An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (26 page)

But the quest to get sexy ladies on the air was not limited to sex-offending educators. Bill was also constantly on the prowl for guests who were “demographically friendly,” which was a polite way of saying “fuckable.” One of his pet theories was that viewers were turned off by the average cable news expert commentator, most of whom tended to fit into the category he disparagingly called Old Gray White Men. OGWMs were virtually banished from the show, to be used only as a last resort.
⁴⁶
So when a producer pitched an expert who was young and beautiful, even if her credentials were otherwise suspect, or her field of expertise was of dubious newsworthiness, she was always given at least a tryout.

This focus on getting eye candy on-screen had its upsides and downsides. On one hand, it launched the careers of several talented political analysts and commentators who otherwise would probably have been dismissed as too young or too lightweight. On the other hand, it saddled
The Factor
with several segments that should have had no place on a “news” show, including an inane segment featuring a blond “body language expert” examining the hand gestures of a politician or public figure, and an especially unfortunate experiment—the existence of which I am not making up or even exaggerating—called Hot for Words, an
etymology
segment featuring a huge-breasted Russian immigrant explaining the origin of common words and phrases. Alert the Pulitzer committee!

Rule 6: Get Him on the Bandwagon

Bill rightfully prided himself on his ability to identify stories that would catch on with the viewers, and to catch them early, getting in on the ground floor and enabling him to say later that he had broken the story.
⁴⁷
But as much as he loved being one of the first to grab on to a story, he also hated being one of the last. If you could convince him that he was in danger of being late to the party, he’d fast-track a story to air.

“Bill, the right-wing blogs are really going crazy for this one,”
⁴⁸
you’d start your pitch. Or “They’ve been doing this story all day on our network.” Or, most effectively, “This story is topping
Drudge
right now.”

Matt Drudge, the proprietor of the
Drudge Report
website, despite not being on the Fox News payroll, was one of the most powerful people at the network. Every producer in the building, myself included, checked his site ten times an hour to see what stories he was pushing. It was the first thing I looked at when I turned on my computer in the morning, before I even glanced at my e-mail, and the first thing I clicked over to after any major news development, just to see what Drudge’s take was.

Drudge is a reclusive, slightly mysterious, fedora-wearing figure who made his bones during the Monica Lewinsky scandal: He was the first to publicly report on it, posting an item revealing that
Newsweek
had prepared—and then spiked at the last minute—a story on the intern’s relationship with Bill Clinton. Drudge runs a website that’s both proudly low-tech, with a design gone largely unchanged since the ’90s, and wildly successful, with millions of visitors a month and a reported seven-figure revenue. His sensibility—right-leaning, populist, and biased toward muckraking and sensationalism—tended to align perfectly with Fox’s. When he promoted a story, complete with a headline putting his own gloss or spin on it, it would, like clockwork, pop up on the network, with spin intact—often within an hour or two of going up online.

Bill was uncharacteristically respectful of Drudge’s power to drive a story, so throwing his name into a pitch was a surefire way to get the boss’s attention, and usually his approval. It was not uncommon for Bill to reject a story, sometimes with extreme prejudice, on a Monday, only to turn around and embrace the exact same story on a Tuesday simply because he was told that Drudge was now pushing it.

Rule 7: Fit It to the Narrative

Certain stories barely even needed pitching—they fit into Bill’s repertoire that had been established and had been successful on multiple prior occasions. I’ve already mentioned Bad Judge stories, and Sexy Teacher stories, but the ur-example, the ultimate ongoing narrative and the one perhaps most closely associated with O’Reilly, is the “War on Christmas.”

