Tales from the dark side: A Fox News mole tells all
This article in Salon by Joe Muto is an excerpt from his book An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media, and it’s a very good read on the inner workings of Fox News, with this excerpt focusing on The O’Reilly Factor, and how O’Reilly works within it, and he often doesn’t cope very well.
But in terms of how a typical O’Reilly show is put together, this quote leapt out at me:
When O’Reilly picked the topics for the show, he’d usually have a specific guest in mind. Sometimes he’d give it to one of our “regulars,” guests who appear every week. (These include, in addition to the aforementioned Messrs. Rove, Morris, and Goldberg, figures like comedian Dennis Miller and Fox daytime anchor Megyn Kelly.) But sometimes he’d want a guest who was not one of the regulars but, rather, someone who would take a certain side on an issue, or an expert with certain biographical details.
Often these requests got hilariously specific: “We’re doing a gay marriage segment — get me a black lesbian civil rights attorney!” or “I want to do a segment on the Super Bowl next week — find me a funny white sports expert under forty! But he can’t be bald.”
One of the most important things the segment producer did was the pre-interview, which was exactly what it sounds like— we’d interview the guest a few hours before Bill interviewed them. We tried to think of the same questions Bill would ask, and would take notes, condensing and bullet-pointing whatever the guest said. Eventually, we’d give this “POV” to Bill, along with research on the topic.
The end result was that, barring the occasional surprise, Bill knew exactly what his guest was going to say in the interview, sometimes down to the last word. In this way, cable news somewhat resembled professional wrestling: The outcomes were predetermined, with the host not only choosing his guests based specifically on the stance he knew they were going to take, but actually getting a preview of their arguments several hours in advance so he could formulate his counterarguments.
It’s long, but it’s a fascinating article, and you should read the whole thing.