On the day after the Susan Rice story broke, the New York Times made an elliptical reference to it on A16. The paper had more important matters to cover on the front page, principal among them the fate of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News television host under attack in the media for allegedly harassing female employees.
Has he harassed them? Who knows? The matter is impossible to referee, given that the cases in questions have all been confidentially settled. It is certainly possible that O’Reilly asked female subordinates out, spoke indecently to some of them, and punished those who didn’t respond. It is also possible that O’Reilly is the target of opportunists. One would think the media’s all-hands-on-deck coverage might center on determining the guilt or innocence of O’Reilly. But it doesn’t. It instead focuses on secondary “questions” that the matter raises: Will this or that company boycott his show? Will guests continue to appear on it? Will Fox News executives stand by him?
By fixating on questions that presuppose his guilt rather than prove it, the media’s coverage appears political, not journalistic, which helps explain why viewers haven’t defected from his show. If anything, it appears that they are cleaving to him even more tightly. His ratings rose this week.
If the media did some fresh reporting establishing his guilt, that might end his career. But merely repeating reports of settlements and unresolved questions won’t. It is true that various currents around the scandal of Roger Ailes make O’Reilly more vulnerable, but so far Fox executives are standing by him, if only tepidly. They issued a lawyerly statement in his defense, which suggests that they probably wouldn’t mind if O’Reilly left on his own in a year or so, but they are not going to fire him unless new cases emerge.
O’Reilly’s strategy, meanwhile, is to stay silent and let the storm pass. He has now received a defense from President Trump, which intensifies the political dimension of the story and turns it into one more front in the left/right wars. This gives the media even more reason to go in for the kill.
This is the same media, of course, that defended Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy against allegations far worse than the ones facing O’Reilly. The public can be excused for finding the media’s supposedly high moral purpose in running O’Reilly off the airwaves less than convincing, given the protection it affords goatish Democrats whose politics it happens to like. A large segment of the public has also grown tired of the ideological panics around feminism, which have left the careers of people hit with nebulous charges in ruins. That is one of the reasons why the Billy Bush episode didn’t sink Trump. The feminist left has cried wolf too many times.
So when people hear that the National Organization for Women is demanding the immediate resignation of O’Reilly, they just shrug. And truth be told, a lot of women in America (this also contributed to Trump’s victory) also roll their eyes at a feminist culture of over-accusation. The media assumes that they automatically identify with O’Reilly’s accusers, but do they? It could be that the media’s oversimplified narratives are leaving people too bored to care about its attempted purges. If so, O’Reilly will survive its latest one.
George Neumayr (@george_neumayr) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a contributing editor to The American Spectator and the co-author of “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.”
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