An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (23 page)

And sometimes you’ll just pick up the line, listen to them breathing for a second, and hang up without saying anything.
Click
. Either way is satisfying.

It sounds cruel, toying with people like this, but it’s completely necessary. You have to be a hard-ass. You have to be ever vigilant. Sometimes you have to be kind of a dick.

Because it’s your neck if one of these callers gets through.

The call screening interface is deceptively simple. You have ten phone lines, each of which rings constantly, starting fifteen minutes before showtime, and continues ringing throughout the entire program. The phones are hooked up to a computer. You just need to strap on a headset, and then you can answer calls simply by clicking your mouse. After that, it’s a matter of filling in the boxes of text. Name, hometown, and whatever the caller wants to say to Bill. The host has a monitor in front of him, right next to his microphone, and his monitor mirrors your monitor exactly. He sees what you type, and that’s how he knows what caller he wants to go to next. So you’d better be specific and let him know exactly what each caller is going to say. No surprises, please.

Of course there’s a very limited amount of space in those text boxes, so you have to be as concise as possible when you take down the POV, leaving some details on the cutting-room floor. John from Tulsa says immigrants are ruining the country. Mike from Columbus says Democrats are traitors. Anne from Coral Gables says she’s tired of homosexuals flaunting it in everyone’s faces. That’s all the information you give the host to work from. Based on these limited descriptions, each of these calls could go either way. Bill is trusting you to not put through any complete maniacs.

And make no mistake: He can tell within two seconds if you’ve put him on the line with what he refers to as a “kook” or a “loon.” He knows the signs as well as you do—the breathlessness, the agitation, the crackpot theories spilling out all at once. He picks up the call and immediately knows he’s trapped, and he’ll politely let the kook squeeze out one or two sentences before cutting him off. Meanwhile he’s glaring daggers at you through the glass partition that separates the radio studio from the control room.

You need to get that glare only once before you figure out that you don’t want it a second time.

That’s why the
real
crazies are so dangerous. The dirty little secret of talk radio is that you can prank any show in the world—you can get past the best call screeners in the business—and all you need to do is not sound like a stuttering moron for a grand total of thirty seconds. If you can coherently give a producer your name and hometown, and then string together three or four sentences describing what you plan to say on the air, without saying anything overtly racist or blurting out the F-word, then you’re in.

Those guys are the truly dangerous ones. You don’t even see them coming. They can be spouting off about something innocuous, then suddenly they say it.

The worst word they could possibly say.

The name that must not be mentioned, under any circumstances.

The name of the enemy.

—

I’d started as an associate producer for
The Radio Factor
with Bill O’Reilly in January 2007. I was a salaried employee for the first time in my career, making $42,000 a year. I was excited to ditch my time card, until some back-of-the-envelope calculations revealed that, with the loss of the substantial amount of overtime I’d been pulling, I’d actually be making less money than I had previously.

The radio show was on five days a week, noon to two
P.M.
(Bill had made the dubious decision to go up against Rush Limbaugh, the nation’s most popular radio personality, who had a lock on that time slot at virtually every top-tier talk station in the country. So while
The Radio Factor
was in every market, it was almost always on the second-rate station, or tape-delayed to a less desirable slot on the better station.) The studio was on the eighteenth floor, almost directly above the area on the seventeenth floor where my former
Lineup
colleagues were sitting. It was small, just two rooms separated by a thick pane of soundproof glass. On one side of the glass, an oval table with four expensive-looking microphones on swivel arms. On the other side, a massive control board with switches and sliders and levers and glowing buttons, and three workstations for producers arrayed behind it. The walls in both rooms were covered in sound-dampening foam panels, soft surfaces studded with dark gray pyramid shapes that swallowed your words. After the din and chaos of the newsroom where I’d spent much of my past two years, it was both eerie and oddly relaxing.

The staff of
The Radio Factor
with Bill O’Reilly was small—five, counting me. When we weren’t in the eighteenth-floor radio studio, we occupied a small area just outside Bill’s seventeenth-floor office.

