The Fox News Mole - it's Joe Muto. Photocredit: Gawker
The identity of the “Fox News Mole”, who provided a whistleblowing column for online magazine Gawker, has been revealed. He’s called Joe Muto. He managed two dispatches before he was found out, including one in which he revealed the parlous state of Fox’s, erm, hygenic facilities, and some behind the scenes footage of Mitt Romney talking about riding. Muto has revealed on Gawker that he’s been suspended indefinitely – “with pay, oddly enough.” Fox News is the highest-rated television channel in America, trouncing CNN and MSNBC, reported The Washington Post, and is run by Roger Ailes.
“I am a weasel, a traitor, a sell-out and every bad word you can throw at me… but as of today, I am free, and I am ready to tell my story, which I wasn’t able to fully do for the previous 36 hours,” wrote Joe Muto on Gawker.
Muto was a long-standing employee of Fox News Channel – he’d been there for eight years. He’d intended to keep his mouth shut, but, according to his first column for Gawker, what broke him was The Fox Nation, in which a lot of thinly-veiled racist comments were allowed through about President Barack Obama. As he put it: “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?”
Outfoxed? Muto’s column was astonishing, said Erik Wemple on The Washington Post. Fox News certainly did not encourage the sharing of information. “ The two pieces had two things in common: Neither produced anything groundbreaking; both were highly unauthorized.” Fox mobilised very quickly to clamp down – as it did when an “unflattering documentary” called “Outfoxed” hit the streets in 2004. Fox works best, it seems, as an “intelligence agency.”
“What is Gawker? Is that htat [sic] pornographic website? I don’t care if they have a mole beause we aren’t doing anything wrong, so it doesn’t matter… they hate me because I hate make money and I do it legitimately me and they don’t like my politics and that’s America,” said Rogier Ailes, quoted on The Hollywood Reporter.
A fun conflagration. Alexandra Petri, also on The Washington Post, said that she “didn’t envy the Fox Mole right now.” But “[a]lthough not much scandalous news coming from the molehill, it’s turned into a mountain already.” The brief messages from Fox News translate as “[Mole] will never work in this town again if we can help it.” The problem is, that the “trouble with burning bridges is that if you are still working on the bridge at the time, you can get scorched pretty badly. But in the mean time, it’s a fun conflagration.”