An Atheist in the Foxhole
Joe Muto
Dutton Books, 336pp, $26.95
Fox News, launched by the former Nixon strategist Roger Ailes in 1996, now boasts a larger audience than its two closest competitors – MSNBC and CNN – combined. It is also astonishingly partisan. Switch on during prime time and you see commentators raging on issues straight out of the Tea Party playbook: mainly, the evils of big government and the Obama administration.
A self-described liberal and an Obama supporter, Joe Muto joined Fox in 2004 as a production assistant, responsible for minor tasks such as running scripts and organising footage for broadcast. By the time he was outed as an insider for Gawker last year, he was an associate producer on The O’Reilly Factor, the prime-time vehicle for Fox’s biggest alpha dog and the highest-rated show in US cable news.
Muto writes with an engagingly light touch and the book is an amusing account of a kid from Ohio with dreams of New York, making his way to the big city, determined to get a job in media any way he can. He neatly avoids the lure of relentless smugness that Toby Young falls victim to in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and often wrestles with the morality of the company and his place within it.
Foxhole is a lot of fun but the whimsy doesn’t hide that the book is somewhat light on revelation. When Muto points out the rank hypocrisy of Fox’s “fair and balanced” slogan, he isn’t surprising anybody. Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, skewers its contradictions on a regular basis. It isn’t shocking to learn that network personalities such as Megyn Kelly adopt “a highly aggressive arch-conservative persona” to advance their careers or that producers don’t allow many jokes at George W Bush’s expense to air. One anecdote, hyped by Muto as “both the apex and the nadir of my post-crime show drinking career”, ends anticlimactically with two unnamed producers getting caught smoking a joint.
Muto’s insider perspective only becomes useful halfway through, when he arrives at The O’Reilly Factor. Anecdotes follow (he describes O’Reilly asking his staff what “teabagging” is, for example). Nonetheless, in May, Muto pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court to misdemeanor charges and agreed to pay a $6,000 fine and serve 200 hours of community service.
In a year when the Guardian’s NSA leaks are destabilising the US security establishment, Muto’s theft of a couple of behind-thescenes videos seems pretty mild. He spends almost as much time praising his former colleagues as he does condemning them: the most resounding revelation is that he admires and even likes O’Reilly.
“What separates Bill from the hacks like Hannity,” he writes, “is that he’s not an ideologue. Sure, he’s ideological . . . but Bill, I would argue, is more intellectually honest. He’ll admit he’s wrong . . . It’s more than a lot of other people at Fox would do.”
Where Muto shines is in his vivid descriptions of day-to-day life at Fox; exhilaration at being the first to break a news story, even by 30 seconds; going to football games with the teetotal O’Reilly; or how it feels to stage an on-camera “gotcha” moment.
As his brief and undistinguished 36-hour career as a whistleblower shows, Muto isn’t in the revelation game. His book gives an insight not into the dark and sinister conspiracy that may or may not be at work behind the scenes at Fox News but into the lives of its people: some hard-working, some lazy, some ideological, some pragmatic, some sinister – but most endearingly human.