An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media by Joe Muto Page A
Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics
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employees. (Another popular theory: The hidden microphones were there to snag any secret liberals. Either way, I kept my mouth shut.)
This widespread institutional paranoia was probably symptomatic of the very paranoid man at the top of the institution. A fascinating 2011 profile in Rolling Stone magazine 17 plumbed the depths of Roger’s apparently disturbed psyche:
Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun. . . . Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. . . . Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows—even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”
Ailes made no mention of “those gays” during any of the biannual State of the Business speeches he’d give in the middle of the newsroom, my earliest contact with him. Some flunky would set up a little microphone and underpowered speaker, and producers, editors, and PAs would wander over and arrange themselves, awkwardly standing among the cubicles, some of which were occupied by annoyed people in the midst of doing their actual jobs. (At a twenty-four-hour cable news network, you were never able to schedule an event when everyone was off duty at the same time. There was always someone, or several someones, who were getting screwed by a loud, distracting corporate pep rally taking place in their laps.) Roger would speak for about half an hour, revving up the troops with stats about ratings victories, how many households and cable systems we were available on, how well the network had covered various recent events, and so on. At the end he’d open the floor to questions from the crowd, which tended to be either extremely technical (“What’s the timeline on our conversion to a digital tapeless system?”) or sycophantic (“To what factors do you attribute our continued ratings dominance?”). He’d invariably toss out an anecdote or two about his past work in television, one of his favorites being the time he worked for The Mike Douglas Show and had overseen the construction of a fully operational bowling alley in the studio in a matter of hours. (The moral of the story: Hard work? Ingenuity? I can’t quite remember. He told it many times, and each time it had a different point.) The funny, affable Uncle Roger who showed up at these meetings was nothing like the sharp-elbowed, cutthroat Mr. Ailes who had built the company in his own image.
The ideology at Fox was strictly a top-down affair. Roger was a conservative. All of his deputies were conservatives. Most of the hosts were conservatives, or at least were good at pretending to be while on television, if they knew what was good for them. But under that, it was a more mixed bag. The ideology varied job by job, and show by show. For example: While Hannity’s staff was mostly simpatico with him, O’Reilly plainly didn’t care one bit about the ideology of his employees. He never once in five years asked me my personal opinion. His staff’s political views were totally irrelevant to him, in fact, because the only viewpoints that ever made it onto the show were his own.
Directly under Roger were several vice presidents. Each VP had a different and somewhat vague title—VP of programming, VP of development, VP of news editorial—but in practice their roles were
This widespread institutional paranoia was probably symptomatic of the very paranoid man at the top of the institution. A fascinating 2011 profile in Rolling Stone magazine 17 plumbed the depths of Roger’s apparently disturbed psyche:
Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun. . . . Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. . . . Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows—even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”
Ailes made no mention of “those gays” during any of the biannual State of the Business speeches he’d give in the middle of the newsroom, my earliest contact with him. Some flunky would set up a little microphone and underpowered speaker, and producers, editors, and PAs would wander over and arrange themselves, awkwardly standing among the cubicles, some of which were occupied by annoyed people in the midst of doing their actual jobs. (At a twenty-four-hour cable news network, you were never able to schedule an event when everyone was off duty at the same time. There was always someone, or several someones, who were getting screwed by a loud, distracting corporate pep rally taking place in their laps.) Roger would speak for about half an hour, revving up the troops with stats about ratings victories, how many households and cable systems we were available on, how well the network had covered various recent events, and so on. At the end he’d open the floor to questions from the crowd, which tended to be either extremely technical (“What’s the timeline on our conversion to a digital tapeless system?”) or sycophantic (“To what factors do you attribute our continued ratings dominance?”). He’d invariably toss out an anecdote or two about his past work in television, one of his favorites being the time he worked for The Mike Douglas Show and had overseen the construction of a fully operational bowling alley in the studio in a matter of hours. (The moral of the story: Hard work? Ingenuity? I can’t quite remember. He told it many times, and each time it had a different point.) The funny, affable Uncle Roger who showed up at these meetings was nothing like the sharp-elbowed, cutthroat Mr. Ailes who had built the company in his own image.
The ideology at Fox was strictly a top-down affair. Roger was a conservative. All of his deputies were conservatives. Most of the hosts were conservatives, or at least were good at pretending to be while on television, if they knew what was good for them. But under that, it was a more mixed bag. The ideology varied job by job, and show by show. For example: While Hannity’s staff was mostly simpatico with him, O’Reilly plainly didn’t care one bit about the ideology of his employees. He never once in five years asked me my personal opinion. His staff’s political views were totally irrelevant to him, in fact, because the only viewpoints that ever made it onto the show were his own.
Directly under Roger were several vice presidents. Each VP had a different and somewhat vague title—VP of programming, VP of development, VP of news editorial—but in practice their roles were
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