By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 5/10 12:00pm

Foxholes

Joe Muto (Photo via Facebook).

‘Fox News Mole’ Joe Muto Had His Day in Court

Joe Muto, a former producer on the O’Reilly Factor who wrote anonymous posts for Gawker about Fox News until he was nabbed and fired from the network, pled guilty yesterday in Manhattan Criminal Court to two misdemeanor charges–attempted unlawful duplication of computer related material and attempted criminal possession of computer-related material.

As part of his plea deal, Mr. Muto was fined $1,000, agreed to give his $5,000 Gawker fee to Reel Works, a  free filmmaking project for New York teens, and sentenced to 10 days and an additional 200 hours of community service. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 5/02/12 10:45am

off the record

joemuto

‘Fox Mole’ Joe Muto Shops Memoir

Can’t say no one saw this coming: Gawker’s Fox News informant, Joe Muto, is taking meetings with publishers this week for a proposed book about his eight years inside the cable news network, tentatively titled An Atheist in the Foxhole.

Mr. Muto, a former associate producer for Bill O’Reilly, was identified and fired by Fox Read More

By Foster Kamer 2:57pm

QUESTIONS THAT ARE NOT RHETORICAL

joe muto

Has The Fox Mole Really Been Blackballed from Media Jobs?

Just a few days after Gawker introduced their recent and short-lived foray into corporate espionage-cum-pranksterism in the form of The Fox News Mole, one Joe Muto found himself on CNN, speaking with Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources about the week he’d just had. In that interview, he explained that he was “completely blackballed within the cable news industry after working at FOX News,” which is to say nothing of how his job prospects might be now (“it’s pretty safe to say my career in cable news is over”). Is it, though? Read More

By Foster Kamer 4/12/12 5:45pm

fox mole

The Annotated Gawker Legal Threat: What Fox News Lawyers Fired Off at Their ‘Mole’ Problem

Well, it wasn’t long, but Gawker’s Fox News Mole, Joe Muto, was nabbed. Meanwhile, sometime after Fox News chief Roger Ailes joked to the New York Times‘ David Carr about the incident (“‘I am the Fox Mole,’ he told me, then quickly added. ‘Who cares? We have nothing to hide.’”) Roger Ailes and Fox News demonstrated just how much they care. By sending to Gawker a vague legal threat with the clear aim of scaring the blog posts back into Muto’s id, where they will never emerge from again.

Naturally, Gawker published that legal threat (alongside an old picture of Bill O’Reilly with topless women, of course). Entertaining as it is, we’ve taken the liberty of annotating the best parts of Fox’s legal letter to Gawker, right here: Read More