Well this should be fun to watch. Gawker has a mole inside Fox News, sending them information including video clips of behind the scenes stuff that didn’t go out on the air. In the first article — anonymously written, of course — the mole explains what made him/her snap and start feeding information to the enemy:
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.” …
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.
This could be fun, though I doubt it will last long. Fox says they’ve already figured out the identity of the mole and they’re “exploring legal options.”
Update: Since I wrote this, he’s been caught and fired. But now he says he’s “free, and I am ready to tell my story, which I wasn’t able to fully do for the previous 36 hours.” This is still gonna be fun. And turns out he was a producer for Bill O’Reilly’s show, which should make it doubly fun.
21 comments
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Michael Heath
April 12, 2012 at 11:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Hopefully someone will collate all of Bill O’Reilly comments on this person, that should be worth some yucks.
otrame
April 12, 2012 at 11:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
* checks on supply of popcorn and fluffs cushions in the comfy chair
Alverant
April 12, 2012 at 11:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Shouldn’t he be protected under whistleblower laws?
Reginald Selkirk
April 12, 2012 at 11:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Inside info on where to buy the best falafel!
otrame
April 12, 2012 at 11:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ 4
Oh, for fuck’s sake. You fucking loser.
fifthdentist
April 12, 2012 at 11:27 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
http://www.newshounds.us/foxnews_com_erupts_in_murderous_racism_at_george_zimmerman_charges_04112012?recruiter_id=2
eric
April 12, 2012 at 11:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If it were Hilary in the WH instead, the same number of comments would unpromptedly point out that she’s a woman. If the President were white, male, but Jewish, they’d work a mention of his Judaism into each post instead. Its very much a pan-bigotry rather than a specific bigotry that they’ve got going. Still bigotry. Still offensive. Just not limited to only one group.
I’m reminded of the old SNL faux-commercials about the Bush-Dukakis election: “[vote for] George Bush – because he’s taller.” It seems any ad hominem will do in a pinch, just so long as you find an ad hom to use. Every Democrat must be vilified.
Reginald Selkirk
April 12, 2012 at 11:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Thank you.
Michael Heath
April 12, 2012 at 11:39 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Did a comment which originally posted @ 4 get removed? Otrame and eric’s comment posts suggest that happened.
Kazim
April 12, 2012 at 11:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@7
I think it’s not so much that they hate Obama BECAUSE he’s black, or Hillary because she’s a woman. It’s that his blackness is seen as fair game in piling on the intense hatred that they feel for him because he’s on the other team. The fact that they’re racist doesn’t solely drive their hatred, but it is a tool in amplifying it.
To flip things around, liberals hated Condi Rice and Wolfowitz for their support of bad policies, but the fact that Rice was black or a woman tended not to become a focal point of the conversations, nor did Wolfowitz’s Jewishness.
It’s the same issue with the letter Jessica Ahlquist just received. They don’t hate her because she’s a woman, they hate her because of the lawsuit. But now that they’ve established that hatred, the fact that she is female makes her fair game, in their minds, for wild speculation about her sexual practices. Misogyny didn’t start it, but misogyny helps the fire burn brighter.
Reginald Selkirk
April 12, 2012 at 11:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
eric’s quote is from Ed’s linked article. I gather from Otrame’s comment that he/she does not care for Mediterranean food.
sunsangnim
April 12, 2012 at 11:48 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m a little disappointed. You would think that after several years at Fox, this guy would have dug up some more dirt. So far, we have a video of Romney talking about horses, and racist comments on the Fox Nation website. Nothing really surprising there. I hope he has something a little more interesting that he hasn’t shared yet.
Raging Bee
April 12, 2012 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Parton the OT, but I just brought up this page and got three pop-under windows that refused to stay up when I tried to bring them up to cose them. It’s no huge deal, I did manage to close all three with very little trouble; but I thiught you might like to know your adware is unusually aggressive today, and may pose a spamesque threat.
Back on topic, thanks and try to keep us posted on whatever our (ex) mole says or does.
Raging Bee
April 12, 2012 at 11:52 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Parton the OT?” Okay, that’s a silly-looking typo…
Aaaand…I got the same three (blank) pop-under windows again.
tommykey
April 12, 2012 at 12:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, with Bill O’Reilly we need something like that infamous clip from Inside Edition when he was pissed off about the teleprompter telling him to say “play us out.”
“What does that mean, ‘to play us out’?” “Fucking teleprompter sucks!”
Alverant
April 12, 2012 at 12:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@otrame What’s wrong with falafel? I like it (provided it doesn’t all apart on you with the first bite), does that make me a bad person?
Markita Lynda—it's Spring after the Winter that wasn't
April 12, 2012 at 12:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hope the ex-producer has enough anecdotes to convince Fox that it has another mole, and another and another. It would be amusing to see how many people they would fire.
Chris from Europe
April 12, 2012 at 1:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Look at the sad reaction by some Fox News employee in the Gawker comment section: The evil mole doesn’t respect business. Sure, he’s a liberal, but not respecting something as American as business … you know how that sounds, right?
twincats
April 12, 2012 at 5:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bill-O had a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him in 2004 in which he was quoted by his accuser saying things about what he’d like to do to her in the shower. It evidently involved a loofah which he mistakenly referred to as a falafel.
cycleninja
April 12, 2012 at 10:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I originally had hopes for this, but now the guy’s been caught, I realize I was hoping for too much. The mole getting caught in such short order speaks to not being very good at concealing his tracks. And frankly, the little information he leaked wasn’t all that juicy (but thanks for the information on the state of the bathrooms at Newscorp.). Maybe the reason nobody wanted to hire him wasn’t so much the fact that he worked for Fox as the fact he wasn’t that impressive.
Now, if someone sneaks out a recording of the board of directors debating what kind of smear campaign to run against Obama, I’d pay money to see that.
jesse
April 13, 2012 at 8:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@eric –no, they really do hate Obama because he is black, and they hated Hilary because she was a woman.
I’m not saying that being for the Democrats has nothing to do with it — of course it does. But the GOP has been very specific about cultivating a base that hates black people. (See: Southern Strategy).
They also have been very clear about women. Hilary’s sin was tackling health care and being a woman. I might refer you to similar — if far more polite — attacks on Eleanor Roosevelt. At that time it was from Dixiecrats.
The GOP has also made it clear they hate Latinos, too, unless they are light-skinned Cubans. (Just look at which Cubans are prominently featured whenever stories about the exile community are aired; how many Afro-Cubans do you see? There’s also a reason that a majority of the first wave of exiles was not Afro-Cuban).