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This week, Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, announced plans to purchase Roku for $22 billion, pending regulatory approval.
The reason I’m paying more attention to the Fox-Roku deal than I might have otherwise is because my former employer, This Old House Productions, is a part of that package. Roku acquired This Old House in 2021, and now Fox is acquiring Roku.
Hearing about this deal, I’m reminded of another time when Fox News and This Old House intersected, and I happened to be there to witness all of it. This is the story of my journey from This Old House to Fox and Friends.
It was October, 2013.
Barack Obama was several months into his second term as president, defeating a Republican ticket of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan in 2012.
Donald Trump at the time was host of The Apprentice. The thirteenth season had aired that spring. While the show had given him a new surge of popularity, it was his 2011 questioning of whether Barack Obama was an American citizen that took him from random celebrity to political commentator slash provocateur.
It was against this backdrop that I got invited, or rather invited myself, to a taping of Fox and Friends, the morning talk show on Fox News, the conservative version of Good Morning America or Today.
I was a producer at the PBS series Ask This Old House at the time and had heard from our executive producer that one of our talent was set to appear on Fox and Friends. I’m not sure if we had been approached by the show or if this was something that our publicist had actively sought out (that same publicist had landed us a story a few months earlier on a website I had never heard of called Brietbart, so it’s definitely possible she had also pitched Fox News).
As soon as I heard that the appearance was booked, I volunteered to produce the segment and accompany our host to New York for the appearance. I had previously produced appearances for our team on other national shows like Today and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, plus several local news appearances in stations across the country. It was always fun to be on somebody else’s set for a few hours and to see how other shows operated. But even more importantly, I was greatly intrigued with the idea of getting an up-close look at how Fox News functioned.
The 2013 media environment seems quaint now. Brian Williams and Matt Laurer were still the faces of NBC News, Diane Sawyer anchored ABC’s evening coverage, Newsmax was not yet on TV screens and OANN was a fledgling cable channel. There was still a veneer of objectivity about coverage, an attempt to look at “both sides” of an issue with the sense that there might be a “truth” somewhere in the middle.
But not at Fox News. Fox was blatantly partisan and was trafficking in innuendo and conspiracy long before that type of language had taken root in the broader culture. It was the zeitgeist’s expression of what was otherwise lingering in the darker corners of the internet. It was pure id to our cultural ego.
I was not an avid watcher of Fox News. I didn’t even have cable. But I did enjoy watching comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert mock clips from the network. (Perhaps one of my favorite Daily Show clips of all time was from December, 2013 showing a segment from Megyn Kelly’s The Kelly File where the host refuses to see Santa Claus as anything but white).
The appearance on Fox and Friends was set to coincide with the one year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy and was meant to focus on hurricane preparedness. As I’ve written about before, This Old House tended to follow natural disasters, which has happened with increasing frequency as climate change effects have accelerated.
Unlike when I had produced for other networks, I don’t remember having a ton of back and forth with anyone at Fox News prior to the taping. We had a list of ideas that we had pitched, which resulted in a prop list of items we were to provide, and it was up to me to procure, deliver, and set them in up in any manner I saw fit.
When I had produced segments for other shows, there were often weeks of phone calls to go over ever detail, every prop, every talking point. I would send photos of props as they were being built, I would provide dimensions of items we needed to have made to an art department, and would meet with folks responsible for talent safety, legal concerns, and other minutiae that was often not a consideration on PBS but that mattered on bigger broadcast networks like NBC. Not the case at Fox News. If we had any meetings at all, they were brief and perfunctory. I don't recall any back and forth or a ton of planning in advance.
I secured the agreed upon props, rented a U-Haul cargo van, and drove the four hours to Manhattan the night before. I awoke from my hotel room early and was able to park the van right in front of the Fox studios on West 48th Street.
At this point, I think it’s worth talking more about the location of the Fox News studios. They are located in the 45 story office tower at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 48th Street. This is literally smack dab in the middle of Midtown Manhattan, one block from Times Square to the west, and one block to the edge of Rockefeller Center to the east. The Radio City Music Hall marquee is visible from Fox’s front door.
This is not only an insanely busy part of the city, but it’s also a very diverse area. There are people from around the world on this block every day, speaking dozens of languages at any given time. There are street carts selling halal meat wraps, restaurants serving food that would be hard to find elsewhere, and cab drivers passing by that have recently immigrated to the States. There’s also tourists from everywhere. This section of Midtown in particular seems like a distillation and concentration of the American Dream promised on the Statue of Liberty. It’s impossible to ignore the myriad cultures walking past at any given minute.
And yet, in the middle of this hustle and bustle, is 1211 Avenue of the Americas, the bunker from which racism, anti-immigration, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric are broadcast widely, infiltrating the minds of older white Americans and shaping their view of the world. The viewers of Fox might live in a small rural town somewhere in the Rust Belt, the Midwest, or the South. Their worldview is shaped by a sense of being “forgotten” or “left behind” in some way. Strangely, the people who help reinforce that feeling of abandonment, namely the Fox News personalities, are literally leaving their studios to board a subway train packed with people from all walks of life, are getting in a car driven by an immigrant driver, or at least are walking past the smells of halal meat on the way out the door. It’s a disconnect that felt impossible to ignore.
