An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (6 page)

The place was decorated and furnished almost entirely with IKEA, but Sloane and her mother had arranged it into what I had to admit amounted to a very chic, put-together setup. It still felt a bit like a dorm room, but it was at least a
very grown-up
dorm room. Not to mention it was way nicer than anywhere I envisioned myself living anytime soon.

The tour ended with a big reveal from Sloane, who clearly had been waiting for this moment. We stopped in front of a door adjacent to the small galley kitchen.

“So this was supposed to be my pantry . . .” she started. “But I decided to turn it into”—she flung open the doors, flourishing her arms like a model at a car show—“my shoe closet!”

Sure enough, the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with three dozen pairs of shoes.

“Wow, you’re really living the dream, Slo,” I said, wondering if
Sex and the City
had claimed yet another victim.

Later that night, we were on the roof of Sloane’s building sharing a bottle of wine—the very cheapest white that a grumbling wine store clerk had in his small refrigerator—and toasting to our mutual future success, which in our youthful exuberance we both agreed was virtually guaranteed, merely on the basis of our both showing up in the right place.

As I looked out over the city, the lights from thousands of windows piercing the humid early-summer evening, the majestic stainless-steel-clad Chrysler Building looming nearby, all I could think was
Forget shoe closets—I’m the one who’s really living the dream.

—

The next morning, I woke up on Sloane’s couch. My head was pounding, the result of our not only finishing the cheap wine but later attacking with gusto the equally cheap bottle of vodka that—aside from an empty ice cube tray—was the lone inhabitant of Sloane’s freezer. She was already gone, having left for her unpaid “internship” at an independent film company that was all too willing to take advantage of eager young college grads trying to break into the industry. I was still three days away from starting work, so I decided to explore the city a little bit.

I set out on foot for my future office, thinking it might be prudent to time the walk so I wouldn’t be late on my first day. I passed through Sloane’s neighborhood, which my pocket tourist map told me was Murray Hill. I found out later that the area had a reputation for being an ersatz college campus, despised by most locals for the proliferation of bars and high-rise apartments overrun by annoying twenty-two-year-olds fresh from graduation. (Fair enough, considering our circumstances.) But walking through it that day, I was struck by how quiet and orderly it seemed, especially compared to the other parts of the city I’d seen up to that point.

Soon enough the calm of Murray Hill gave way to the traffic and mayhem of midtown. The News Corp. building was just a shade under a thirty-minute walk from Sloane’s apartment. Not a terrible commute for the few weeks that I’d be living with her.

My new office was smack-dab in the middle of the part of town you’d probably take your parents to first if they came to visit. A couple of blocks north up the avenue was the familiar sight of Radio City Music Hall, its neon-lit façade stretching skyward. Just to the east of that was Rockefeller Center, the masterful Art Deco complex of buildings, home to NBC, the
Today
show, the famous Christmas tree, and the skating rink that, I was delighted later to find out, turns into a bar in the summer months.

To the southwest of my new office was the flashing video-screen overloaded, tourist-crammed clusterfuck of Times Square, filled with street artists hawking caricatures, food vendors generating an ungodly amount of smoke from their grills, and dazed tour groups of old ladies from New Jersey shoving their way through the crowd, hustling to make curtain time for
Mamma Mia!

Farther north up Sixth Avenue, past Radio City, you could just make out a massive expanse of green: Central Park, which is where I headed. Rather than enter the park itself—despite rumors of a recent revitalization, I still knew the park only from the movie
Home Alone 2
and the TV show
Night Court
as a haven for crackheads, prostitutes, and terrifying old ladies who breed armies of pigeons to do their bidding—I hooked a right turn onto Central Park South. It’s the street where all the hansom cabs line up, waiting to give tourists horse-drawn rides.

New York City visitors have a very romantic vision of the horse-and-carriage ride, but the reality is a disappointing letdown. Instead of a proud, beautiful steed pulling your cart, you have a sad, plodding creature with its head stooped in misery. Instead of a merry driver dressed like a Victorian caroler pointing out landmarks, you have a surly guy in jeans who ignores you and won’t stop texting on his cell phone.

