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

stretching skyward. Just to the east of that was Rockefeller Center, the masterful Art Deco complex of buildings, home to NBC, the Today show, the famous Christmas tree, and the skating rink that, I was delighted later to find out, turns into a bar in the summer months.
    To the southwest of my new office was the flashing video-screen overloaded, tourist-crammed clusterfuck of Times Square, filled with street artists hawking caricatures, food vendors generating an ungodly amount of smoke from their grills, and dazed tour groups of old ladies from New Jersey shoving their way through the crowd, hustling to make curtain time for Mamma Mia!
    Farther north up Sixth Avenue, past Radio City, you could just make out a massive expanse of green: Central Park, which is where I headed. Rather than enter the park itself—despite rumors of a recent revitalization, I still knew the park only from the movie Home Alone 2 and the TV show Night Court as a haven for crackheads, prostitutes, and terrifying old ladies who breed armies of pigeons to do their bidding—I hooked a right turn onto Central Park South. It’s the street where all the hansom cabs line up, waiting to give tourists horse-drawn rides.
    New York City visitors have a very romantic vision of the horse-and-carriage ride, but the reality is a disappointing letdown. Instead of a proud, beautiful steed pulling your cart, you have a sad, plodding creature with its head stooped in misery. Instead of a merry driver dressed like a Victorian caroler pointing out landmarks, you have a surly guy in jeans who ignores you and won’t stop texting on his cell phone.
    Also, the entire length of the street smells like horse shit.
    I was walking past the depressing queue of horses, idly wondering whose job it was to empty those little poop-catcher aprons strapped underneath each animal, when I almost ran over a guy about my age standing in the middle of the sidewalk.
    “Excuse me, sir. Would you like to donate to help us defeat George Bush this November?” He was carrying a clipboard and wearing a shirt identifying him as an employee of the Democratic National Committee. He had a JOHN KERRY FOR PRESIDENT button pinned to his chest.
    “Sure, I’d love to,” I replied, digging into my back pocket for my wallet. “How does five bucks sound?”
    The kid, obviously too blown away by my generous offer to speak, scribbled something on the clipboard and handed it to me.
    “I just need your information there. Name, address, employer, and so on.”
    “You know, it’s funny that I’m making this donation,” I said as I filled out the form. “I’m actually starting work in three days for Fox News Channel.”
    “Oh, my God! Why?” He looked at me, horrified. “Why are you going to work for them ?”
    “Ummm . . . that’s a great question,” I said. “I guess . . .”
    I was completely taken aback by the anger I heard in his voice. I was still coming to grips myself with the fact that I was in the city to take a job with Fox News, so I wasn’t yet completely prepared to have to justify it to a stranger a full three days before I even started.
    My immediate impulse was to tell the guy that this was just a temporary job, a way to get my foot in the door, to establish a life in New York while I searched for something that I really wanted to do. That I didn’t buy into Fox’s philosophy, and in fact believed the exact opposite . That while I was there I was going to do my best to keep them honest, and to maybe even change them from the inside, to bend the entire organization to my way of thinking through sheer force of will, using my dazzling powers of persuasion. I was going to be a force for good . I would not let the questionable values of my employer change my values, or who I was as a person.
    But I didn’t say any of that.
    What I did say was: “I guess you gotta make a living, right?”
    The volunteer frowned at me but said nothing as I handed him back his clipboard and a