By the time I joined the show, the War on Christmas had been going for a few years, the first shots having been fired in 2004, when Macy’s had the temerity to ditch the phrase “Merry Christmas” in its advertising and in-store displays, in favor of the more inclusive “Happy Holidays.” This, of course, represented an unconscionable attack on Christianity, and Bill, along with the FNC five
P.M.
host John Gibson and numerous right-wing Christian groups, launched a salvo against Macy’s, accusing it of caving to secular forces of political correctness. The following year Macy’s, apparently deciding that making a few Jews visiting their store uncomfortable was preferable to poking the hornet’s nest of outrage-prone American Christendom, announced that they’d bring back “Merry Christmas.” But Sears, Kmart, and Walmart hadn’t been paying attention, and hence became that year’s targets. They, too, caved the following year. Then Best Buy stepped in to take their place and was also summarily smacked down. And so on.

By the time I came on board
The Factor
, the War was all but won, with every major corporation cowed into compliance, terrified to attempt a holiday advertising campaign that didn’t incorporate the word
Christmas
. O’Reilly declared victory, then continued fighting just for the thrill of it, opening a new, more localized front, railing against states, cities, and municipalities that refused to acknowledge the reason for the season, or seemed poised to strip Christ from Christmas.

“These things come earlier and earlier every year,” Eugene would say when he announced his first War on Christmas pitch of the season, sometimes as early as mid-September. The details would change from story to story, until every incident eventually blurred together into a sort of bizarre Yuletide Mad Libs:

A well-meaning, but liberal (governor/mayor/city council/atheist activist) would try to get (a manger scene/a tree/Christmas lights/Santa Claus/any mention of Jesus) removed from (City Hall/the public park/a school), because they say (it offends non-Christians/it violates the Constitution/there’s not enough money in the budget for it). The controversy leads to a backlash from the (community/Catholic Church/parents of the schoolchildren), and eventually (an outraged public hearing/angry protests/death threats).

I suspect that even Bill knew how silly the War on Christmas narrative was, but the canard was simply too fertile for him to abandon entirely. (The liberal watchdog group Media Matters calculated that in the month of December 2011,
The Factor
spent almost forty-two minutes talking about the War on Christmas, compared to just over thirteen minutes of screen time devoted to the
actual
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Personally, as a lapsed Catholic, I never took offense that corporations were trying to make the holidays more generic and secular; rather, I found it offensive that the whole premise of the War on Christmas narrative was that any attempt to
include
non-Christians was inherently offensive.

Of course, I kept all that to myself. If anyone else on the
Factor
staff (which was roughly 50 percent Jewish) found Bill’s blithe dismissal of the non-Jesusy religions insulting, they also wisely kept it to themselves.

Rule 8: When All Else Fails, Appeal to His Ego

In college, while trolling eBay for funny things to hang on the wall above the bar in the off-campus house I shared with six other guys, I came across a small light-up sign advertising Colt 45. The sign featured the suave actor Billy Dee Williams nattily dressed in a white dinner jacket with a red bow tie, cracking open a tall can of the foul malt liquor, while a smiling Phylicia Rashad look-alike, with big hair and a dress with shoulder pads so tall they almost reached her earlobes, stood behind him, caressing his shoulder and gazing lovingly at his face. The text on the sign read
THE POWER OF COLT 45: IT WORKS EVERY TIME!

I mention this because I thought of that sign, and that slogan, whenever I came across a pitch that fit Rule 8—aka the Billy Dee Williams Rule. If someone on another network mentioned Bill’s name, all a producer needed to do was to show that clip at the pitch meeting and it meant almost automatic inclusion in the show. If the mention was complimentary, great. If it was an insult, even better!

To draw from some recent examples of pitches that were accepted without a second thought, there’s the tale of a savvy racehorse owner who named one of his colts The Factor, ensuring several days of coverage on the show as the animal came close to running in the Kentucky Derby. Or Ellen Barkin, a boilerplate liberal celebrity, who insulted Bill on Joy Behar’s Headline News show, becoming the lead
Factor
story on an otherwise slow news day.

Works every time.

—

It took me five years of failure to learn those rules. I say failure, because knowing the types of stories O’Reilly was looking for is a completely different thing from actually
finding
said stories.

