My Name is Bill & I Work for Fox

First published in The Huffington Post on October 7, 2008

“I’m at Fox now.” That’s what I used to tell people when I first started working for my current employer, after a strategic move from the world of the small independent studio to mega-corporate entertainment where I now spend my 9-5’s. A colleague of mine, when I told him of the general consternation and dirty looks I was getting as a result of that statement, set me straight. “I tell people I work for 20th Century Fox. It’s much less inflammatory.”

He was right. Oddly enough, most people don’t make the connection between 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment (the company I work for) and Fox News, home of the likes of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, neo-con true believers who use their positions at the cable-news outlet to further the cause of the far-right wing. (When I’m speaking to young people, I usually leave out the F-word altogether, and just say I work for the company that does the X-Men movies and The Simpsons.)

But now, after watching the vice-presidential debate and becoming even more terrified at the thought that this half-wit from Alaska could actually ascend to the presidency one day, I must come out of the closet. Everyone knows that Fox News is, to put it mildly, slanted right. Their producers and on-air personalities are culpable in their fiery promotion of the Bush agenda for the past eight years no matter how flawed. Since the current election cycle began they’ve been “spinning” what the McCain/Palin ticket really stands for (i.e. more of the same), often to the point of absurdity. (If you haven’t noticed the contrast of the anchors’ sunny demeanor when they mention the names of McCain or Palin versus the dark seriousness with which they utter the surname “Obama,” you aren’t paying attention.)

A while back you may recall that Ann Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot” in one of her speeches during the primaries. The negative reaction against this Medusa was (finally and about time) swift and condemning from just about every corner of the political and cultural landscape. Except for Fox News, that is, which as most know was one of Coulter’s primary delivery outlets for her hatred and bigotry at the time. Rather than condemning her use of the derogatory term, censuring her, and banning her from the channel, the producers at Fox News had Coulter on the air the next morning. No, not to apologize, but to defend herself!

I was so distraught that my company would actually give this harpy more air time after such bad behavior that I wrote a letter to one of the very high-up executives of the organization expressing my outrage. I received no response, but at least I felt that I had made my voice heard.

But now internal action just doesn’t seem enough. This Fox employee can hold his silence no longer. Call it a self-serving cleansing if you will, but I must speak. (The following are the views solely of my independent writer persona. I’ve composed this on my own time, and the following content in no way represents the views of my employer or anyone other than myself.)

Hear me now! Many employees, and we number in the thousands, who work for the entertainment arm of News Corporation, the parent company of pretty much all entertainment entities with “Fox” in its moniker, often feel embarrassed, ashamed, and angry at the blatant, one-sided, dis-informational tactics of the producers, staff, and on-air “talent” at Fox News. In their efforts to swing this election in favor of McCain, their usual crimes of unfair and unbalanced journalism have become startlingly egregious.

Fox News put together a “focus group” during the Biden/Palin debate. This obviously hand-picked group of “common voters,” touted to be 50-50 for the two tickets, was obviously screened, staged, coached, and almost entirely one-sided (the Palin side). I was not only outraged at yet another example of Fox News manipulating the perception of its viewers for the political benefit of the GOP, but that we, 20th Century Fox, home of American Idol & Fox Reality Channel, would be associated with such a lame-ass attempt at fake reality television. To top it all off, the focus group was sponsored by Budweiser! (In case you didn’t know, Cindy McCain’s day job is Chairwoman of an Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Arizona.) How can Fox News present such fabricated crap with a straight face? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t even know whom to ask.

Trust me in this, except for the above-mentioned Fox News staffers, most of us in the other subsidiaries of the company have no idea who these people are, where they work, how they get their marching orders, or how they sleep at night. I can only tell you that the Fox I work for is a fantastic company. We are treated with respect and generosity. We are afforded opportunities to expand our careers and promote social concerns. We are diverse and inclusive. We tolerate and are tolerated in all shapes, colors, religions, and sexual orientation. Our individual politics span the range of ultra-liberal, to hard-line conservative, and everything in-between. And we, all of News Corp, its subsidiaries, and employees are very very green.

On that last point, in the approximate six years total that I have been with this company, the only pressure outside of our job descriptions News Corp. has ever passed down to us is a demand that we participate as fully as possible in the fight against global warming. In the last two plus years, News Corp. has stood as a penultimate example of the difference businesses large and small can make by becoming more aware of, and responsible for, its carbon footprint. This alone is enough to make me proud to say that I am an employee of News Corp. and 20th Century Fox.

So it’s no wonder that many of us Murdoch’s minions watch with dismay and confusion the daily neo-conservative drumbeat emanating from the Fox News Channel. They don’t represent all of us. We’ve never gotten a memo telling us to be sure to vote Republican. We don’t get e-mails from Sean Hannity bragging about the latest Democrat he reduced to tears on his show. Bill O’Reilly doesn’t invite us to his book signings. We are completely out of the loop.

So the next time someone tells you, “I work for Fox,” cut them some slack. Fox News is an enigma even to us. We don’t get it any more than you do. It’s like that uncle in jail who nobody knows what he did to get there and is never spoken of even inside the family. We just pretend he’s out of town, and hope he doesn’t come to visit if he ever gets paroled.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 09:28 and is filed under Entertainment, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.