Arriving at the studios, I walked inside to the lobby to check in and receive my credentials and was greeted by a young Black male security guard. This was not unusual in any other office building in Manhattan, but this man’s presence felt like even more cognitive dissonance. Fox News had always openly trafficked in white supremacist language, yet they had a Black security guard as the first line of defense to prevent unwanted entry to their building. The security desk was prominent in the lobby and would have to be passed by all of the network’s lead people on the way in to work every day, from Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to Roger Ailes and even Rupert Murdoch when he was in town. I wondered how these figures viewed this guard, whether they greeted him by name, smiled at him when passing, or completely ignored his presence. I also wondered whether the guard felt a sense of belonging or pride at work or if he was just cashing a paycheck.
I was directed to the green room where I met our This Old House host who had traveled down early that morning and a New York based publicist who was helping with the appearance. As I remember it, the green room had a deep red wall on which painted portraits of the three main Fox and Friends hosts were hung. The room had a few couches around a ceiling mounted TV and not much else.
In other green rooms I had been in, it was common for people to make small talk with each other. Not so at Fox and Friends. People all had a nervous energy to them. I remember recognizing a frequent Fox News guest who was known for his loud, bombastic appearances on the network. In real life, he was a short, quiet man, almost mouse-like. He quietly read over printed notes to himself, testing which syllables he might hit to more deeply emphasize his points.
We were scheduled to be the last guest on the show, going live around 8:50am before the show signed off at 9:00am, but were asked to arrive plenty early. There wasn’t much else to do but sit on the couch, crane our necks up to the TV that was mounted way too high, and watch Fox and Friends.
A parade of guests come on to share news headlines, weather reports, and talk politics. It was standard morning show fare. But then, the show hosts introduced a special guest to comment on the day’s news, Donald Trump.
I was surprised when they introduced him, as I hadn’t seen the reality TV host in the green room with us. It turned out that Donald Trump was not an in person guest but rather had dialed in from his phone. There was no video feed of him, only crackly audio that sounded like an AM sports radio call-in show.
Even back then, Trump was known for non-sequiturs and a roundabout speaking style that he has come to call “the weave.” Back then, he might have started off taking a jab at President Obama, then pivoted to immigration, then talked about something random like sports or what he saw on TV, then threaten war with somebody. He sounded like the drunk at the end of the bar who knew everything but never left his barstool, a racist and less lovable Norm Peterson from Cheers.
Because he was neither in person nor on camera, the control room had no real visuals to cut away to. They might occasionally roll in a clip of archival B-Roll, but because Trump was “weaving” it was nearly impossible to cue up anything relevant. By the time the control room had a clip ready to go and roll in, Trump had already moved on to another topic.
So the director made the strange choice to keep one frame up for nearly the entire conversation, which probably lasted something like eight to ten minutes: a single wide shot of all three Fox and Friends hosts on their curvy couch, staring dead eyed into the camera while they listened to the host of The Apprentice rant and rave, his smiling face appearing as a small graphic in the bottom corner of the screen.
The hosts job seemed to be to not react. As I recall, they rarely smiled, even if Trump was making a joke. They didn’t seem to be visibly angry when he invoked inciting language. They just stared straight ahead like deer in headlights.
Looking back, you could almost zoom in to any of their faces and add funny music, “The Sound of Silence” a la The Graduate or the theme song from Curb Your Enthusiasm maybe. In my mind, their faces seemed to be communicating “just get through this.” I remember watching the segment from the green room, turning to our publicist and commenting “that’s a tough eye line to hold.”
Thinking about it as a producer and director, Trump’s appearances were not good television. Thinking about it as a fellow guest on the show, it was mildly infuriating. I had spent a week preparing for this appearance, drove a cargo van into Manhattan the night before, spent a night in a hotel away from my infant daughter, and had to wake up very early to arrive at the Fox Studios. Trump Tower, where Donald was living at the time, was one avenue over and nine blocks up. He was a 15 minute walk from Fox News at best, or a short limo ride away. My hotel the night before was further from the Fox studio than Trump Tower was.
I couldn’t quite understand why this one guest seemed to be given preferential treatment over the rest of us. Every other guest had arrived at Fox News early, checked in, had makeup applied, and waited in the green room to appear live. Trump didn’t even have a remote camera sent to his apartment. He was allowed to dial in on the phone, possibly in his bathrobe or pajamas, and was given free rein to rant as he saw fit. Even back in 2013, that felt like a dangerous precedent.
After the Trump segment wrapped, it was time to start preparing for our appearance, which was equally as enlightening about how Fox and Friends operated, at least back then.
Our segment was outdoors on the small plaza facing W 48th Street. There were a few folding tables left for us, but that was it. I was responsible for setting up the props as I saw fit, with no oversight from a producer, director, art director, or anybody else.
As props were set, Fox News talent started to trickle out onto the plaza. First was meteorologist Maria Molina. In other shows I had visited, it was typical for a producer to brief the talent on what was happening, but there was no producer in sight for our segment.
