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

Iraq War had just started to go bad but was still at the Hmmm, this could be a problem stage (as opposed to the later Holy shit, what in Christ’s name were we thinking? stage). Meanwhile, the election was heating up, and the Democrats, apparently not having learned their lesson with Michael Dukakis, were serving up yet another aloof, effete Bay Stater to be shredded by the Republican attack machine. The difference is that in 1988, Roger Ailes was skewering Dukakis from within the Bush campaign—where he was alleged to be the mastermind behind the infamous Willie Horton TV ads that portrayed Dukakis as soft on crime 13 —while in 2004 he found himself as the head of the highest-rated cable news network in the country, able to push whatever narrative he wanted for free.
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    I suppose that, as a godless liberal, I should have been more concerned about this, but on that first day of work, watching my new colleagues spring into action, frantically leveraging the full resources of a multimillion-dollar global news-gathering operation in order to break news of a celebrity death to the world a full half minute before the competition, I was too fascinated by the spectacle of it all to register any qualms I had with the tone of the political coverage.
    “Well, that was intense,” I said to Camie once the Marlon Brando fuss had tailed off. “Is it always like that in here?”
    She nodded. “Oh, yeah. It gets real wild when there’s breaking news.”
    “But I mean with, like, all the cursing and whatnot. Is that normal?”
    She nodded again. “Sure is. It’s like a frat house. You’d think they’d tone it down a bit with me around, but no.” She paused for a second, a thoughtful look on her face. “Of course, the women are just as bad as the men. Maybe worse, in some cases.”
    That was true, I found out soon enough. Most of the female producers were tough as nails, and just as profane as the guys. They had to be, really, or they’d get eaten alive because they were vastly outnumbered; while the ranks of producers were fairly evenly split between male and female, the tech guys—who filled half the slots in the control room—were almost exclusively men.
    So, much to my delight, the control room was filled with constant shit-talking. They talked shit about everyone.
    They talked shit about the bosses:
    “When are they going to fix that fucking smell in here?”
    “Those cheap asses would probably have to pay a contractor to put in more drainage . . . so my guess is never.”
    They talked shit about the guests on the air:
    “Mike, this guest we have on right now is not exactly a looker. Can you throw up some b-roll to cover her face? I don’t want to scare away viewers.”
    “Want me to get on the headset with the stage manager and see if she can scrounge up a paper bag real quick?”
    They talked shit about the anchors:
    “They told me Brit isn’t sitting for the six o’clock tonight. What gives?”
    “I heard he had an appointment to get the bolts in his neck tightened.”
    I’d listen and laugh so hard that I’d get distracted from doing my actual job, and then they’d talk shit about me:
    “Hey, kid, I’m glad you’re finding all this so amusing, but why don’t you get off your ass and bring Rick his scripts so he isn’t just sitting there with his dick twisting in the wind?”
    On a typical weekday, Fox News is live from six A.M. to eleven P.M. Seventeen hours a day. For seven of those hours, Camie and I huddled at our tiny workstation in the back of the control room, printing scripts for anchors and taking turns running them into the studio. Here’s the lineup as of 2004, when I first started running scripts:
    6:00 A.M. –9:00 A.M.
    Fox & Friends , the morning show, featured three grinning jackasses sitting on a couch, bantering about the news. The format called for one of the anchors to introduce the story, often getting the basic facts wrong, then for the other two to join in and chat about