Joe Muto, the disgruntled Bill O’Reilly employee promptly fired by Fox News when he started leaking dispatches to Gawker, has surfaced again with similar complaints. This time, the Fox News Mole is writing at Slate, grading the accuracy of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO show The Newsroom against his own experiences within Rupert Murdoch’s empire. After wryly acknowledging his “quiet, dignified” exit from the industry, Muto drops a few more nuggets about his old bosses. But the shtick is a little tired and he seems to know it.
In his list of “What Sorkin Gets Right,” Muto writes of O’Reilly as “The Luddite anchor” similar to the show’s Jeff Daniels character Will McAvoy:
My old boss has a website, which he’s certainly aware of, since he steers people there every night to buy branded merchandise. It’s still an open question whether or not he’s aware that he has a Twitter account with almost 200,000 followers.
He also compares Roger Ailes to The Newsroom’s “‘back-in-my-day’ old guard news honcho”:
Fox News president Roger Ailes is known for regaling staff with stories about his TV past during speeches at company functions. I personally heard at least three retellings of the time he worked for The Mike Douglas Show and had to set up a functioning bowling alley in the studio with less than 24-hours notice.
And Muto can’t help but drop a reference to O’Reilly’s YouTube-able freak-out: “McAvoy can’t remember the names of any of his crew, and angrily berates them when they don’t do their jobs right. Sound familiar?”
But amid the continuous snitching (which can’t be inspiring to any potential future employers), Muto inserts some self-deprecation, referring to when “the great Howard Kurtz methodically flayed me alive during an interview” and concluding, “Then again, maybe it’s impossible for me to be objective about a show that portrays my old profession as heroic, when I departed that profession in such a less-than-heroic manner.” It almost sounds like Muto’s sick of trading on his Fox News days, until you remember that six-figure book deal.
Related: TV Review: Sorkin’s The Newsroom — Corny, But Inspiring