Also, the entire length of the street smells like horse shit.

I was walking past the depressing queue of horses, idly wondering whose job it was to empty those little poop-catcher aprons strapped underneath each animal, when I almost ran over a guy about my age standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Excuse me, sir. Would you like to donate to help us defeat George Bush this November?” He was carrying a clipboard and wearing a shirt identifying him as an employee of the Democratic National Committee. He had a
JOHN KERRY FOR PRESIDENT
button pinned to his chest.

“Sure, I’d love to,” I replied, digging into my back pocket for my wallet. “How does five bucks sound?”

The kid, obviously too blown away by my generous offer to speak, scribbled something on the clipboard and handed it to me.

“I just need your information there. Name, address, employer, and so on.”

“You know, it’s funny that I’m making this donation,” I said as I filled out the form. “I’m actually starting work in three days for Fox News Channel.”

“Oh, my God! Why?” He looked at me, horrified. “Why are you going to work for
them
?”

“Ummm . . . that’s a great question,” I said. “I guess . . .”

I was completely taken aback by the anger I heard in his voice. I was still coming to grips myself with the fact that I was in the city to take a job with Fox News, so I wasn’t yet completely prepared to have to justify it to a stranger a full three days before I even started.

My immediate impulse was to tell the guy that this was just a
temporary
job, a way to get my foot in the door, to establish a life in New York while I searched for something that I
really
wanted to do. That I didn’t buy into Fox’s philosophy, and in fact believed the
exact opposite
. That while I was there I was going to do my best to keep them honest, and to maybe even
change
them from the inside, to bend the entire organization to my way of thinking through sheer force of will, using my dazzling powers of persuasion. I was going to be a force for
good
. I would not let the questionable values of my employer change my values, or who I was as a person.

But I didn’t say any of that.

What I did say was: “I guess you gotta make a living, right?”

The volunteer frowned at me but said nothing as I handed him back his clipboard and a five-dollar bill.

I could still feel his disapproving gaze on my back as I slunk away, the smell of horse shit lingering in my nostrils.

—

True story: I showed up for my first day of work with bloody socks.

All my shoes were brand-new, bought during a spending binge at a Cincinnati department store. In those heady pre-financial-crisis days, the fine people at Macy’s had foolishly decided that I was trustworthy enough for a three-thousand-dollar line of credit. This was good, because I desperately needed some big-boy clothes. I wasn’t 100 percent sure what I was supposed to wear to a Manhattan office job, but I was fairly certain that my standard college uniform of orange athletic warm-up pants paired with an ironic thrift store T-shirt wasn’t going to cut it. (“Mr. Ailes, don’t you find my
SOUTH BEND GIRLS’ CHOIR
T-shirt hilarious? I picked it up for three bucks at the Salvation Army.”)

The problem was that three days of walking around the city wearing cheap shoes that hadn’t been broken in yet had taken a toll, and opened enormous blisters on the heels of both feet. It was just my luck that one of them had started bleeding during the half-hour walk from Sloane’s place to the Fox building.

I could only hope that my new coworkers wouldn’t notice the red stain blooming on the Achilles tendon on one of my tan dress socks. I didn’t want to be known around the office as “Joe the Bloody Sock Guy.” (It would seriously undermine my plan to get known as “Joe the Large-Penised Genius.”)

I limped into the lobby a little bit before eight
A.M.
and checked in again at the security desk. The guard checked my ID and made a phone call, and after a few minutes, a dark-skinned—Indian, I guessed—pretty woman in her late twenties appeared.

“Hi, I’m Nina. You must be Joseph Mutt-Oh?” she said, mispronouncing my surname.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. “It’s Moo-Toe, actually. And I go by Joe.”

She nodded. “Okay. Follow me.”

I obediently trailed after her toward a set of security gates. She pressed her ID badge—suspended from a lanyard around her neck—against a sensor, and two clear glass partitions parted with a satisfying mechanical
whoosh
noise, letting her pass through. I did the same with the temporary paper ID that the security guard had printed for me.