There was Stan Manskoff, the executive producer, who was actually important enough to have his own office next to Bill’s. He was there for adult supervision but was mostly checked out of the proceedings, occupying his time with the sundry TV-related issues that cropped up throughout the day. Stan was responsible for the entire empire, overseeing radio, television, and the website. He was the steady hand at the tiller of the USS
O’Reilly
, the practical second in command to the volatile Captain Bill. Stan was a details man by nature, sweating the small stuff that the Big Guy couldn’t be bothered with. He was a reluctant hatchet man when necessary, carrying out deeds that were too distasteful or unpleasant for Bill to dirty his hands over. And he was the main go-between for Bill and the Second Floor, the broker for a relationship that was tense even on good days, and downright apocalyptic on bad ones. It was probably the most stressful job this side of Fallujah, and to this day I have no idea how Stan was able to survive every day without guzzling a bottle of Pepto to deal with the grapefruit-size ulcer from which he undoubtedly suffered.

He was the same age as my parents, graduating college in ’72. But unlike my parents, who’d attended a sleepy Midwestern Catholic college that had barely been touched by the 1960s counterculture (my mother swears—unconvincingly, if you ask me—to this day that she never once attended a party where someone was smoking pot), Stan had spent his university years behaving like—to coin one of Bill’s favorite phrases—a “far-left loon,” protesting U.S. military actions, occupying various administrative buildings, and (I’m guessing, based mostly on a contemporary picture showing him with long, straggly hair and a beard) ingesting copious amounts of marijuana. I loved the guy immediately.

Manskoff had built an impressive career as a producer at ABC News, which is where he’d met O’Reilly, who was a correspondent for that network in the late ’80s. Years later, when Bill was already established at Fox News and needed a heavyweight presence to run his burgeoning empire, he tapped Stan, luring him away from his cushy network gig with what was rumored among the staff to be a huge pile of money. If Stan had any misgivings about betraying his radical leftist past to come work for a TV host who could only be described as a living caricature of The Man, he kept them to himself. (Though I did catch him occasionally emitting some world-weary, Danny-Glover-in-
Lethal-Weapon
-I’m-too-old-for-this-shit type of mumbling when he thought no one was listening.)

Next in line on the radio crew was Sam Martinez, associate producer, head call screener, and the guy who’d recruited me. At twenty-six, he was one year older than I was and had a year and a half of O’Reilly experience under his belt. He was happy to have me aboard but also warily guarded his turf from my encroachment, taking umbrage at any indication that I was on the verge of usurping him. His worries were unfounded. I knew my place, and I had no intention of trying to overtake him; I was perfectly fine with my status as the little brother. But like any good little brother, I sometimes took delight in tormenting my work sibling and his insecurity about his place in the hierarchy.

“Hey, Sam, when you were out sick yesterday, Bill told me that he liked the way I screened calls better than the way you do it,” I’d lie.

“What? Bull
shit
!” he’d say. “You’re totally full of shit, Muto.” Then, quietly: “He didn’t actually tell you that, right?”

I’d let him dangle for a few minutes before confessing. When I did, he’d grumble and begin planning his payback, to be sprung on me at a later date.

Sam’s unease was surprising. Anyone could see that his position on the staff was secure. He was by far the hardest-working producer on the O’Reilly team, and conceivably in the entire building. He also had one of the most impressive personal stories I’d ever heard. He was born in California, the grandson of Mexican immigrants. His father died tragically when Sam was only six years old, leaving his mother suddenly alone with three young kids to support. Sam grew up and worked his way through Arizona State, turning down scholarships from more prestigious schools so he could stay close to home and help on weekends in the restaurant that his mother owned and had built from the ground up. After graduation, he came to New York with barely a dime in his pocket, staying at the YMCA until he could find an affordable apartment. He’d overcome so many hardships to get to his position that it sometimes made me ashamed of my easy, comfortable, white-bread, middle-class upbringing.

Sam was middle-of-the-road politically, not a hard-core conservative like some of the other staffers. But he was absolutely in awe of O’Reilly, and terrified of disappointing him.

