USA TODAY International Edition
O’REILLY OUT AT FOX, BUT IS CHANGE IN?
Generational turnover might not be enough to change toxic environment for women
Jill:
What does it take to get fired from Fox News? Apparently $ 13 million in sexual harassment settlements isn’t enough, but fleeing advertisers are another story altogether. Money talks, even louder than a defense from President Trump.
Of course, supportive words from the self- acknowledged p--- y grabber in chief may have hurt Bill O’Reilly more than they helped him. Trump’s relationship with both facts and sexual propriety is so tenuous, furthermore, that when he calls O’Reilly a “good person” and says, “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong,” you’d be fairly safe in assuming the exact opposite.
O’Reilly’s forced departure is an encore that follows former Fox News chief Roger Ailes’ exit for similar reasons — and after Trump similarly defended him as a “very, very good person.” Both developments are a positive step for women and for Fox News, but the culture there is still sexist and toxic. Maybe the Fearless Girl statue should be moved a few dozen blocks uptown from Wall Street to Fox headquarters.
David:
The cultural shift coming at Fox is huge. O’Reilly, born in 1949, is out, to be replaced at 8 p. m. by Tucker Carlson, born in 1969. A big part of the toxic culture at Fox was the result of leadership by Baby Boomers and folks like Ailes who were born during World War II.
Generation Xers like Carlson and myself have never worked in a time when powerful women in business and the media were an aberration. And while O’Reilly was a part of the launch of Fox News back in 1996 and stayed with the network for more than two decades, Carlson has bounced from network to network, spending years at liberal cable news networks CNN and MSNBC. Hopefully, that broader industry experience will stick.
The more important question to me is whether Fox News is going to grow into a mature news organization. In 2015, Fox News stood behind O’Reilly despite the fact he was shown to have lied about his reporting adventures, in particular fabricating war- zone exploits. The truth mattered less than ratings. Now that the fact-challenged anchor is out, will Tucker and Fox do better?
Jill:
One of the best things about journalism is the extent to which it is a meritocracy. You rise or fall on whether you can do the work. Television has always had an element of how you look, but in recent years the focus at some networks has edged closer to where it should be: Can you dig up the story? Get the facts right? Conduct a newsmaking interview? Think on your feet during a breaking story, and keep those feet out of your mouth?
Except on Fox, a sort of midtown Manhattan Lake Wobegon, where the women are blonde, the women are good- looking, and the women have above- average legs.
When Fox News managed to find Megyn Kelly, a blonde, beautiful woman with good legs who also happened to be one of the sharpest journalists working today, the network drove her away.
I’m skeptical that Fox is really ending its Mad Men era. It’s got a lot of evolving to do before its onair image reflects hiring priorities different from, say, a modeling agency. I’m going to be hard to convince. I was watching live in 2008 when ( now former) Fox News host E. D. Hill — blonde and beautiful, naturally — wondered whether a playful fist bump between Barack and Michelle Obama was a “terrorist fist jab.” Argh.
David:
It’s a fact of life that TV news factors looks into judging talent, and that goes for the men, too. Men have to project just the right image of gravitas and virili- ty. Often this involves a chin dimple and just the right peppering of gray hair. That’s not going to change at Fox, just as looks will remain part of the calculus on all the other networks that do news.
What I will be looking for is something deeper — whether Fox News can stick to its identity as a conservative network with a different set of news values while still upholding a mission to seek truth and hold those in power accountable. In a time when so few Americans trust the mainstream news media, Fox holds an incredible amount of power.
Millions of Fox viewers voted for Trump and have watched him flip- flop on issue after issue, from Chinese currency manipulation to corporate subsidies through the Export- Import Bank. A strong Fox can use the trust it has built with its conservative viewers to hold Trump accountable and represent the interests of those whose faith Trump is betraying. A Fox News hobbled by fleeing advertisers and new sexual harassment scandals won’t have the independence to stand up for its viewers. We’ll all lose if Fox doesn’t get it right now.
David Mastio, a libertarian conservative, is the deputy editor of USA TODAY’s Editorial Page. Jill Lawrence, a center- left liberal, is the commentary editor of USA TODAY.