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the Fox News Mole
first post:
Announcing Our Newest Hire: A Current Fox News Channel Employee
What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole?a long-standing, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization.
I always intended to keep my mouth shut. The plan was simple: get hired, keep my head down and my views to myself, work for a few months, build my resume, then eventually hop to a new job that didn't make me cringe every morning when I looked in the mirror.
That was years ago. My cringe muscles have turned into crow's feet. The ten resumes a month I was sending out dwindled into five, then two, then one, then zero. No one wants me. I'm blacklisted.
I work at Fox News Channel.
The final straw for me came last year. Oddly, it wasn't anything on TV that turned me rogue, though plenty of things on our air had pushed me in that direction over the years. But what finally broke me was a story on The Fox Nation. If you're not a frequenter of Fox Nation (and if you're reading Gawker, it's a pretty safe bet you're not) I can describe it for you ? it's like an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting. Word around the office is that the site was actually the brainchild of Bill O'Reilly's chief stalker (and Gawker pal) Jesse Watters.
The Nation aggregates news stories, gives them provocative headlines, and invites commenters to weigh in. The comments are fascinating actually, if you can detach yourself enough to view them as sort of the id of the conservative movement. Of course, if you can't detach yourself, then you're going to come away with a diminished view of human decency, because HOLY MOLY THESE PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE THE BLACK PRESIDENT. I'm not saying they dislike him BECAUSE he's black, but a lot of the comments, unprompted, mention the fact that he is black, so what would you say, Dr. Freud?
The Fox Nation moderators, realizing that they had a problem on their hands, did the absolute bare minimum, hiring one or two college kids to comb the comments for the most egregiously racist postings, and putting in automatic text filters that blocked various key words. Of course the intrepid commenters quickly found ways around these filters using letter substitutions and spacings, which is why many comments complain about our "n@gger president" and the "M u s l i m in the White House."
So the site has become the seedy underbelly of the Fox News online empire. It's surprising that we even have an online empire, considering that our fan base is mostly septuagenarian technophobes.
The post that broke the camel's back might be familiar to some of you, because it garnered a lot of attention and (well-deserved) ridicule when it hit last August. The item was aggregating several news sources that were reporting innocuously on President Obama's 50th birthday party, which was attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay Z, and the headline "Obama's Hip Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs."
The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on. It came close on the heels of the Common controversy, which exhibited a lot of the same ugly traits. (See also: terrorist fist jabs; Fox & Friends madrassa accusations; etc.)
The worst thing about the Hip Hop BBQ incident is that we didn't back away from it. Bill Shine, who is a rather important guy?sort of Roger Ailes' main hatchet man, and the go-between for Ailes and most of the top talent?bafflingly doubled down and defended it. The story still exists on the Fox Nation site, headline and photo montage intact, to this very day.
That was it for me. It wasn't that the one incident was so bad, in and of itself. But it was so galvanizing, and on top of so many other little incidents, that I guess it just finally pushed me over the edge.
So here I am. And I come bearing gifts. The video above is of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity bantering before the taping of an interview for the "Hannity Vegas Forum" in February. Of note: Romney professes his and his wife Ann's well-known love of horseriding, praising the qualities of the "Austrian Warmbloods" that his wife rides?the are "dressage" horses, he notes?while maintaining his own preference for the "smoother gait" of his own "Missouri foxtrotter."
Now there's nothing wrong with Mitt and his wife loving horseback riding. But remember this video next time Romney attacks Obama for golfing. The inherent elitism and snootiness of golf is NOTHING compared to competitive horseback riding. And I think Mitt loses points with the GOP base for his correct pronunciation of dressage. To GOP-voter ears it sounds not only gay, but even worse, French.
Elsewhere in the video you will see the two men discussing the possibility that this very footage may one day be leaked, as they warn one another against primping too carefully. "You don't want to have John Edwards moment," Hannity says. "Did you see that?" Romney replies: "Oh, yeah I saw that. It's one thing to do it for a second. It's another thing to do it for an hour." (And it's quite another for Newt Gingrich's wife to groom him like a circus walrus.)
Later, Hannity's producers ask him to change his necktie mid-interview. Here's a little TV trick for you: The show was splitting the Q-and-A over two nights, and they wanted to make the second night look like a fresh, new encounter rather than a rehash from last night. So they made sure to change Hannity's tie lest eagle-eyed viewers spot the repeat. Romney, to his credit, refuses to play along. Offered a pink tie, he says, "I'm not going all Donald Trump today." That day, Trump had announced his endorsement of Romney. In the portion of the interview that was broadcast, Romney said he was grateful for Trump's support, and that "he is a man who'se created a lot of jobs, and he shares my concern about China."