Also in the radio unit was Richie, the sound board operator and engineer. Thin and bespectacled, he was in his fifties, but through some sort of bizarre Dorian Gray/Benjamin Button supernatural intervention, he appeared to be not a day over thirty-five. I asked him his secret once. “Clean living,” he said, taking a bite of the apple that most days was the only thing he ate for lunch.

And finally there was Eric, another associate producer, who was brought on a few months after I came in. (His predecessor, in an ill-fated career move, had left the show in early 2007 to work on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.) Eric’s background was in sports radio; dealing with the irate maniacs who’d call into those shows made him almost
over
qualified to handle our tame-by-comparison callers.

We were a merry little band, tight-knit in a way that can only come from being locked in a small enclosed space for several hours a day—it’s a miracle none of us went nuts, as in
The Shining
, and ax-murdered our compatriots, the foamy walls dampening the sounds of our screams and the sickening wet thuds of the ax cleaving human flesh.
³⁸

—

The secret to Bill’s success, the reason why he’s such an imposing interviewer, is something that doesn’t fully come across on television: He’s one of the most physically intimidating people on the planet. Cameras don’t do him justice; all the HDTVs in the world can’t replicate the experience of standing in his presence; the sheer size of him cannot be limned from mere pixels.
³⁹
He’s a force of nature that has to be experienced in person to be appreciated, like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon.

He’s six feet four but somehow seems taller the nearer you stand to him. He’s equipped with the classic anchorman’s giant head, but unlike many of his colleagues, it doesn’t look odd on him—probably because it sits upon equally giant shoulders. A former athlete, he still carries himself with that unmistakable jock swagger. He’s softening around the middle ever so slightly but is otherwise in remarkably good shape for a man in his early sixties. I have no doubt that I, three decades his junior, would lose a fight with him, and lose badly.

And that voice. That golden voice, powerful and terrible, thick, rich, and warm like butterscotch syrup fresh off the stove, deep and smoldering like a lion’s growl, sounding as if he’s perpetually on the verge of breaking into a shout, even when he’s whispering.

Everyone on the staff did the voice. Never in front of him, of course. And not to make fun of him, either, not really.
⁴⁰
It’s just that the voice was so infectious, so pervasive in the workplace, that it became simply impossible to tell a story about the boss without dropping your voice a couple octaves while reciting his dialogue.

Sam was a particularly gifted mimic and would have the whole control room howling, recounting the various times Bill had dressed him down.

“So Bill looks at me and he goes ‘MARTINEZ!’” Sam would say, nailing Bill’s clipped staccato delivery. “‘ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN HANDLE THIS JOB? IF YOU’RE NOT, TELL MANSKOFF AND WE’LL GET SOMEONE IN HERE WHO CAN.’”

Sam took a lot of heat in my first few months, most of it unfairly, because Bill was big on assigning blame for things. If there was an issue, no matter how small, he always wanted to know whose fault it was. As the new guy, I was still under O’Reilly’s radar (I wasn’t sure he actually knew my name until at least my third month on the job), so Sam took the brunt of the punishment for any of my minor transgressions.

And I do mean minor. The issue with Bill wasn’t that he flew off the handle for no reason—there was
always
a reason. The problem was that he had no sense of scale. In his book, every foul-up, no matter how big or small, was an occasion for a shouting jag. He’d get just as mad at the producer who had failed to book a desirable guest as he would at his assistant if she forgot to get mustard on his sandwich. He’d get just as angry about being given a stat that turned out to be wrong, leading to his embarrassing himself on the air, as he would about being given a research packet with the wrong font.

And when he turned on the rage, all six feet four of him towering, red-faced, wild-eyed, and screaming, jabbing a finger in the face of whoever was unlucky enough to have provoked his ire, it was a truly terrifying experience. It was also oddly exhilarating—thrilling, even—as long as you weren’t the target. One of my fellow producers compared it to watching a tiger at the zoo mauling someone who’d wandered into its enclosure.