“Cool,” I muttered. “Just like Star Trek.”

Nina looked back over her shoulder.

“I mean, high-tech and stuff . . .” I said, trailing off awkwardly.

“There used to be a lot less security in the building,” Nina said. “They’d let anyone come and go. But then, you know. Nine-eleven, I guess.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, nodding. “You can’t be too careful with terrorists. After all, the
TV Guide
offices are in this building, right?”

Nina looked at me through narrowed eyes.

I followed her onto an escalator that took us down to the basement of the building, into a long, barren, fluorescent-lit hallway. Straight ahead was an entrance to the subway and a subterranean Wendy’s restaurant. The smell of hash-brown-flavored frying oil filled the space.

“Whoa, it’s way too early for a burger,” I cracked.

“Oh, they actually don’t have burgers this early,” Nina said, ignoring my joke. “And their breakfast kinda sucks.”

We rounded a corner, passed two workers in Wendy’s uniforms unloading a pallet stacked with forty-pound bags of frozen French fries, and approached two security guards standing sentry in the middle of the hallway. I couldn’t imagine what exactly they were guarding, because there didn’t appear to be anything else in the corridor except exposed ductwork overhead and a stack of beat-up folding chairs piled against a wall.

“Be honest,” I said to Nina. “Are you taking me somewhere to murder me?”

This time she laughed. I’d finally cracked the Ice Queen!

“No,” she said. “I’m taking you to the newsroom.”

As we got closer to the security guards, I saw that they were actually posted outside a set of thick, heavy glass doors. One of them pulled a door open as we approached, grunting a little with the effort.

As we stepped through the doorway, Nina smiled at me and said, “Welcome to your new home.”

I have to admit—I was impressed.

The Fox newsroom was built in a space formerly occupied by a Sam Goody record store. It was a massive room, about the size of two end-to-end football fields. It was packed with people—about 250 of them—sitting elbow to elbow at workstations, each equipped with a computer and a small television set with a cable hookup. Most sets were tuned to Fox, though I noticed that some were showing CNN or MSNBC. The volume was up on most of the televisions, and the din from the clashing audio was constant and relentless. I noticed a lot of people eating breakfast at their desks, and the smell of coffee and eggs and fried potatoes and toasted bagels hung thick in the air.

At the near end of the room was a glassed-in area with a half dozen people staring at a wall of forty tiny monitors, each screen no bigger than a postcard. There was a bank of ten VCRs, each about the size of a large microwave oven, arranged on shelves underneath the monitors. The technicians were jamming tapes into some machines, and snatching them out of others; hitting
RECORD
on the machines with new tapes and boxing the old ones, labeling them with Sharpies.

“That’s intake,” Nina said. “The satellite feeds come in from all over—updates from our reporters in the field, international footage from AP and Reuters, local news packages from our affiliates. They get recorded onto tapes, logged into the system, and filed away in the library.”

“Why are those VCRs so big?” I asked.

Nina shrugged. “They’re just old, I guess. They’ve had the same equipment here since the network started in ninety-six.”

Near intake were two large oval tables, each with about a dozen people sitting at them, most of them talking on the phone. I heard a smattering of foreign languages coming from several workers at one of the desks.

“Those are the two assignment desks—foreign and domestic,” Nina continued. “They keep in touch with all of our sources, gather the information, and spread it to everyone else at the network.”

We started walking toward the back of the room. The seating arrangement changed to squared-off areas of six desks apiece, bordered on all sides by waist-high cubicle walls.

“Each show has its own little seating area—we call them pods.” Nina started pointing as we walked past each pod, naming each show in turn. “Here’s the
Fox Report
. Here’s
Studio B
. That’s Greta. Then O’Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, and Cavuto.” Each pod had a large sign on the wall behind it identifying the show.

About halfway down the length of the room was a glassed-in studio with lights suspended from the ceiling, a bulky camera on a tripod, and a shiny, metallic anchor’s desk.