An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (43 page)

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

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45
For more on ambush
artiste extraordinaire
Jesse Watters, please see chapter 13. Or, you know, just keep reading ’til you get there.

46
Exceptions were made for the recurring cast of regulars who appeared on the show every week, like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and Bernie Goldberg, each one older, grayer, and whiter than the last.

47
In the mainstream journalism world, the widely accepted definition of
breaking
a story means that you’re the first person to report it. In Bill’s mind, however, breaking a story simply meant that he was the first person to talk about it on television. It didn’t matter if the story had been kicking around on blogs for six months—as long as Bill was the first to put it on TV, he would take credit for breaking it.

48
Not that Bill wanted to follow the lead of the right-wing blogs too closely. He held the conservative blogosphere at arm’s length, not considering himself part of it, and going so far as to reject any story he saw as excessively partisan, lest it taint the aura of fairness he seemed to think he’d managed to hold on to. For example: He never embraced the Birther movement, refusing to give any oxygen to those who questioned President Obama’s birthplace. It was only when Donald Trump started dabbling in Birtherism in 2011 that O’Reilly finally started giving the issue a prominent place on his show.

49
In contrast, our other (much less prolific) ambushing producer, Porter Berry, was a more staunch conservative, and it showed. When he ambushed a liberal, it came off as if he could barely contain his disgust at having to be in the same room with the person. While Porter was probably accurately mirroring the emotions of many of our viewers, it tended to make his ambushes seem self-righteous, which made for bad television. Jesse’s sarcastic, somewhat softer touch was much more entertaining.

50
The crown jewel of my career was a weeklong engagement as Barry the Best Man in a semiprofessional production of
Tony and Tina’s Wedding
in downtown South Bend, Indiana. I wish that were a joke or an exaggeration.

51
My place in this somewhat tortured metaphor: When I started at Fox, I was probably space dust, but by the time I left, I’d arguably worked my way up to chimpanzee astronaut.

52
He was also notorious for being a micromanager and would often call the control room to complain about small matters, demanding that a piece of b-roll be removed from the rotation, or that a sound bite be cut slightly differently.

53
The reason for the ban was simply “because Roger hates him as a guest.” My pet theory was that he was blacklisted because he was too good—he was likable, charismatic, and made persuasive cases for liberal policies. This made him totally anathema to Roger, who prefers his left-wingers to be paper tigers.

54
I wish I could say this was solely an affliction of the right, but I suspect that it is depressingly common among Americans on both sides of the aisle. Writing incomprehensible e-mails to public figures is a pursuit that knows no ideology.

55
FBN was founded on the erroneous—and frankly ludicrous—premise that CNBC, the official channel of $5,000-suit-wearing plutocrats, was somehow not pro-business enough. The idea was to combine financial coverage with conservative politics and underqualified but sexy twenty-five-year-old anchor babes. A friend who worked in finance told me that half the TVs on his company’s trading floor were tuned to FBN on mute, specifically for the eye candy, but anytime they wanted actual information, they turned the volume up on CNBC.

56
They are the most impossibly tall, thin, and good-looking couple I’ve ever seen in real life. Their continued existence is simply unfair to us normal, comparatively hideous people.

57
Hannity even convinced Wright to come on his show at one point, an interview that went mostly unnoticed by the mainstream press—probably owing to the fact that it was incredibly boring, consisting mostly of Hannity trying to get the reverend to admit he was a black separatist, and Wright stonewalling the fiery conservative host with jargon about “Liberation Theology” and references to obscure works by equally obscure authors. It was not good television.

58
Notably, Bill and the guest agreed that Obama was born in Hawaii, leading to a flood of angry calls and e-mails.

59
Word was that Greta and her Clinton-friendly husband did not take Hillary’s loss in the Democratic primary well, and had vowed to never support Obama. In the meantime, they’d both befriended Sarah Palin.

60
This didn’t seem to hold true in the 2012 cycle, as I noticed from my new perch as an outsider that Rove was often going on air and arguing things that someone as smart as he couldn’t possibly believe. This may have been because he was running a large Super PAC that had convinced hundreds of mega-rich conservatives to shell out millions of dollars with the express purpose of defeating Barack Obama—he became less an analyst and more a cheerleader. The low point of this behavior came on election night, when Rove pitched an on-air tantrum of denial after the network called Ohio—and hence the victory—for President Obama.

61
I’m strictly a Reds fan, but I give myself permission to root for my adopted hometown’s American League team on a situational basis. Fuck the Mets, though.

62
Fair warning to my esteemed publisher—when this book comes out, I’m probably going to bring an empty cooler to the release party so I can take home any unopened bottles.

63
Did I mention the yelling?

64
This reputation has dogged him throughout his career, as Marvin Kitman recounts in the entertaining biography
The Man Who Would Not Shut Up
: “He was so unbelievably cheap, another coworker on
Inside Edition
recalled, that he had a party at his house in New Jersey, and on the invitation to the staff, he wrote ‘CASH BAR.’ And no one went.”

65
A cynical person might think that it was part of some kind of massive tax dodge. Luckily, I’m not a cynical person, and I also have no idea how taxes actually work, aside from confusedly groping my way through TurboTax once a year. Anyway, some worthy charities are getting lots of money every year, so honestly Bill does deserve kudos for that.

66
Where’s the birth certificate, Ann?

67
I never did hug her, since I was afraid I’d snap her in half. She’s even thinner in person than she appears on TV, almost brittle-looking.

68
Did I mention this wasn’t a very well-thought-out plan?

69
Honestly, at this point I’m starting to lean toward the latter explanation.

70
Aka, Reginald VelJohnson, the actor who plays Bruce Willis’s cop buddy and later went on to play the father Carl Winslow, in the classic 1990s sitcom
Family Matters
.

71
See what I did there?