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

time in his career, and he took the opportunity to develop the persona that eventually became his signature, the populist everyman who is protecting the average people (or “the folks,” as he loved to say) from the forces trying to harm or corrupt them: liberals, atheists, college professors, the mainstream media, and Hollywood celebrities. Bill’s brand of cranky populism was groundbreaking, and was eventually adopted as the editorial persona for the entire network.
    Essential to O’Reilly’s narrative was the pretense that he was an independent; the claim was that he wasn’t partial to the Republicans or the Democrats, the right or the left—he went after both sides, doling out scorn to whomever deserved it more. It just so happened that those on the left were the ones who deserved rebuke 95 percent of the time. The remaining 5 percent of the time when he went after the conservatives—on certain carefully chosen issues like the death penalty and climate change—gave him plausible deniability. I’m fair, I’m balanced. I call it like I see it.
    Fox launched just a few months after MSNBC, which—due to the backing of Microsoft and NBC News—was deemed by media critics as a more credible competitor to CNN. But Murdoch had given Ailes a mandate: Do whatever you can to beat CNN. And Ailes thought he had a solid strategy to do so, reasoning that the conservative hordes who flocked to talk radio were being underserved by CNN, which had a perceived liberal bias. Give those conservatives a home on cable TV, Ailes’s reasoning went, one that serves up both openly conservative opinion and conservative-slanted reporting that is thinly veiled as “straight” news, and they’ll become habitual watchers.
    The first turning point for the network came during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Fox News had started broadcasting only about a month before the ’96 elections, too late in the game to make much of an impact. Having missed a chance to beat up on Bill Clinton then, Fox made up for lost time, hammering Bubba for his illicit blowjobs. O’Reilly and Hannity were especially tenacious, and their spirited denunciations of Clinton juiced the ratings to the point where Fox’s prime time was nipping at the heels of CNN.
    Ailes’s strategy was working. He was proving that a fiercely loyal niche audience, one that watched so fervently that they literally ruined their TV screens (as I was reminded repeatedly), could bring in higher ratings than the wishy-washy broad audience that CNN was pursuing. As if to punctuate the point, in 2000, O’Reilly for the first time topped Larry King in the monthly ratings, becoming the most-watched show on cable news.
    He’s never been beaten in a monthly rating since.
    If the Lewinsky scandal was good for Fox’s ratings, the 9/11 attacks were nothing short of great. With the whole country traumatized, viewers had little patience for middle-of-the-road nuance, and even the staunchest liberals found themselves drifting a little bit rightward.
    All the news networks went the full patriotic route following the terrorist attacks—plastering their screens with flags and red, white, and blue graphics—but Fox did it with the most relish and conviction, and the ratings soared. In January 2002, the 9/11 bump led to another ratings milestone—Fox’s network-wide numbers passed CNN’s for the first time.
    Again, the network has not been beaten since.
    Another benefit of 9/11 for Fox—it helped the network ratchet up support for the Bush agenda while maintaining plausible deniability. We’re not being partisan—we’re simply being patriotic! Consequently, Fox ended up being one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq War, with, in the words of The New York Times , “anchors and commentators who skewer the mainstream media, disparage the French and flay anybody else who questions President Bush’s war effort.”
    And this was the place I found myself working.
    When I started in summer 2004, the