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place that I’d fallen in love with at a very young age and, to paraphrase Woody Allen, a town I idolized all out of proportion.
    But it was also true that I’d essentially be working for the enemy. Could I swallow my distaste for Fox News’s conservative leanings? If I took the job, I realized with a queasy feeling, I’d be selling out at age twenty-two—and not even for a lot of money.
    “So what do you think?” Jim’s voice on the phone snapped me out of my mental Hamletting. He sounded like a nice guy, polite, soft-spoken, and eager to recruit me. And he hadn’t asked for any sort of ideological purity test. Neither had Jessica, for that matter. No one seemed to notice, or care, that I was a bleeding-heart liberal. Maybe I could handle this.
    “We’d really love to have you,” Jim’s voice urged.
    My eyes swept across a map that I’d pinned to the wall just the day before. I’d bought it at a souvenir stand near Times Square shortly after my blown interview. The island of Manhattan stretched from the top to the bottom, filling the space, rendered in yellows and reds, and vaguely phallic. When I’d tacked it up, I’d been certain that staring at it every day would be the closest I would ever get to actually living there. But now the opportunity had re-presented itself, unexpectedly.
    I sighed. It might be my only chance.
    “I’m in.”

April 11, 2012—11:45 A.M.
    I had made it past the suspicious Nick De Angelo, though the encounter had left me rattled. Rather than risk being spotted getting on the elevators on my own seventeenth floor, I’d decided to take a little-used staircase up to the eighteenth-floor elevator bank, where I was less likely to bump into someone who would find it odd that I was fleeing the building with a duffel bag at eleven thirty in the morning.
    I climbed the stairs and emerged into the long narrow space that was currently being uneasily shared by the staffs of Sean Hannity’s and Greta Van Susteren’s shows. 10 The two crews, despite airing back-to- back on the same network, were, in a very real sense, competitors, with each staff independently pursuing the same scoops and the same hard-to-get guests. It was an awkward arrangement, to say the least, to have a rival producer ten feet away and able to hear your every word when you were trying to work the phones; but the two staffs had somehow made do for a few years. The room was mercifully mostly empty, with most of the late-working staffers not yet in for the day; the few people who were there seemed to pay me no mind.
    The space was divided equally, with each show getting its own side, but the décor was pure Hannity, the walls plastered with various campaign signs for Republican candidates, and one very large fan-donated piece of art.
    Now, it wasn’t unusual at Fox for some of the more zealous viewers to mail artwork and other mementos to their favorite hosts. The O’Reilly pod a floor below was studded with some of the more memorable examples—most of them of dubious artistic merit, but all of them glorifying the host: a wooden, hand-painted Bill O’Reilly bobblehead doll; a watercolor painting of Bill’s famous on-air confrontation with congressman Barney Frank; a nightmare-inducing papier-mâché depiction of O’Reilly dressed as a lumberjack, for some reason, complete with an ominous, shiny-bladed ax.
    The point is, for a show to display viewer-made art wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but the piece mounted next to the door in the Sean/Greta headquarters stood out; it was enormous, and clearly done by someone who knew how to wield a paintbrush. The giant oil-on-canvas showed Sean Hannity’s massive grinning head on a TV screen with a Fox News logo, with confetti flying through the air behind him. The artist, in an inspired bit of wishful thinking, had added an on-screen graphic that read OBAMA DEFEATED IN HISTORIC LANDSLIDE .
    At least if they fire my ass, I thought as I passed the thing, I’ll never have to