An Atheist in the FOXhole Quotes

“But I thought you were a conservative?’ ¶ ‘I am, I guess,’ she said. ‘But I also have eyes and ears.’ ¶ And that’s when it hit me. ¶ No one believed it. ¶ Fair and Balanced. We Report, You Decide. Everyone knew it was bunk. A sham. Over the next eight years at Fox, I never met a single employee, not the truest of true believers, who wasn’t cynical about what our main purpose was. ¶ ‘We all know the “Fair and Balanced” thing is bullshit,’ a very conservative O’Reilly Factor producer told me once, late at night, after we’d had a few drinks. ‘We’re not here to be fair. We’re here to give red meat to our viewers.’ ¶ ‘To stir up the crazies, you mean,’ I said. ¶ He laughed. ‘Yeah, to stir up the crazies. Because outrage equals ratings.”
― Joe Muto, An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

“There was no reason why Fox, which, by the time I joined, had been in business for nearly a decade and had been number one in the ratings for more than two years, should still have been running such a rinky-dink operation, with broken-down tape machines, control rooms that smelled like a sewer whenever it rained more than half an inch, chronic intentional understaffing, and a workforce composed of barely trained, underpaid children like myself. But that was the business model, and the ratings were good enough—and the on-air product was just this side of mistake-free enough—that there was no incentive for the bosses to change it.”
― Joe Muto, An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

“Under Ailes’s sharp tutelage, Nixon was able to skillfully leverage television to trick the American public into believing he was a halfway reasonable human being instead of the sweat-soaked paranoid head case that he actually was.”
― Joe Muto, An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

“O’Reilly—ever vigilant for liberal media slights against the honest, hardworking Americans who only wanted smaller government and whiter presidents—was on the case. ¶ But first he had to figure out what teabagging actually was.”
― Joe Muto, An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

“Fox News has always had a bizarre institutional animosity toward the New York Times. The newspaper was routinely caricatured by O’Reilly and the rest of the network as a liberal rag, a monolithic left-wing institution full of reporters and editors crawling all over themselves to destroy the Republican Party and promote a grab bag of progressive causes—atheism, homosexuality, Hollywood depravity, big government, and so on. In a way, Fox’s depiction of the Times was an exact mirror image of the left’s depiction of Fox, but that irony was lost on O’Reilly, who took delight in skewering the Times at every available opportunity. (With the exception of the admittedly frequent occasion that one of his books charted on their Best Sellers list, in which case he was happy to tout their wisdom and authority.)”
― Joe Muto, An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

“We’re not here to be fair. We’re here to give red meat to our viewers.”
― Joe Muto, An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media