An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (36 page)

But Beck blew that all away. When the numbers came out every afternoon at four thirty, he was handily beating Greta, often topping Hannity, and even some days coming close to O’Reilly. Whispers started in the hallways that a big change was coming in prime time.

“Roger sees these numbers,” a producer for Greta’s show said to me one day in early 2009, at the beginning of the Beck phenomenon. “He can’t ignore them. And Beck is pulling these at five in the fucking afternoon. They’ve got to be thinking about what kind of damage he could do in prime time, at ten
P.M.
, or nine . . .”

“Or eight,” I said, finishing his thought for him.

These musings were not lost on the talent. A few weeks into Beck’s tenure, O’Reilly decided his best course of action, the best way to protect his flank, would be to co-opt the potential usurper, giving him a weekly segment on
The Factor
.

“Get with Beck’s people,” O’Reilly said at the pitch meeting. “Tell them I want a segment, every Friday. We’ll call it”—he leaned back in his chair, thinking—“the At Your Beck and Call segment.” He chuckled quietly to himself, pleased with his pun.

The other on-air talent were not as welcoming. Once O’Reilly had claimed Beck as his own, the newcomer was basically shut out by the other two prime-time shows. And I didn’t blame them. Sean and Greta wanted no part in promoting the man who could potentially take their jobs.

I personally didn’t quite know what to make of Beck at first. He must be a bullshit artist, right? No way someone who seems as smart and business savvy as he does could believe all the nonsense he was peddling on a daily basis. But one incident in particular made me wonder.

In the summer of 2009, Beck had been given an office near my desk on the seventeenth floor. It wasn’t anything special, but it was in a power location, a couple of doors down from O’Reilly’s corner office. Two or three Beck staffers had stopped by to decorate it, festooning the door with art his fans had sent in—a charcoal sketch of a smiling Beck holding the Constitution, a child’s Magic Marker drawing of a stick-figure Glenn waving an American flag, a watercolor of Beck with a bald eagle perched on his shoulder.

I was wary of my new neighbor, not wanting my relatively quiet corner of the building disturbed by the Beck circus, but it became obvious after a few days that the office was just some sort of contractually obligated bauble and that Beck had no intention of using it on a regular basis. Word was he preferred instead to work out of his (much more lavish, I was told) radio offices, which were located a few blocks down Sixth Avenue.

But Beck did, on occasion, hold staff meetings in his Fox office, and that’s when the crazy really came out.

The meeting I overheard was shortly after President Obama had come under fire for criticizing the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer who had arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates in his own home. Beck had gathered about a half dozen staffers in his office, and the door was open a crack. But he was talking so loudly, even shouting at some points, that I probably would have been able to hear him perfectly, even if he had bothered to keep the door shut.

“Obama did it on purpose,” Beck was saying. “He knew going after that cop would cause a controversy. He
wanted
the controversy. He’s trying to distract us from something. But what? What is he tying to distract us from? That’s the question.”

For the next hour and a half, he lectured his staff, exhibiting impressive stamina even for someone who spent several hours a day talking on radio and TV. His employees seemed as if they were used to such tirades, and endured it with minimal interruption. Eventually, Beck settled on an obscure provision in the pending health care bill as the
real
thing the administration was trying to distract the American public from with the “fake” cop gaffe and the ensuing Beer Summit. He seemed to think the provision would somehow allow the federal government to take children away from their parents if the parents let the kids get fat.

I was amazed by the whole incident. Up to that point, I had assumed he was putting on a show, stirring up the crazies for ratings. I never imagined that he truly believed his own insane conspiracy theories. But the rant I heard in his office was repeated on the air a few hours later. And, if anything, it was toned down from what he had said in private.

Oddly enough, it was an on-air incident stemming from the Gates scandal that helped derail Beck’s prospects at the network.

Shortly after the meeting I’d overheard, he went on
Fox & Friends
for a guest spot. And with one disastrous statement, all the chatter and speculation that he would soon be taking over one of the prime-time hours ground to a screeching halt: He declared that Obama had a “deep-seated hatred of white people.”

