Which brings us to the anchor of my new show. She was named Kimberly Guilfoyle, and despite her unfortunate (but oh so silky) dark brunette hair, she was being groomed as the Next Big Thing at Fox News. In regard to the aforementioned chart, she was absolutely off the scales for #1, instantly becoming one of the most beautiful women at the network. She was also quite good on #3—summoning outrage and berating guests—a helpful trait for the type of true-crime show she was going to be doing. Whether she possessed any of the other traits was still an open question, one that we, as her new staff, would have to help answer.

Kimberly’s résumé would have made a great premise for a TNT network hour-long dramedy series. Half Puerto Rican and half Irish, she had worked her way through law school as a Victoria’s Secret underwear model. She started her career as a San Francisco assistant district attorney, along the way marrying Gavin Newsom, a movie-star-handsome winery entrepreneur turned politician who was eventually elected San Francisco’s mayor. (
The Lingerie Lawyer
Thursdays at nine on TNT!)

On paper, she was actually a bad match for the network. Her marriage to the archliberal Newsom—and subsequent stint as First Lady of a city that Fox hosts routinely took delight in skewering as a radical, hippie, left-wing, pot-riddled cesspool—should have disqualified her. But she’d moved to New York to do analysis for CNN and Court TV and eventually filed for divorce from His Honor, and someone on the second floor at Fox took notice.

She was poached from the competitors and given a hefty contract and a promise to build a weekend show as a vehicle for her. The concept was that she’d function as a sort of Saturday/Sunday version of Greta Van Susteren—none of the investigative journalism chops, but about forty times the sex appeal.

The Second Floor saw it as a can’t-miss proposition.

—

“Does anyone have any other comments about the show so far? Anything they think is
really
working?” the executive asked. “Or anything they think”—she looked around the room dramatically—“is
not
working?”

The staffers of
The Lineup
with Kimberly Guilfoyle shifted awkwardly in our seats. A month after the show’s debut, it was clear that a lot of things weren’t working, but no one wanted to say so in front of Suzanne Scott, a company vice president and a powerful programming executive who was only a level or two removed from Roger Ailes.

Even though she half scared the shit out of me, I had to admit she was an impressive figure. She’d started with the network as a personal assistant to one of the anchors and had quickly worked her way up through the ranks from there, eventually rising to become the senior producer for Greta Van Susteren’s show, before corporate noticed her and brought her into the fold. She was intense, as you’d expect someone with her ladder-climbing ability to be, and more than a bit icy. She was also taking special interest in our show, since her background with Greta meant she was an expert on the crime beat.

Our production team was disconcertingly small. I was the youngest, and also the only guy. In addition to me, there were two bookers in charge of recruiting guests to come on the show; a line producer, who was responsible for keeping track of the time while we were on air; a senior producer, who was ostensibly in charge of the whole endeavor but, as near as I could tell, did absolutely nothing all day; and finally, the brains behind the whole operation, Lizzie, the producer.

Lizzie was a short, profane, raucously funny New Jersey broad. She was ultracompetent and very good at her job, and had zero patience for anyone who wasn’t—which, as far as she was concerned, was everyone around her. In the weeks leading up to our first show, I watched Lizzie’s frustration grow as she bristled at what she saw as the constant meddling from Suzanne and the other executives, who had started second-guessing her on every single detail.

And the details were endless. Decisions had to be hammered out for every show element: graphics, music, animation, an opening title sequence, ideas for “signature” segments (i.e., “Kimberly’s Court,” during which the host was supposed to give her own verdict on one of the criminal cases in the news that week); the list went on and on.

But the details that gave Lizzie the biggest headache, the details that everyone—from the executives on down to the makeup and wardrobe department—agonized over, were all related to the personal appearance of our beautiful host.
How should Kimberly be lit? Did we want soft, Barbara Walters–style lighting, or should we go for a more dramatic and mysterious setup? And what should she wear? Something professional like she’d wear in court? Or something a little sexier, to get our money’s worth—like a miniskirt and a blazer without a shirt underneath, revealing a tasteful amount of cleavage?
(“We should put her in robes, like Judge Judy,” I half joked at one of the early production meetings, only to be met with cold
you’re not being helpful
stares.)

And the hair and makeup.
Oh, God
, the hair and makeup. Kimberly was strikingly beautiful in person—disconcertingly so, as a matter of fact—but if she wasn’t coiffed and primped and painted properly, her severe features would warp under the harsh studio lights, making her look like the world’s most glamorous transsexual. And even on some days when the makeup was right, the hair people still went overboard, giving her a shellacked beehive that the Second Floor worried made her look like a Fembot.

But that’s not what Suzanne was asking about that day. She was probing us for weakness, testing us to see if we’d dare diagnose what was ill about our fledgling show.

“Is there anything you think we could do to improve the show?” Suzanne said, urging one of us, any of us, to break the awkward silence that had settled over the meeting.

There was only one person in the room dumb enough to rise to the bait.

“Well, . . .” I started, and all heads in the room swiveled toward me. I met Lizzie’s eyes. She had a
what the hell are you doing
look on her face.

Undaunted, I stupidly pressed on. “I’m not sure that we’re doing a good job of emphasizing the whole ‘victim’s advocate’ angle that we discussed.”

During preproduction for the show, that had been the buzzphrase tossed around by everyone—victim’s advocate
. Kimberly will be a victim’s advocate!
Or:
This segment idea is great, but how can we approach it from more of a victim’s advocate angle?
It’s the hook that would supposedly separate her from Greta, her weeknight counterpart, though I never knew quite what they meant by it.

It was only later that I figured out it was all just a euphemism for
Be more like Nancy Grace
. Grace was a CNN Headline News host with a grating personality who had her own inexplicably popular crime show. A former prosecutor herself, she had juiced the ratings of the formerly moribund also-ran network by creating her own brand of angry perp-berating Southern charm. That’s what the Second Floor wanted from Kimberly.

But after a month of shows, I wasn’t seeing it.

It was only after I opened my mouth to say so that I realized I wasn’t offering constructive criticism so much as throwing our whole team under the bus. After all, any failure to emphasize the agreed-upon theme reflected as poorly on the staff as it did on the host.