![]() ![]() Stoking and fuelling his viewers’ outrage was, essentially, his business. Yet few television personalities commanded as loyal and vocal an audience as Bill O’Reilly did. ![]() That shouldn’t be enough to keep the leaders of a multi-billion-dollar company up at night. Yes, his show brought in more than a hundred million dollars in revenue last year, and his ratings are great, but losing O’Reilly might mean the loss of no more than thirty or so million dollars, directly. Kelefa SannehĪt first glance, Fox News’s decision about whether to keep or remove Bill O’Reilly could be seen as one with relatively minor financial stakes. And, from time to time, he has shown himself willing to aim the force of his industrial-strength skepticism toward the current Administration. ![]() But that doesn’t mean Carlson always supports the President. On the eve of war, he said that he was inclined to support Bush, but added, “Nobody knows for sure what the absolute right thing to do is.”) Carlson, who is something of a contrarian, loves to criticize the most intemperate critics of President Trump, and he can be particularly withering on the topic of immigration. (In fact, O’Reilly’s support for the war in Iraq was more lukewarm than most people remember. The network developed a reputation, in the aughts, for being ferociously loyal to President George W. It seems possible, though, that Tucker Carlson’s promotion to the eight-o’clock slot that O’Reilly is vacating will, in a small but noticeable way, change the way people think about what Fox News does. And nothing about the network’s public response to the latest scandal has conveyed the impression that it is eager to remake its corporate culture. But much of the old guard remains: the network’s co-president is Bill Shine, who is known as Ailes’s former right-hand man. ![]() of Fox News, Roger Ailes-suggests that the network’s old way of operating has become unsustainable. The departure of Bill O’Reilly-like the departure, last summer, of the founding C.E.O. The most chilling detail may be that, as the scandal was breaking, in early April, O’Reilly’s nightly ratings went up. Why would Fox News do anything about any of this? After all, O’Reilly’s enormous audience had remained loyal. Sure, in 2006, he mocked a girl who’d been raped and murdered for, among other things, her choice of outfit, saying, “ Every predator in the world is going to pick that up at two o’clock in the morning.” Sure, two years earlier, he’d threatened Andrea Mackris, a producer at the network, who had accused him of-among many other things-fantasizing on the phone about taking a shower with her and fondling her body with a “ falafel thing.” (He meant a loofah.) And, sure, his teen-age daughter told a court examiner that she’d seen O’Reilly choke his ex-wife and drag her down the stairs by the neck. O’Reilly, whose annual salary at Fox was eighteen million dollars, had cultivated an audience who didn’t mind his coarseness and aggression toward women. The decision to offload the network star (months after losing Megyn Kelly, whose departure is said to have been influenced by O’Reilly’s open, apparently sanctioned sexism) didn’t come out of moral rectitude rather, a combination of outraged women inside the company, vanishing advertisers, and mounting protest seems to have forced the Murdochs’ hand. In 2002, the network paid out the first of five harassment settlements, which would eventually amount to thirteen million dollars spent on his behalf to compensate female complainants. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.Ĭredit where it’s due: Fox News finally got rid of Bill O’Reilly, a mere decade and a half after finding out that he was a flamboyant workplace harasser. Bill O'Reilly, the longtime Fox News star, is leaving the channel amid reports of sexual-harassment allegations made against him. ![]()
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