An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (39 page)

“Joe,” he answered. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s over,” I said.

   CHAPTER 18   

The Mole

I
don’t quite know what finally sent me over the edge with Fox. It’s true that after the Rosie O’Donnell ambush, I’d decided I wouldn’t worry about the ideology anymore and would just try to relax and have a good time. But as the Obama years wore on, I saw the network take a nasty turn, and I found myself less and less comfortable with staying there.

I suppose the final straw, if you try to pin me down on it, would have been August 2011. Oddly, it wasn’t anything on TV that turned me rogue. What finally broke me was a story on
The Fox Nation
, a news aggregating website that the network had launched shortly after Obama’s inauguration. (Coincidentally, the site was the brainchild of
The Factor
’s own Jesse Watters, who pitched it to the Second Floor and had a small hand in its day-to-day running.) The
Nation
was an unholy mashup of the
Drudge Report
,
The Huffington Post
, and a Klan meeting, gathering stories, giving them provocative (and often sexist or race-baiting) headlines, and inviting commenters to weigh in.

The comments on the site are fascinating, actually, if you can detach yourself enough to view them from a psychological/anthropological/politically scientific stance, interpreting them as a sort of id of the conservative movement. Of course, if you can’t detach yourself, then you’re going to come away with a diminished view of human decency, because,
holy moly, these people do not like the black president
. I’m not saying they dislike him
because
he’s black, but a lot of the comments, unprompted, mention the fact that he
is
black, so what would you say, Dr. Freud?

The
Fox Nation
moderators realized early on that they had a problem on their hands, with commenters leaving spittle-flecked rants that verged on white supremacy. So in response, they did the absolute bare minimum, assigning one or two unpaid interns to comb the comments and delete the most egregiously racist postings, and putting in automatic text filters that blocked certain key words. Of course, the intrepid commenters quickly found ways around these filters, using letter substitutions and odd spacings, which is why many postings denounce “our n@gger president” and “the dirty M u s l i m in the White House.”

In just a few years online, the site had become the seedy underbelly of the Fox News online empire—an empire that was surprising in its mere existence, considering that the network’s fan base was mostly septuagenarian technophobes.

The
Fox Nation
post that broke this camel’s back was an item that was an aggregate of several innocuous news reports on President Obama’s fiftieth birthday party, which had been attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos, and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay-Z, and the headline
OBAMA’S HIP-HOP BBQ DIDN’T CREATE JOBS.

The post neatly encapsulated everything that had been bugging me about my employer for so many years: the non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; the gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts. It jammed together all the ugly things about my network that had been doled out in small doses over the years, all the segments I’d watched on the small TV at my desk and ground my teeth over.

The worst thing about the Hip-Hop BBQ incident is that Fox didn’t back away from the posting. VP Bill Shine bafflingly doubled down and defended it. The story still exists on the
Fox Nation
site, headline and photo montage intact, to this very day.

That was it for me.

It wasn’t that the one incident was so bad, in and of itself. But it was so galvanizing, and topped off so many other little incidents, that I guess it just finally pushed me over the edge.

I knew then that I wouldn’t survive another election year at Fox with my sanity intact, not with the hosts and pundits gearing up for a nonstop barrage of wanton attacks on President Obama—of whom I was still a huge fan.

In addition to finally reaching my limit, the truth is that I felt I was in a bit of a rut at the office. Sam Martinez, my partner in crime for my entire tenure with
The
Factor
, had left the show, going on to work as an editor at the newly launched
Fox News Latino
website.

I went to visit him at his new workspace on the fourteenth floor. He liked his new duties, he said, but he missed the rest of the O’Reilly crew. Ever the racial provocateur, he missed being able to make jokes about being the only brown person in the room.

“Now I’m surrounded by brown people all day,” he said glumly.

I missed Sam, though I did like his replacement, a producer whom Stan had poached from Greta Van Susteren, a guy my age named Tim Wolfe.

—

“So who exactly are you?” John Cook asked.

I handed him my business card, the one with the Fox News logo, and my title “Associate Producer,
The O’Reilly Factor
&
The Radio Factor
with Bill O’Reilly.”

He looked it over, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“Well, I
was
interested in the video clips,” John said. “But now I’m more interested in
you
.”

It was March 2012. I was at a restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a divey dumpling-and-noodle joint that the
Gawker
writers had adopted as their Langan’s, ignoring the name on the door and nicknaming it Chinese Fantastico. I was sitting at a table across from John and his
Gawker
colleague Emma, both of whom were now sizing me up as if I were some sort of exotic creature who’d just stumbled into their midst.

I was way out on a limb.

I’d approached them, actually, creating a fake AOL e-mail account under the name “Gordon Schwartz,” an inside joke of sorts; it was an old nom de plume I’d used for certain nefarious deeds in college. I’d sent a cryptic message to the
Gawker
tips in-box, offering to show them my behind-the-scenes video of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

At that point, the GOP was in the thick of their primary, and Newt’s name was on the tip of everyone’s tongue for the first time since the late ’90s. But Romney was clearly starting to pull away with it, so the window for anyone being interested in a video clip of Gingrich was slowly but surely closing.

It took them a week to respond, a long enough span that common sense got the better of me, and I was starting to reconsider. But, alas, it was not to be, and they finally answered my e-mail. First Emma, and then John. After some jousting back and forth, with them trying to figure out if I was pranking them or wasting their time, we agreed to meet one weeknight after work at the Chinese place.

“I want to leave Fox,” I told them after we’d ordered drinks and dumplings. “I’m done there. And I want to come work for you guys.”

The two
Gawker
ers exchanged a look, then returned their attention to me.

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” John said. “First, can you show us the clips?”

