Fox Lost Bill O’Reilly, But It Still Has Donald Trump

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Bill O’Reilly filled a need for Fox News, as it built its brand and its culture. But, in the Trump era, it doesn’t really require him for that anymore.Bill O’Reilly filled a need for Fox News, as it built its brand and its culture. But, in the Trump era, it doesn’t really require him for that anymore.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY JOE ROBBINS / GETTY

There was a time, in the clouded days of January, 2016, before the Iowa caucuses, when Donald Trump was very angry at Fox News—or, rather, at a woman at Fox News, Megyn Kelly, who, he thought, had forgotten her place. Kelly had asked him, during the first Republican-primary debate, a few months earlier, about his demonstrable record of misogyny, and so he had refused to appear in an upcoming debate that the network was hosting, and of which Kelly would be a moderator. Trump talked about boycotting Fox altogether, but he was willing to go on Bill O’Reilly’s show, to be cajoled and flattered, and to deride Kelly. (“I have zero respect for Megyn Kelly. I don’t think she’s very good at what she does. I think she’s highly overrated.”) At the time, there was more than one sexual-harassment suit pending that involved O’Reilly’s treatment of his female colleagues, and a custody case that O’Reilly lost several weeks later, after, according to press reports, one of his daughters told a court examiner that she had seen him choking her mother and dragging her down a flight of stairs. (O’Reilly denied the abuse, as he has other charges of wrongdoing.) But none of that seems to have given O’Reilly any inkling that he might, in this very public setting, want to be seen as standing up for a colleague. Instead, he tried to persuade Trump that he should do the debate, because it would give him another chance to insult Kelly in person.

“You have, in this debate format, the upper hand,” O’Reilly told Trump. “You have sixty seconds right off the top to tell any of the moderators, ‘You’re a pinhead, your question is unfair, and here’s why, and here’s what I want to say.’ ” Again and again, he told Trump how “strong” he would look when he put the moderators down; how strong Trump was, in general; and that Americans deserved the chance to witness Trump’s strength. The closest O’Reilly came to defending Kelly was when he said that the general substance of her question hadn’t been entirely out of bounds, though he would have asked it a very different way. Otherwise, he responded to the trashing of his colleague with a reminder to Trump that the two of them had a social bond—“I bought you so many vanilla milkshakes”—that should be factored into Trump’s decision to do something that might harm Fox. O’Reilly concluded by praising Trump for being there and for just being Trump: “I don’t know any politician under these circumstances that would have come on in here and done what you did tonight. I just don’t know any.” Spending fifteen minutes with your core audience is not exactly bravery, but Trump had no problem taking the compliment.

“And, by the way, this is much tougher than the debate,” Trump said. “Bill, this is much tougher being with you, because frankly, you’re smarter. This is much tougher than doing the debate with Megyn Kelly, believe me.” “Well, that’s why you should do it and have fun tomorrow night,” O’Reilly replied. It could all have served as a set piece illustrating the dismissiveness with which women fear that they will be treated, made much worse by imagining what O’Reilly and Trump might have said to each other once when the camera was not recording them.

Gabriel Sherman, who has written definitive accounts of the network’s outrageous treatment of women, reported that the failure of O’Reilly and Fox News’s head, Roger Ailes, and other colleagues to defend Kelly was a turning point for her. “She felt she put herself out there,” a source told Sherman—that is, attempted to act as something other than a propagandist in the debate. (Kelly hasn’t always been consistent in that regard.) In return, she was receiving death threats from Trump supporters. When, finally, last summer, Gretchen Carlson, a former co-host of “Fox and Friends,” filed a harassment suit against Ailes and the network, Kelly stood by her, instead of by her boss. Other women did, too. And the sheer number of stories made it increasingly impossible for Fox News; its parent company, New Corp; and its main owners, the Murdoch family, to pretend that they were dealing with isolated incidents rather than with a toxic and hostile work environment.

Ailes was forced out in July, 2016, on a day when much of his team was in Cleveland, at the Republican National Convention, to herald Trump’s nomination. Two weeks ago, the Times published a story about additional cases involving O’Reilly; as with earlier reports, they appeared to reveal a man who believed that he had the right both to sexually impinge upon and to degrade the women he worked with—and, indeed, that for him those two modes of interacting with women were not entirely distinct. The Times reported that, over the years, the network paid at least thirteen million dollars to settle suits concerning O’Reilly’s behavior. O’Reilly’s response to the story was to issue an attack on the character of the women who had had the temerity to complain—“individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity,” he called them. “The worst part of my job is being a target for those who would harm me and my employer, the Fox News Channel. Those of us in the arena are constantly at risk, as are our families and children.” The worst part of his job, actually, is the way that O’Reilly used the position to harm people around him and, through the politicians he helped elect, those he would never meet. O’Reilly repeated his complaint about being a target in a statement that he issued on Wednesday, after he lost his job while on vacation in Rome. The payout on his contract, which Fox News extended earlier this year, will, reportedly, be substantial.

What comes across most strongly, looking back on that Trump-O’Reilly interview, is the spectacle of two men ignoring the core problem raised by Trump’s comments about women: the effect of such views on women’s lives. That is who O’Reilly is and who Trump is. Their capacity for disdain is also, in large measure, a large part of what Fox News—and the wider conservative movement—long seemed to value in both of them. They offered crude showmanship, the stoking of resentments, the grumbling assumption that all liberals are idiots, and a political agenda that scorned and burdened the most vulnerable, in the manner of bullies, which both men are. Perhaps Bill O’Reilly filled a need for Fox News, as it built its brand and its culture. But it doesn’t really require him for that anymore. The network can always invite the President of the United States on, or just point a camera at him and let him speak. O’Reilly has lost his job, but Trump is just getting started with his. “I know Bill,” Trump said in an interview with the Times, after the paper had run the story about the settlements, which he thought never should have been paid. “Bill’s a good person. I don’t think Bill would do anything wrong.”

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