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| Credit: Gawker.com |
Less than
24 hours after Gawker introduced “The Fox Mole,” an anonymous columnist for the
news and gossip site and current employee of Fox News Channel, Fox said it
figured out associate producer Joe Muto was leaking inside information, and
announced that he has been fired.
“Joe Muto
is fired effective April 12. Once the network determined that Mr. Muto was the
main culprit in less than 24 hours, he was suspended late today while we
pursued concurrent avenues. We are continuing to explore legal recourse against
Mr. Muto and possibly others,” a Fox spokesman said Wednesday.
Muto was
still blogging about Fox on Wednesday afternoon. In a post on Gawker, the mole
wrote, “So Fox’s PR team has been telling people that they have ‘found’ me and are
presently ‘exploring legal options.’ If Fox has smoked me out, it’s news to me.
I’m still here. Back to work.”
In response
to that, a Fox rep told Mediaite, “We know who it is.”
Muto
described being confronted by Fox in a later Gawker post: “Two hours ago I was
called into a meeting with Dianne Brandi, the Fox News Executive Vice President
of Legal and Business Affairs and suspended indefinitely … with pay, oddly
enough. They nailed me. In the end, it was the digital trail that gave me away.
They knew that someone, using my computer login, had accessed the sources for
two videos that ended up on Gawker over the past few weeks. They couldn’t prove
it entirely, but I was pretty much the only suspect.”
Muto said
he first denied it, “which is why they didn’t fire me outright.”
A Fox rep
told ABCNews.com that Muto is no longer being paid and does not work at the
company as of today.
Muto’s
first column which debuted Tuesday, promised to deliver privileged information
from Fox News’ headquarters. Its first post included previously unseen video of
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney discussing horseback riding with
Fox News host Sean Hannity. The second post featured photos of the company’s
bathrooms and a description of the “dreary” newsroom, where staffers are
“constant worrying about an infestation from bedbugs, mice or some other
vermin.”
In
Tuesday’s column, Muto explained that after years working at the news network,
“the final straw for me came last year.” The main point of contention: The Fox
Nation, a news aggregator, described as “an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report,
the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting.”
Muto knew
the end was coming, but wanted to go down in flames: “I am leaving. Sooner
rather than later, I’m guessing. But I can’t just leave quietly, can I? Where’s
the fun in that?”
Conde Nast dealt with its own mole last year, when a staffer at the magazine publisher’s
headquarters launched a Twitter account dedicated to real and imagined musings
from inside the building’s elevators. @Condeelevator amassed more than 80,000
followers in a matter of days, but the person behind it shut down the account
before management found them, tweeting “Love my job. Better stop.”
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