Last week, NBC News fired an anonymous employee. Fox News is about to fire an employee who only thinks he’s anonymous.
Gawker is very proud of their “newest hire”:
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.
This is followed by 1,100 words on how awful Fox News is, topped off with what the mole calls a “gift”: unaired FNC video from Hannity’s interview with Mitt Romney last February. In the footage, the two men chit-chat before the interview starts, talking about their wives’ hobbies and Romney’s horses. They mock John Edwards’ infamous hair-adjusting moment. Then Hannity changes his tie for the second part of the interview, since it was going to air over two nights.
That’s it.
As the mole explains:
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.
A president who’s been successful in the business world and pronounces foreign words properly? Nah, let’s stick with Obama instead.
So, yeah. Pretty gripping stuff. But is it worth losing your job over? I don’t know much about TV production, but presumably there are only so many people within FNC who would be able to access such footage. FNC has to be tracking down its provenance even as you read this. It’s possible that somebody dumb enough to do this is smart enough to cover his tracks, but how likely is it?
Not to mention that this is the first time I’ve seen Mitt Romney and actually liked him. He seems like a pretty okay guy when he doesn’t think the cameras are rolling.
Biden on a hot mic: “This is a big f***ing deal.”
Romney on a hot mic: …er, what’s the big f***ing deal?