Fox News, Bill O’Reilly and the odious factor
“Say you’re a cocaine dealer,” said Bill O’Reilly once on TV to a black guest, “and you kinda look like one.”
The guest was Marc Lamont Hill, then a Columbia University professor.
Two can play that game, Bill. You kinda look like a sexual predator. Powerful, entitled, unsavory, icky. A man who, in 2004, made a $9-million settlement with The O’Reilly Factor producer Andrea Mackris, who had accused him of talking to her about his own sexual encounters over the phone, and sharing his fantasies about her, with her, all while masturbating audibly. Eww. O’Reilly, the hate whisperer, the nightly normalizer of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, is out of his job as prime-time news anchor for Fox News, losing his recently signed $18-million (U.S.)-a-year contract some three weeks after a New York Times investigation exposed how he and Fox News had settled five sexual harassment allegations over 15 years.
Not office romances (in themselves problematic for potential power imbalances) but allegations of sexual harassment — unwanted lewdness with women.
What kind of an egotistical bubble must a man inhabit to not know — or not care — that his advances are undesirable?
One who lives among fawners and beyond accountability.
If you’ve never experienced harassment on the phone, you might wonder, why not just hang up? Simple answer: fear. Sometimes, you’re ambushed and you don’t know how to react. Other times, for all your revulsion, you know that outright rejection is untenable to the fragile ego at the other end of the line, that it will be just as futile — or dangerous — as any threat of exposure. So how do you mitigate the risks and protect yourself?
Mackris recorded the conversations. As did Rebecca Gomez Dia- mond, Fox host of Happy Hour, who made similar allegations in 2011.
The scandals that have dogged O’Reilly for years have included allegations of rage and violence at home.
In 2015, the online newsite Gawker reported that his teenage daughter told a court during a divorce custody hearing how she saw him choking her mother and dragging her down a few stairs with his fingers around her neck.
O’Reilly’s odiousness lay not in his espousal of right-wing views — much as he and his fan base want to believe his ouster is a left-wing conspiracy. No, it lay in the disrespect with which he discussed those issues.
I don’t have cable TV, so I was not well versed with O’Reilly’s show. Escape it as you try, however, nuggets trickle through other media.
Over the years, he made his contempt for women obvious.
Around this time last year, he said women might use the guise of “health issues” and choose to have abortions for a reason as flimsy as a migraine. Does anybody know women who choose to abort for any but the most serious of reasons — financial, emotional, physical?
In the summer of 2015, as he defended the right of bakers to not bake for gay weddings, he created a ludicrous equivalence by asking — should bakers be forced to bake for Nazis even if they didn’t agree with their philosophies?
The superficiality of his arguments made me not take O’Reilly seriously. I was mildly offended a few years ago when Jon Stewart hosted him on the Daily Show and proceeded to verbally spar with him in a friendly way that sanitized his boorishness. I was therefore surprised to discover recently that some 4 million viewers tuned into O’Reilly’s show each night.
Given his popularity and that these allegations were nothing new, why was O’Reilly sacked this time around?
Had Fox discovered it had a heart, after all? Having entertained such a thought, allow an image of Rupert Murdoch’s icy visage to float before your eyes. Now shake your head vigorously so as to rid it of such silliness.
Was it the absence of protector CEO Roger Ailes, himself booted over sex-assault allegations?
Was it just the losses from advertisers who finally pulled out?
Activists had been pressuring advertisers to pull out of The O’Reilly Factor for at least two years over his racism and sexism. So why now? Business pressures, for one: 20th Century Fox is trying to keep its hands clean in a bid to take over U.K. broadcaster Sky, an attempt that was thwarted previously after a phone-hacking scandal involving Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.
We can also thank the U.S. president. As Donald Trump was rewarded richly despite his own brand of lewdness, awareness of sexual assault grew and with it came backlash.
Women’s groups organized in resistance and kept up the pressure. We are finally reaching a point where workplace sexual harassment is starting to stigmatize the perpetrator, not the victim.
Hours before Fox announced O’Reilly’s departure, women were protesting outside its headquarters in New York.
In the face of these relentless pressures, Fox finally wilted. Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar.
Time, gentlemen.