I wasn’t enough of a masochist to frequent the right-wing blogs my colleagues combed for good politics-related pitches, so I decided to dedicate myself to an unrelated niche that my fellow producers (smartly, as it turns out) wouldn’t touch: Sexy Outrage stories.

It did not go well.

“Bill, there’s a new website called H-Date that people are very angry about,” I pitched one day.

“Oh, yeah?” Bill said. “Why are they so mad?”

“Because it’s a dating website specifically for people with herpes.”

His hands went immediately to his temples, the gesture of weary annoyance that I unfortunately knew quite well.

“Are you kidding me, Muto?” he asked, suddenly as angry as I’d ever seen him. “You honestly want me to put that disgusting fact on television?”

I stood in place, knowing from experience that interrupting him at the beginning of a tirade I had set off was a very bad idea.

“This is a family show,” he continued. “It airs at eight
P.M.
People are eating dinner. I will not bring a discussion about . . .
herpes . . .
into America’s living rooms.”

I probably should have learned my lesson there, but a few months later, I came across another story that I somehow got into my head would be a slam dunk.

“Bill, people are outraged because the Iowa State Fair is planning to hold an erotic corn-dog-eating contest,” I said.

“Jesus, Muto!” Stan blurted out as the rest of the producers groaned or laughed nervously.

But Bill was confused. “I don’t get it,” he said, frowning. “What’s an erotic corn-dog-eating contest?”

“Come on, we don’t need to hear this,” Stan protested, but Bill silenced him with a wave of the hand.

“Go on, Muto,” Bill said.

“Well,” I started, “I don’t know the exact way it’s going to work, but my understanding is that they’re going to bring women on the stage, and then have them eat corn dogs . . . in a sexy way.”

At this point, Bill had a look of utter disbelief on his face.
Is this pitch actually happening?
I, of course, misinterpreted the look as confusion, wrongly thinking that he still didn’t grasp what I was describing, so I plowed on.

“I believe that the objection is that the contestants are going to treat the corn dogs like they’re, uhhh, you know . . . male . . . genitals—”

“YEAH, WE’VE GOT IT,” Bill said, cutting me off.

After the meeting, Stan pulled me aside.

“Erotic corn dogs? What’s the matter with you?”

I shrugged. “Worth a shot, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, sighing. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then replaced them and leveled his gaze at me. “Maybe in the future you should run your pitches by me before the meeting.”

“What for?”

“So I can save you from yourself.”

April 11, 2012—5:51
P.M.

Bill glanced at me out of the corner of his eye as I stole up from behind, snatching the folder marked
E-BLOCK
off the anchor desk in front of him and sliding the
F-BLOCK
folder into its place. He nodded and mumbled his thanks. I slipped out of the studio and reclaimed my seat in the empty green room.

I’d made it through almost the entire show. Just one more block to go before I could leave. I was anxious to go, too, because the
Gawker
people were waiting for me at a downtown bar to plan our next move.

I had half a mind to walk into the bar and tell them I was done, to call it off right there on the spot. I hadn’t been busted yet, but I had no idea how much longer my luck was going to hold out.

Also, I wasn’t thrilled with the tenor of the postings. Everything was coming out all wrong. When
Gawker
had asked me to write an anonymous column from inside the company, I’d envisioned it as a sort of mischievous prank, something fun and light and silly, something that would get a little attention on some obscure media blogs but would go largely unnoticed by the larger world. But I had misjudged
Gawker
’s ability to stir the shit. They were absolutely brilliant at it, and the story was getting way more notice than I’d ever imagined, with mainstream publications like
The
New York Times
starting to weigh in. But with the added scrutiny, the story had gotten away from me, and the light tone I was hoping for had somehow morphed into something sinister and dark.

I won’t deny that a small part of me was exhilarated by seeing the fuss I had kicked up; but mostly I was terrified by the slow realization that I was dealing with forces I didn’t understand, and consequences that I’d underestimated.