"So why not just leave Fox News?" you might ask. Good question! I've asked myself that same thing many times. And I am leaving. Sooner rather than later, I'm guessing. But I can't just leave quietly, can I? Where's the fun in that? So I'm John McClane-ing this ***. I'm inside the building, crawling through the air vents, gathering intel, and passing it along to Carl Winslow.(Note: Please don't misunderstand, and take my Die Hard metaphor as a threat of violence. Like most left-wingers I abhor actual violence, but am still hopelessly enthralled by the Hollywood machine that glorifies it. Also, that was a 20th Century Fox movie. Synergy!)
Watch this space for future dispatches from the Fox Mole.
second post
By The Fox Mole Apr 11, 2012 10:17 AM97,4795
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The Thin White Line That Separates Fox News Staffers From Bill O?Reilly on the Shitter
What follows is the second installment from the Fox Mole, a Gawker columnist and current employee of Fox News Channel. Here's the inaugural column.
Fox HQ in New York is a truly soul-crushing workplace. Our building is connected to the labyrinthine system of tunnels radiating out from Rockefeller Center, which means I can go straight from the train into the News Corp. building without going above ground. At first this seems like a convenience ("I don't have to go out in the cold!") but eventually it just adds to the depression ("I literally have not seen the sun once since I left my apartment this morning.")
The basement newsroom is dreary, with no windows, fluorescent lighting, and constant worrying about an infestation from bedbugs, mice or some other vermin. Nobody really has a lunch break, so we bolt down our food at our desks like convicts and toss our sandwich wrappers and salad bowls into the wastepaper baskets under our desks, creating a tasty daily buffet for insects.
The place is oddly low-rent. The computers are all at least 6 or 7 years old, and can barely run more than two software programs at a time. Everyone has a TV at their desk with a cable hookup, but the signal is bad and constantly cuts out and has static on half the channels. Half the printers are usually out of commission, and god help you if you have to find a working fax machine.
Credit where credit is due ? they recently redid the bathrooms outside the newsroom, and they're GLORIOUS. But only by comparison to the old bathrooms, which were dismal, and as near as I can tell had never been fixed up since the network started in the mid-90s.
When Fox was a young network on a shoestring budget, spartan bathrooms were perfectly understandable?almost a badge of honor, really. ("You think Murrow had a nice place to piss when he was on a goddamn London rooftop during the blitz?" I imagine a crusty old newsman lecturing me.) But that was a long time ago. We've been number one for 12 years. We're a *** cash cow at this point, basically propping up Rupert's entire money-losing journalism empire. Yet on most floors of the office, we're still dealing with what you see in this photograph.In case it's hard to make out, this is a bathroom stall with a gap between the edge of the stall and the wall that's so big that it has toilet paper draped over it for a modicum of privacy. And this isn't some temporary fix?it has been like this for YEARS.
This is what the bathrooms are like on most of the floors, including the talent floor. If you were to wander up there, the only thing separating you from watching Bill O'Reilly take a dump is a slight breeze displacing a couple strands of cheap single-ply. Yes?O'Reilly shits with the commoners. That man makes entirely too much money to have to put up with that. Bill, call your agent!The lobby isn't too shabby. It's mostly bland and marble, with the usual pieces of inoffensive corporate art. Not so usual, however, are the 25-foot-tall murals featuring a rotating cast of on-air personalities. Up until a couple months ago it was Fox News prime time people plastered up there. Currently it's Fox Business personalities, the grim swollen visages of Neil Cavuto and Lou Dobbs grinning at you, North Korea-style, insisting that all is well at the ratings-challenged business network.Watch this space for future dispatches from the Fox Mole.
BUT... Fox says that they know who the Mole is!!!
Fox News Spokesperson Tells Mediaite: We Found The Mole (UPDATE)
by Jon Bershad | 12:38 pm, April 11th, 2012? 428 comments
So, when we asked readers how long it would take for Fox News to find the mole that Gawker had in their midst, did anyone put money down on ?24 hours?? If so, it would appear that you just won the jackpot. A Fox News spokesperson revealed to Mediaite that they have already discovered the mole?s identity.
Here is the brief statement from the spokesperson:
?We found the person and we?re exploring legal options at this time.?
More on this story as it develops.
UPDATE: Shortly after we published the statement from Fox News, Gawker posted a statement of their own, purportedly from the still-free mole.
?If Fox has smoked me out, it?s news to me. I?m still here. Back to work.?
We have contacted Fox News and are awaiting a response.
We told you this whole thing would be fun to watch.
SECOND UPDATE: Fox News got back to us and reiterated their previous statement. It?s important to note that their first statement did not say that they had confronted or fired the person yet. The spokesperson went on to give another, equally brief statement.
?We know who it is.?
Well, that is certainly to the point.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/fox-news-spokesman-we-found-the-mole/
I am the 99%.
Re: the Fox News Mole
Hilarious!
(Your kids are uber cute, btw!)