I pulled out my iPad and cued up the clips one after another. The first showed Newt Gingrich awaiting an interview with O’Reilly. The former Speaker of the House is sitting in a chair, getting his makeup done by a professional, when Callista, his helmet-haired, icy-eyed automaton of a wife comes in from off camera and starts doing his hair. Armed with a giant brush and a can of hair spray, she grooms her husband, who seems happy as a clam to receive the primping.

The second set of clips was from an interview that Mitt Romney did with Sean Hannity. Some of the chatter during the commercial breaks was interesting to me. In one part, Romney waxes rhapsodically about the horses that he and his wife own:

“She has Austrian Warmbloods, which are—yeah, it’s a dressage horse, it’s a kind of horse for the sport that she’s in. Me, I have a Missouri Fox Trotter. So mine is like a quarter horse, but just a much better gait. It moves very fast, and doesn’t tire, and it’s easy to ride, meaning it’s not boom-boom-boom, it’s just smooth, very smooth.”

At another point, Hannity advises the gaffe-prone Romney to start using a teleprompter for his speeches; then, in almost the same breath, he turns around and mocks Obama’s use of prompters.

I hadn’t saved the clips with the intention to give them to
Gawker
or anyone else. I’d just grabbed them because I thought they were funny (or in the case of the teleprompter exchange, hypocritical and rage-inducing). But when I made up my mind early in 2012 to finally leave Fox, I had the not-very-bright idea to use the clips as an attention-getting ploy with prospective new employers—a calling card of sorts. I figured the unconventional loudmouthed cover letter had worked to get me the Fox job in the first place. Maybe lightning would strike twice and an even more unconventional, even-dumber scheme would be just the thing to get me out of it.
⁶⁸

It’s not like I hadn’t tried other ideas to leave first. I know that the events of this book, and this chapter in particular, probably leave you with a lot of doubts regarding my mental capacity. And rightfully so! But you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that even I am not stupid enough to make something like this my
first
plan. Naturally, I went through the job application process initially. In fact, I sent an application to CNN the day I read the Hip Hop BBQ post for the first time. Then I sent another. And one to MSNBC. And another. And one to all the networks, and any other position I could find that would need someone with my very specific skill set. I began to suspect that my years at Fox had somehow blacklisted me, made me persona non grata to the rest of the broadcast news industry at large. Either that, or I’m just really crappy at writing cover letters.
⁶⁹

But after months of sending résumés into digital pits of no return, I finally reached the end of my rope, and in one night of desperation I wrote and sent the fateful e-mail. And that’s how I came to be sitting in the restaurant that day, watching John and Emma from
Gawker
share a pair of earbuds plugged into my iPad to listen to Mitt Romney’s effete chatter about his cherished horses.

“So what do you want?” John said when he’d finished the video.

“Honestly,” I said, “I just wanted to meet you guys. Like I said, I’m leaving Fox soon, and I’m looking for my next job. I thought this video would be a good way to get your attention.”

“Mission accomplished,” Emma said. “You have our attention.”

“You say you want to work for us after you leave Fox?” John asked.

I nodded.

“What about,” he said, leaning in and looking me square in the face, “working for us
before
you leave?”

—

“We’ll call you the Fox News Mole. Does that name work for you?”

A. J. Daulerio, the editor in chief of
Gawker
, was sitting across the table from me, next to John Cook. It was two weeks after my first meeting. We were at the same Chinese restaurant as before.

At the end of the first meeting, I’d given John and Emma a USB drive with the Gingrich clip on it. The plan was for them to put it up on
Gawker
—without announcing it was from the “Mole”—to test my theory that the video wasn’t traceable back to me.

They put it up, with John’s headline
SECRET VIDEO: NEWT GINGRICH’S CREEPY WIFE GROOMING HIM LIKE A CIRCUS WALRUS.
The video made a very minor splash online, but was mostly received with a shrug within the building. I held my breath and waited for blowback. I was certain that there was no record that I had made a copy of the video. When no heat came my way, I assumed—naively, perhaps—that I was in the clear.

Now I was meeting with A.J. to talk about John’s idea for me to write dispatches from the inside. The plan was—in my head, anyway—that I’d write some dumb, jokey posts for a while, going undetected by my bosses by fudging enough details to throw them off the scent. I’d eventually put in my two weeks’ notice, then start my new career as a
Gawker
writer, maybe revealing myself as the Mole at some point down the line.

“The Mole?” I said. “Like a spy movie? Okay, I kinda like that.”

“How long do you think you can keep it going?” John asked. “Like how long before they catch you?”

“If I’m careful enough,” I said, “they’ll never catch me. But I’m thinking at least a month or two.”

A.J. scoffed in disbelief. “I don’t think you’re even going to last three days.”

We all laughed, not knowing how right he would eventually be.

—

The first dispatch from the Fox Mole went up on April 10, 2012. I immediately got a half dozen e-mails from friends asking some variation of “Is this guy you?”

I hadn’t told anyone my plans. I hadn’t told my roommates. I hadn’t told my parents.

I hadn’t told my girlfriend.

Jenny and I had been dating for about a year at that point. We’d started seeing each other a few months after my relationship with her predecessor, Krista, had fizzled.

Krista, tiring of her administrative position in the legal department of an arts nonprofit, had decided to go to business school. I pushed for her to apply to NYU or Columbia, but she got into an Ivy League program several hours away from the city and never looked back. We paid lip service to attempting a long-distance relationship, but a month in, we both knew that it was over.

Unable to afford our tiny West Village apartment on my own, I moved right back to Williamsburg, where my old roommate Rufus had a vacancy open in his three-bedroom apartment. I was looking forward to living like a carefree bachelor with Rufus and our other roommate, Ari, another Notre Dame buddy. And for a few glorious months we did exactly that.