Given a chance by the shocked and incredulous
Fox & Friends
hosts to retract, he instead doubled down: “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

The incident set off a months-long, surprisingly successful boycott effort by liberal groups. It meant that Fox was unable to capitalize on Beck’s sky-high ratings, because the number of sponsors who would pay to be associated with him eventually dwindled to almost nothing. His commercial breaks turned into sad parades of hucksters touting investments in gold doubloons, reverse-mortgage hawkers looking to prey on senior citizens, and denture-cream manufacturers.

Also hurting Beck was discomfort from his colleagues. Howard Kurtz wrote a piece in March 2010, quoting anonymous staffers within the Fox News DC bureau claiming that they thought Beck’s shenanigans were hurting the credibility of the entire network.

I can report that there were similar sentiments in the New York bureau. I, for one, had come to the conclusion that Beck was ultimately bad for the network, high ratings or no. Most of the producers I spoke to—even the ones who liked him and shared most of his opinions—agreed that his on-air performances had become increasingly unhinged. One anchor on my floor repeatedly, loudly and openly, referred to Beck only as Crazy—as in “What’s Crazy up to today?” or “Why does Crazy have a birthday cake on the set with him?” or “Did you see Crazy playing around with a dead fish yesterday? What the fuck?”

O’Reilly, for his part, was sticking with the man he’d nicknamed the Beckmeister, though even Bill sometimes seemed uncomfortable with the strange positions Beck was taking.

In the beginning, the formula for Beck’s weekly
Factor
segment involved the two hosts chatting about whatever Beck had been covering on his show that week. But as time went on, and Beck went further and further off into the weeds, we’d have to brainstorm during pitch meetings to come up with more innocuous topics, topics that wouldn’t set him off on a rant that would have to be edited out later.

We still ended up cutting quite a bit. The pieces, which aired on Fridays, were taped a day in advance. Bill intentionally let them run long so they could be edited for time and content. Anything that made Beck sound too unhinged hit the cutting-room floor. Some days, it was hard to get the bare-minimum four minutes of non-crazy out of him. He was one of the only guests we ever did this with.

During that time, Bill would often clash with the Second Floor over the Beck segments. Bill, ever mindful of the ratings Beck could bring, would spur him on to do increasingly wacky things when he appeared on
The Factor
.

“I saw Beck with a dollhouse on air yesterday,” Bill would say. “Tell him to bring it on our show and we’ll talk to him about it.”

The executives accused O’Reilly of attempting to make Beck look like a clown—they thought Bill was trying to further poison the well and eliminate any last chance that Beck would take over his time slot. (O’Reilly denied it, of course, but I always wondered if maybe there wasn’t something to the theory.) O’Reilly counterargued that rather than make Beck appear clownish, he was trying to pull his head out of the clouds, stop him from being so esoteric, and get him to talk about issues that viewers cared about, even if those issues were silly.

In the end, though, even Bill O’Reilly couldn’t protect Glenn Beck from himself.

During the Arab Spring in early 2011, Beck completely went off the rails, warning that the protests in Egypt were a secret plot by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that he claimed, with little to no evidence, was a shadowy cabal of jihadists that had financial backing from several liberal groups in the United States.

He sounded like a complete kook. Even more so than before.

Beck ignored repeated pleas from management—including, rumor had it, personal appeals from Roger Ailes himself—to tone it down. And a few weeks later, that was that. His time at Fox was done, just a little over two years after it had started.

—

Beck wasn’t the only newcomer to shake things up at Fox following Obama’s election. A certain former Alaska governor came aboard in January 2010 as a political analyst and the host of a potential series of specials, signing a three-year, multimillion-dollar deal.

From the moment Sarah Palin abandoned her elected duties in the summer of 2009 for dubious reasons, it was an absolute inevitability that she’d end up at Fox News. She was a perfect fit for the network—beautiful, feisty, and controversial, inspiring utter devotion from her fans, and blind outrage in her critics, and, hopefully, the theory went, high ratings for the network. The Second Floor was well aware of her unfortunate reputation for being vacuous, ill-informed, and thin-skinned, but
surely that was just liberal media slander
—
the woman had run an enormous state, for chrissakes! How dumb could she be?
Also, her employment marked a continuation of a proud Roger Ailes tradition of hiring disgraced and discredited GOP pols and operatives like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ollie North, and Karl Rove.

