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

time I joined it in July 2004 as a lowly production assistant, pretty obvious in its rightward lean, even as it staunchly clung to the ass-covering catchphrases “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide.” The truth was, Fox had been conceived from the very beginning as a venue for TV news with a deliberate slant.
    Liberal alarm bells went off in early 1996, when Rupert Murdoch announced that he was going to start his own cable news network to compete with CNN and the still-in-the-works MSNBC. The suspicion on the left only increased when it was announced that the head of the network was going to be Roger Ailes, a jowly, fire-hydrant-shaped former GOP operative and media consultant who had made his bones during the 1968 Richard Nixon campaign. Under Ailes’s sharp tutelage, Nixon was able to skillfully leverage television to trick the American public into believing he was a halfway reasonable human being instead of the sweat-soaked paranoid head case that he actually was. His reputation as a TV genius solidified, Ailes went on to advise more GOP presidents, most notably Bush the elder.
    With Ailes’s skill set joining forces with Murdoch’s fire hose of endless money, it seemed like a plot hatched in the bowels of the Republican National Committee headquarters.
    “Will FNC be a vehicle for expressing Mr. Murdoch’s conservative political opinions?” The New York Times asked in an article shortly before Fox News Channel went live. The Times ’s question seems hilariously naive in retrospect, but the truth is that in those early years, the answer was initially unclear. Instead of the partisan firebrand it later became, the young network’s content was mostly of the anodyne “news you can use” variety. The daytime programming featured lengthy segments on travel, culture, and religion, topics to which the Fox News of later years would give screen-time only in passing. On weekends, there was a two-hour animal-themed call-in show called Pet News . If Murdoch and Ailes were aiming for right-wing indoctrination straight off the bat, they sure had a funny way of going about it.
    But some of the seeds for the future rightward lunge were already there. Hannity & Colmes , for one, was in place in the nine P.M. slot the day the network launched. H&C was a debate show featuring the robust, square-jawed, thick-haired, all-American-looking conservative Sean Hannity squaring off against the thin-haired, sickly looking, bespectacled liberal Alan Colmes. It was an article of faith around the office that the visual mismatch had been a deliberate choice by Ailes, a transparent but effective attempt to make the conservative host—and by extension his ideas—more appealing. The show had in fact been conceived from the start as a vehicle for Hannity, with the addition of a liberal foil as an afterthought. (The working title for the show was Hannity & LTBD , meaning “Liberal To Be Determined,” Colmes revealed in an interview once.) Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a fair fight, but as the show progressed, a lopsided dynamic emerged—one in which Colmes got clobbered on a nightly basis, as the aggressive Hannity held him personally responsible for every single transgression of the Clinton administration.
    My future boss, Bill O’Reilly, was also present at the launch, though his six P.M. O’Reilly Report was still clearly a work in progress; it had yet to get its eight P.M. prime-time slot and catchier name, The O’Reilly Factor . Content-wise, it wasn’t as overtly political as its later iteration—politics generally took a backseat to zeitgeisty cultural issues: drugs, gangster rap, teens gone wild, and so on. These topics jibed with his past work as the host of Inside Edition , a tabloidy syndicated news magazine show that he had brought to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With his show on Fox, O’Reilly—who had gotten his start as a straight news reporter—had editorial independence for the first