Read An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media for Free Online Page A

see that fucking asinine painting again.

   CHAPTER 2   
    I Coulda Been a Contender . . .
    S o is this fat fuck dead or what?”
    Kurt Karos, a producer in his late twenties, was barking into the phone, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the control room. We had just received a report that Marlon Brando, legendary actor, star of classic films like On the Waterfront , Apocalypse Now , and The Godfather , noted recluse—and alleged fat fuck—was, in fact, dead. But the report had come from just one source, Fox’s affiliate in Los Angeles, and Karos was on the phone with the assignment desk, trying to get a second source to confirm the news so we could go to air with it.
    “Don’t fuck with me on this, Steve,” Kurt was shouting. “I know it’s still early on the West Coast. . . . Wake them the hell up, then! . . . Look, if CNN gets this first, they might as well stay in bed because I swear to Christ I’ll make it my business that they no longer have jobs to wake up to!”
    I was taking this all in from my perch in the back corner of the cramped, chaotic control room, itching to do something, to help in any way I could; but I was by far the lowest-ranked person in the room, and the producers and technicians seemed to have forgotten that I was even there. So I watched, and waited, as the number one cable news network in America struggled to be the first to inform a blissfully unaware public that a Hollywood icon had dropped dead.
    It was July 1, 2004, my very first day at Fox News.
    I was about three hours into it.
    —
    Four days earlier, I had arrived in New York City with my entire life packed into three suitcases, only six weeks removed from the comforting bosom of college. My diploma was still at the framer’s in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio—which was just as well, because I wasn’t going have an office wall to hang it on anyway.
    I took a cab straight from LaGuardia Airport to my friend Sloane Coupland’s Manhattan apartment. Sloane was a delightfully manic brunette I’d known since freshman year. The first time I met her, she’d brought me back to her dorm room and nonchalantly changed her clothes in front of me. For any other girl, that would have been a brazen come-on, but for Sloane, it was simply a practical matter: She needed to change, and it was rude to ask a new friend to wait outside while she did so. Of course I didn’t know that at the time, and diligently waited for a sexual entanglement that never materialized. By the time I realized that the bra and panties she’d flashed at our first meeting was the nakedest I would ever see her, it was too late: We were friends. Most recently, as seniors, we’d collaborated on a truly overwrought pro-choice student film that she’d written, I’d photographed, and we’d both directed. It didn’t win any awards in the student film festival, but it did give Sloane and me a lot of time to talk about our future plans, with both of us having aspirations to head to New York.
    Sloane had arrived in the city three weeks prior. She was living in a luxury high-rise overlooking the East River, in a spacious one-bedroom that no twenty-two-year-old had any business having all to herself. Sloane was one of those lucky cases that seemed to crop up occasionally in New York: Her parents had agreed to support her for a year while she made a go of it in the film industry.
    When the taxi dropped me off at Sloane’s building, one doorman helped me with my luggage while another held the door for me and a third greeted me at the front desk of the lobby, a soaring marble-clad space with a curtain of water running down one wall and gathering in a little pool. I was still taking it all in, slack-jawed like a moron, when Sloane stepped off the elevators and wrapped me in a hug.
    “You’re here!” she shouted, squeezing the air out of my lungs with her surprisingly powerful embrace. “Finally!”
    “You really expect me to stay in this