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

rapped on the door lightly with her knuckles, then turned the knob, easing the door open a crack and poking her head in.
    “Go away,” the editor said, without even looking up from his sandwich to see who was intruding. “I’m on lunch.”
    “Chris . . .” Marybeth cooed. “That’s no way to talk to your favorite PA in the world. ” He sat up and swiveled around in his chair as she pushed the door open all the way and glided into the room. His face lit up when he saw her.
    “MB! How’s it going, girl?”
    She laid a hand on his arm. “Oh, you know me. Can’t complain.” She made a pouty face. “But I can’t find any editors to cut this tape. And it hits in ten minutes. Could you cut it for me? Please please please? ”
    Chris wiped his hands on a napkin and sighed. “What is it? I guess I could probably do it for you.”
    Marybeth beamed. “Oh, could you? Thank you, thank you! It’s just Bush talking. It’ll be so quick .”
    “Sure. Give me the tape.”
    She handed it to him. “You’re the best.”
    He slid the source tape into the deck, twisting dials and punching buttons. As President Bush’s face popped up on-screen, Chris seemed to notice for the first time that I was in the room.
    “Who’s this kid?” he asked Marybeth.
    “This is Joe. He’s a new PA. I’m training him this week.”
    “Hey, Joe,” Chris said. “Where you from, man?”
    “Hi,” I said. “Cincinnati.”
    “Ohio!” he barked with a laugh. “How big is your family’s farm?”
    I frowned. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
    A few minutes later, we were back at Marybeth’s desk, freshly cut tape in hand. I watched as she labeled the cassette and the box with a numbered label, and typed the corresponding digits into the rundown on the computer.
    “So that’s your method?” I asked. “You just flirt with the editor until he does what you want?”
    She grinned. “Yup. It gets the job done, right?”
    “That’s fine for you, but what the hell am I supposed to do?”
    “I dunno,” she said, shrugging. “Just go to the girl editors?” She yawned and stretched in her chair. “That, or grow a pair of tits.”
    —
    The Fox News hierarchy was dead simple: Roger was in charge.
    The man who a startling number of employees referred to only as “Mr. Ailes” was something of a mythic figure in the company, especially among those who had been there in the early days. To listen to some of them, Roger had single-handedly built the network from the ground up through sheer force of will.
    It all seemed a little much to me. There’s no doubt that Fox News’s rise was impressive, meteoric, and unprecedented; in less than eight years, it had gone from a bare-bones operation with minuscule viewership to a just-slightly-more-than-bare-bones operation with more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. But the worship of Ailes as some sort of renegade television genius was maybe giving him too much credit. Yes, he had come up with a good concept, bringing the talk radio model to cable news to attract conservatives who were underserved by the market; and yes, he had a good eye for talent, picking O’Reilly, Hannity, and Shep Smith when they were still essentially unknowns and molding them into stars. But the success of Fox News owed just as much to luck, timing, and Uncle Rupert’s dump trucks of money as it did to anything Roger Ailes had done. With Fox News he had hit on a serendipitous combination that was not easily repeatable, TV genius or no. (And even money can’t put you over the top sometimes, as evidenced by the still-anemic ratings of Fox Business Network, launched in 2008 to much fanfare.)
    But I kept those treasonous thoughts to myself, wary of becoming an office apostate early in my career. Also, the PA pod was rife with rumors—only half joking—that Roger had bugged the whole building with hidden microphones and some CIA-developed software that listened for mentions of his name to weed out disloyal