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 Page A

five-dollar bill.
    I could still feel his disapproving gaze on my back as I slunk away, the smell of horse shit lingering in my nostrils.
    —
    True story: I showed up for my first day of work with bloody socks.
    All my shoes were brand-new, bought during a spending binge at a Cincinnati department store. In those heady pre-financial-crisis days, the fine people at Macy’s had foolishly decided that I was trustworthy enough for a three-thousand-dollar line of credit. This was good, because I desperately needed some big-boy clothes. I wasn’t 100 percent sure what I was supposed to wear to a Manhattan office job, but I was fairly certain that my standard college uniform of orange athletic warm-up pants paired with an ironic thrift store T-shirt wasn’t going to cut it. (“Mr. Ailes, don’t you find my SOUTH BEND GIRLS’ CHOIR T-shirt hilarious? I picked it up for three bucks at the Salvation Army.”)
    The problem was that three days of walking around the city wearing cheap shoes that hadn’t been broken in yet had taken a toll, and opened enormous blisters on the heels of both feet. It was just my luck that one of them had started bleeding during the half-hour walk from Sloane’s place to the Fox building.
    I could only hope that my new coworkers wouldn’t notice the red stain blooming on the Achilles tendon on one of my tan dress socks. I didn’t want to be known around the office as “Joe the Bloody Sock Guy.” (It would seriously undermine my plan to get known as “Joe the Large-Penised Genius.”)
    I limped into the lobby a little bit before eight A.M. and checked in again at the security desk. The guard checked my ID and made a phone call, and after a few minutes, a dark-skinned—Indian, I guessed—pretty woman in her late twenties appeared.
    “Hi, I’m Nina. You must be Joseph Mutt-Oh?” she said, mispronouncing my surname.
    “Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. “It’s Moo-Toe, actually. And I go by Joe.”
    She nodded. “Okay. Follow me.”
    I obediently trailed after her toward a set of security gates. She pressed her ID badge—suspended from a lanyard around her neck—against a sensor, and two clear glass partitions parted with a satisfying mechanical whoosh noise, letting her pass through. I did the same with the temporary paper ID that the security guard had printed for me.
    “Cool,” I muttered. “Just like Star Trek.”
    Nina looked back over her shoulder.
    “I mean, high-tech and stuff . . .” I said, trailing off awkwardly.
    “There used to be a lot less security in the building,” Nina said. “They’d let anyone come and go. But then, you know. Nine-eleven, I guess.”
    “Oh, sure,” I said, nodding. “You can’t be too careful with terrorists. After all, the TV Guide offices are in this building, right?”
    Nina looked at me through narrowed eyes.
    I followed her onto an escalator that took us down to the basement of the building, into a long, barren, fluorescent-lit hallway. Straight ahead was an entrance to the subway and a subterranean Wendy’s restaurant. The smell of hash-brown-flavored frying oil filled the space.
    “Whoa, it’s way too early for a burger,” I cracked.
    “Oh, they actually don’t have burgers this early,” Nina said, ignoring my joke. “And their breakfast kinda sucks.”
    We rounded a corner, passed two workers in Wendy’s uniforms unloading a pallet stacked with forty-pound bags of frozen French fries, and approached two security guards standing sentry in the middle of the hallway. I couldn’t imagine what exactly they were guarding, because there didn’t appear to be anything else in the corridor except exposed ductwork overhead and a stack of beat-up folding chairs piled against a wall.
    “Be honest,” I said to Nina. “Are you taking me somewhere to murder me?”
    This time she laughed. I’d finally cracked the Ice Queen!
    “No,” she said. “I’m taking you to the newsroom.”
    As we got closer to the security