Of course the last thing Fox News superstar Bill O’Reilly, ousted this week in the wake of multiple allegations of sexual harassment, and his former boss Roger Ailes, canned last July for the same thing, can be called is gentlemen.
But let’s see them one by one off the stage properly, shall we, in a significant cultural moment that online news site the Daily Beast described as “Twilight of the Creeps.”
These big, brash, ego-driven, blowhard men. These “I can do anything I want to you because I’m powerful” tyrants. These “I’ll destroy you if you tell on me” predators.
Roger Ailes. Bill O’Reilly. Donald Tr— well let’s leave their friend and supporter, the president of the United States, who has cheerfully admitted on tape to grabbing women in their private parts, out of it for the time being.
Let’s concentrate on O’Reilly, 67, the latest of the Fox News giants to topple. The popular and populist host on Fox News, whose annual salary was about $18 million (U.S.) in 2016, may have been photographed this week shaking hands in Rome with the Pope while on vacation (hope His Holiness washed his hand after). But he is now out of a job. Not only have there been multiple allegations that O’Reilly, who just published another bestselling book, Old School, on good old American values — including treating women respectfully — harassed, intimidated and diminished the women who worked with him.
They reported unwanted advances, sexual innuendo and phone calls during which O’Reilly seemed to be masturbating.
But as the New York Times revealed only weeks ago, since at least 2004, there were five settlements totalling $13 million, some of them secretly paid by his employers, to keep his accusers quiet.
A terse announcement from O’Reilly’s employers, 21st Century Fox, owned by the Murdoch family, said that after a “thorough and careful review of the allegations,” O’Reilly would not be returning to the network. There was word of more accusers in the wings.
Right from its start, Fox created a top-down, hostile work environment for even its most successful female hosts, including Megyn Kelly, who has decamped to NBC, and Gretchen Carlson, the brave soul and former anchor who got the ball rolling last year with her allegations of harassment against Roger Ailes.
Carlson, awarded a multimilliondollar settlement, is forbidden from commenting on her former network.
But she has become a vigorous advocate against sexual harassment.
Yet this was less an unmitigated victory for women in the workplace than it was a careful business decision made by Fox’s owners, primarily the sons of Rupert Murdoch, after O’Reilly’s show lost half its advertisers in the wake of the New York Times investigative piece
As feminist author Sady Doyle tartly tweeted: “May we all see our workplace harassers fired after 15 to 20 straight years of repeated and often nearly identical allegations.”
It’s a start. It’s a message. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “seismic shift” in the treatment of sexual harassers, these are very big men to bring down in a wider culture that is gradually tolerating less and less abuse of women.
That O’Reilly was taken down is a testament to investigative reporting (that New York Times story), public response on social media and the quick action of women’s groups who sensed that the time was right to call for his ouster.
When advertisers including Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai pulled their ads, more businesses followed.
This chain of action/reaction may be the new template to rid the workplace of famous and powerful sexual harassers.
The fact that Fox News and the U.S. conservative movement basically invented each other and flourished together these past two decades is also meaningful in this mess.
And while many of Fox’s more devoted viewers will believe O’Reil- ly’s claim that these are “unfounded” allegations, many will also look at their wives, sisters and daughters and think, this wasn’t right and he nearly got away with it.
I have no time for enablers who sneer that O’Reilly’s accusers should have just walked away or put him in his place or chosen not to sue for big money.
Lisa Bloom, a U.S. attorney acting for several accusers, told CNN that at least three of them haven’t asked “for a penny.”
And unless you’ve actually had your entire career threatened by a powerful superior who comes after you sexually and makes it clear that compliance is part of your job, don’t you dare say how easy it is to rebuff these bosses. It isn’t and it never has been.
What bothers me is the lack of bystander support. Men or other women who know a colleague is being harassed should stand by them as they report it.
I saw a shameful clip of O’Reilly last March spouting a racist, sexist slur against congresswoman Maxine Waters, African American, 78, and fervently anti-Trump. O’Reilly said dismissively he hadn’t heard a word she said because he was too busy concentrating on her “James Brown wig.”
Waters demolished him in a public statement. O’Reilly apologized and survived long enough to announce he was going on vacation, urging his viewers to “guess where Bill is going.”
In the wake of his dismissal, I think I can speak for millions of women: Frankly, we don’t give a damn. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.