An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media by Joe Muto Page B
Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics
Ads: Link
often quite similar: They were Roger’s hatchet-men (and at least one woman, as of this writing). The VPs, as near as I could tell, were all staunch conservatives, too. Whether by coincidence or design, Roger had effectively surrounded himself with fellow travelers.
One level below the VPs were executive producers. As I said earlier, the purview of an EP could vary. Some were in charge of a single show, some were in charge of multiple shows or entire chunks of programming, and some, like Siegendorf, were managers. This was the level where the ideological firewall started to go wobbly. There’s no doubt that most of the EPs were true believers, but a few of them seemed to be moderate, and at least one whom I knew, when he got a few drinks in him, gave several distinct hints that he was a frustrated liberal trapped in a nightmare of his own making.
The next level down was senior producer. An SP on one of the smaller shows (a newswheel, or a weekend show) was generally the boss; on one of the more important shows (a prime-time show or Fox & Friends ), an SP was high-level but not in charge. The senior producers tended to be the most openly right-wing people in the whole building. I was confused for a while as to how SPs ended up to the right of EPs, but someone eventually pointed out to me that most of the seniors had come up through the ranks at Fox, earning their promotions by slavishly toeing the company line, while a lot of the execs had been imported from other networks.
Under senior producers were producers, the utility players of the newsroom. Producers could book guests or select stories or time out the shows, ensuring that the commercial breaks hit at the right times (this was also known as “line producing”). Producers were generally too busy and harried to be ideological, but the smart, ambitious ones who wanted to eventually be promoted to seniors knew to occasionally let their conserva-flags fly.
It was in the scrum of the bottom two levels where the ideological diversity really started to ramp up. People outside of Fox tended to assume that the whole building was filled with lockstep conservatives, but at a certain point, it was simply impossible to staff a business based in New York City, and consisting of people who were attracted to the field of journalism, without letting at least a few pinkos in.
So the ranks of the associate producers—the title generally given to guest bookers, writers, and segment producers—and the production assistants were actually quite mixed. The conservatives, who made up at least 50 percent, as near as I could tell, were naturally not afraid to speak their minds at the office—like Camie, the pearl-wearing ingenue who had trained me on scripts. Another 30 percent were professed moderates, or at least agnostics who claimed they didn’t care about politics either way. And the remaining 20 percent, the ones who tended to keep their mouths shut and roll their eyes whenever the discussion turned political? Well, those people didn’t tend to last very long at the company. To borrow Mitt Romney’s parlance, they’d eventually self-deport.
Except for the one idiot who wrote this book. He decided to stick around.
—
For the entire month of August, I shadowed Marybeth, taking notes. Tape was a simple process in theory:
The producer picks a video by writing a slug line in the rundown with clear, concise, and specific instructions.
You find a source tape for the video, cue it up to the right spot, and bring it to an editor in one of the tiny edit rooms lining the walls of the newsroom.
The editor operates the machinery, copying shots from the source tape to a blank tape while you watch and offer guidance.
The finished product will be a tape that’s ready for air, about forty seconds in length, with ten extra seconds of “pad,” footage that ensures the screen won’t go to black if the director accidentally runs the tape too long.
You slap a numbered sticker on the tape,
One level below the VPs were executive producers. As I said earlier, the purview of an EP could vary. Some were in charge of a single show, some were in charge of multiple shows or entire chunks of programming, and some, like Siegendorf, were managers. This was the level where the ideological firewall started to go wobbly. There’s no doubt that most of the EPs were true believers, but a few of them seemed to be moderate, and at least one whom I knew, when he got a few drinks in him, gave several distinct hints that he was a frustrated liberal trapped in a nightmare of his own making.
The next level down was senior producer. An SP on one of the smaller shows (a newswheel, or a weekend show) was generally the boss; on one of the more important shows (a prime-time show or Fox & Friends ), an SP was high-level but not in charge. The senior producers tended to be the most openly right-wing people in the whole building. I was confused for a while as to how SPs ended up to the right of EPs, but someone eventually pointed out to me that most of the seniors had come up through the ranks at Fox, earning their promotions by slavishly toeing the company line, while a lot of the execs had been imported from other networks.
Under senior producers were producers, the utility players of the newsroom. Producers could book guests or select stories or time out the shows, ensuring that the commercial breaks hit at the right times (this was also known as “line producing”). Producers were generally too busy and harried to be ideological, but the smart, ambitious ones who wanted to eventually be promoted to seniors knew to occasionally let their conserva-flags fly.
It was in the scrum of the bottom two levels where the ideological diversity really started to ramp up. People outside of Fox tended to assume that the whole building was filled with lockstep conservatives, but at a certain point, it was simply impossible to staff a business based in New York City, and consisting of people who were attracted to the field of journalism, without letting at least a few pinkos in.
So the ranks of the associate producers—the title generally given to guest bookers, writers, and segment producers—and the production assistants were actually quite mixed. The conservatives, who made up at least 50 percent, as near as I could tell, were naturally not afraid to speak their minds at the office—like Camie, the pearl-wearing ingenue who had trained me on scripts. Another 30 percent were professed moderates, or at least agnostics who claimed they didn’t care about politics either way. And the remaining 20 percent, the ones who tended to keep their mouths shut and roll their eyes whenever the discussion turned political? Well, those people didn’t tend to last very long at the company. To borrow Mitt Romney’s parlance, they’d eventually self-deport.
Except for the one idiot who wrote this book. He decided to stick around.
—
For the entire month of August, I shadowed Marybeth, taking notes. Tape was a simple process in theory:
The producer picks a video by writing a slug line in the rundown with clear, concise, and specific instructions.
You find a source tape for the video, cue it up to the right spot, and bring it to an editor in one of the tiny edit rooms lining the walls of the newsroom.
The editor operates the machinery, copying shots from the source tape to a blank tape while you watch and offer guidance.
The finished product will be a tape that’s ready for air, about forty seconds in length, with ten extra seconds of “pad,” footage that ensures the screen won’t go to black if the director accidentally runs the tape too long.
You slap a numbered sticker on the tape,
Similar Books