In the few months since the radio show had ended and I’d been put on TV full-time, I’d actually produced a few Rove segments. It was surreal to get on the phone with him for the pre-interviews. I didn’t quite know what to expect from the man who’d earned the dual nicknames the Architect and Turdblossom from his old boss; the man who’d engineered a cynical, divisive 2004 campaign; the man who had cleverly pulled the rip cord and bailed on the floundering Bush administration midway through the second term; the man whom I’d vilified in one of my college newspaper columns; the man I was hoping would not, on a whim, Google my name and his name together. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got was an affable politics nerd who would talk for an hour during the pre-interview if you let him get going, and a tech geek who was obsessed with his iPhone and all things Apple.

Rove was actually enjoyable to talk to—smart, with generally good analysis, and somewhat less tendency than most political operatives to revert to disingenuous, intellectually dishonest arguments and talking points.
⁶⁰
His biggest failing was that he was completely defensive about the deficiencies of the Bush administration, refusing to admit they had done even a single thing wrong. But maybe his biggest victory was that he refused to buy into the Palin hype, casting gallons of cold water on any talk of her becoming a viable presidential candidate—vehemently in private, and more gently and diplomatically on the air. If he had any thoughts about Palin becoming a Fox News analyst, at a reported salary that was higher than his own, he kept them to himself.

When the Palin news was announced, the atmosphere at the office was instantly electric, with some of the more conservative producers positively gleeful about the prospect of her as a new colleague. There was an underlying tension, too, especially among the hosts and senior producers, as everyone kicked around the same question: “Who gets her first?”

Bill lobbied the Second Floor hard—as hard as I’ve ever seen him push the executives for anything—to secure for himself the first interview with her. Palin’s choice likely would have been to go on the show of her new friend and confidante, Greta Van Susteren, but Bill twisted every arm in the building, sweet-talking, cajoling, threatening—and ultimately making the obvious argument that a Palin appearance on
The Factor
, the highest-rated show, would make the biggest impact. Bill’s argument won the day, and it was announced that Palin would appear first on
The Factor
.

On the morning of the taping, she made a pilgrimage to the seventeenth floor to pay homage to O’Reilly. A wave of excitement followed her as she promenaded down the hallway, with well-wishers shouting greetings to her. She winked and waved and finger-gunned her way through the crowd, beaming widely, the conquering hero basking in an adoring glow. She wouldn’t have looked out of place holding a bouquet and wearing a sash, like a homecoming queen making her way to the fifty-yard line at halftime.

I had to admit, as much as I despised her politics and the unbelievably stupid things that came out of her mouth, she was astoundingly charismatic in person, working a crowd as well as I’d ever seen it done. And she was even more good-looking than she appeared on television; cameras truly did not do her justice.

“Hey, governor!” I called out as she passed my desk.

“Hiya!” she called back, waving to Sam and me before walking into Bill’s office, her hangdog husband, Todd, skulking after her, seemingly oblivious to the furor.

I was assigned to help produce her segment that night, to put together a video montage of pundits on CNN and MSNBC disparaging her.

I was more than happy to help in this regard.

Bill’s
intention
was to play the clip for her to illustrate how the “left-wing media” was having a “conniption” over her hiring. I managed to cram several clips of people like Chris Matthews and Paul Begala calling Palin dumb and a liar into a neat twenty-second package. Judging from Palin’s annoyed look when the camera cut to her after the video finished playing, I did my job well.

Despite the fanfare surrounding her launch, it quickly became clear to everyone that Palin just was not working out. The one special she hosted, featuring old interviews with celebrities that had been edited and repurposed, drew criticism for her stiff performance, and garnered only modest ratings, not the blockbuster numbers the Second Floor had been hoping for. And her abilities as a pundit left much to be desired. She conversed entirely in shallow, empty platitudes, as if she’d just memorized a list of talking points instead of actually boning up on whatever issue was on her plate. She also, most infuriatingly for Bill, tended to play hard to get, turning down requests for appearances for little or no reason, and refusing to communicate with our staff directly, insisting that a high-up executive act as her intermediary.