Maria thoughtfully walked through the props with our host and together, they crafted what seemed like a logical order and logical blocking for the segment. Soon after, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the former Survivor contestant and co-host of The View who had recently taken over for Gretchen Carlson at Fox, came outside. She recognized that Molina had already done a fair amount of work for this segment and asked to get caught up. Molina, Hasselbeck, and my talent again walked through the segment, with Hasselbeck making thoughtful suggestions along the way.
A few minutes before we were scheduled to go live, Brian Kilmeade came outside in what can only be described as a torrent. This was the first time I had encountered him in person, but my sense was that he was a combination of dim-witted and overly confident. He had the energy of the privileged son of the boss of a company. He wasn’t especially talented, but he was always being told that he was and walked with a swagger that showed he believed it. I was reminded of Bobby Moynihan’s caricature of Kilmeade on Saturday Night Live.
Kilmeade immediately tried to take charge of the segment just a minute or two before going live, despite the work that his female colleagues had done preparing it. He started barking orders at everybody about where to stand, what order props should be in, where the cameras should be. It was confusing and threw everybody off their game.
Moments before going live, Steve Doocy, the last of the three Fox and Friends came out. He seemed content to take a back seat to the proceedings. He was present but not especially engaged or interested in my recollection.
One of our demonstrations included smashing a window with a baseball bat to demonstrate how hurricane windows work. Elizabeth Hasselbeck was slated to swing the bat, but I realized moments before we went on that I had neglected to pack safety glasses. There were none on site, so somebody loaned her a pair of sunglasses. I also hadn’t anticipated that she was wearing stiletto heels and that broken glass would go flying. I felt bad for her as she scampered through a field of glass shards, wearing some random person’s sunglasses.
As the segment was happening, I noticed that a lot of the behind the scenes crew running the cameras and audio equipment were also Black like that first security guard I had encountered in the morning. Again, this wasn’t unusual on a TV set, but it was unexpected on a show that so blatantly trafficked in racist and white supremacist talking points.
This meant that anytime somebody on Fox News was making a racist comment on air, they weren’t just doing it with the context of one of the most diverse cities in the world outside of their windows, they were often doing it with the people they were targeting with their rhetoric less than ten feet away from them and literally within their line of sight. More cognitive dissonance.
After our segment, there was a brief commercial break, then a quick tag to end the show. Heather Nauert, who read news headlines during the broadcast and would later serve in the first Trump administration as a spokesperson for the State Department, joined for that sign off.
And then that was it.
We were left on West 48th Street to clean up our props and leave. There was nobody from production there to help us load up. I don’t remember a producer debriefing with us, good or bad. It was just over.
I had gone to Fox News because I was curious to see the inner workings of a network that was already shaping conservative thought in this country and was driving many older people to political action. What I saw was not the well oiled machine I expected, thoughtfully strategizing about how to sell the next talking point to the American public Don Draper style.
Instead, I felt like I was walking into a local news station in a small market where nobody really knew what was going on and there didn’t seem to be anybody in charge.
Furthermore, as often happens on any TV set when you see “how the sausage is made” it was clear that so much of Fox News was a veneer. It was meant to look slick and polished, but it was really just kind of duct taped together, at least metaphorically if not physically.
Donald Trump continued to be a regular presence on Fox and Friends for years to come. His appearances became dress rehearsals for his political rallies, and later, his life as a politician.
I never understood why he was given preferential treatment, by Fox and Friends when I was there in 2013 and by the larger media through the primaries and election season in 2015 and 2016. The only answer I can imagine is that as uncomfortable as his long ranting sessions felt as a viewer who did not connect with his message, those segments must have been working with viewers and Fox seemed to understand that.
In my memory, This Old House Ventures had one other appearance on Fox and Friends, this time with a New York based magazine editor showing a roundup of new home improvement tools. To my knowledge, show talent from This Old House was never invited back to the Fox bunker, nor were any show producers involved in other appearances on the network.
It seems like a strange full circle moment that This Old House and Fox and Friends may soon share a corporate parent, pending regulatory approvals. If you had told me that 13 years ago, I could never have imagined a media environment where that would be the case (although I also couldn’t imagine that the old man ranting for 10 minutes into his phone from his penthouse a few blocks away would one day be the president… twice).
As we were setting up for our segment on the Fox plaza that morning, I remember a young couple walking by. They spoke with Southern accents and were clearly tourists visiting New York. They asked what time we would be filming. Figuring they were excited to see any TV production in the big city, I mentioned that Today just a block over had a big setup in Rockefeller Plaza that morning and it might be more exciting to walk over there and see what was happening.
The couple shrugged. “We’re more… aligned with Fox. We were really just hoping to catch a glimpse of the Fox and Friends.”
Their reality was not my reality. Theirs was shaped by Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, mine was shaped by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Yet somehow, we were all American.
Media consolidation will continue in this environment, with more outlets having less and less to say. I think it’s worth remembering though that even those that seem to project the loudest voices are really flimsy when you examine them closer.
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Related Reading
This Old House is a Climate Change Show
Some Personal Memories of Roger Cook
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