Bill O’Reilly may or may not be out. The Washington Post says he reportedly is, which means it’s hedging.
According to a New York magazine report Wednesday, O’Reilly is being forced out.
Is being…so it’s a process so it’s not being reported as a fait accompli yet.
A once-unthinkable move had begun to seem inevitable. Multiple news outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, reported Tuesday night that Fox News was preparing to sack the King of Cable News, as advertisers fled his top-rated program in response to a New York Times report that O’Reilly and the network have paid $13 million to five women over the years to settle claims of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. Murdoch also owns Fox News.
Earlier Tuesday, attorney Lisa Bloom said she had taken the case of a sixth woman who claims O’Reilly sexually harassed her.
Fox still has top ratings, and O’Reilly still has top of the top – but oh guess what, top ratings don’t do you a bit of good if advertisers won’t touch you. The entire point of high ratings is that they command top advertising dollar. If the ad dollars=no not at any price, ratings become meaningless.
There’s also, Callum Borchers says, the intangible of reputation or image.
Besides principles of right and wrong, which are not always paramount in business, there was Fox News’s brand image to consider. Sexual harassment allegations pushed out Ailes, and with similar accusations dogging O’Reilly, the network appeared hostile to women.
A company’s reputation is a difficult thing to quantify, but consider this, from the Department of Anecdotal Evidence: As of Monday, the Fox affiliate in Boston, the nation’s ninth-largest media market, will change the name of its local newscast from “Fox 25 News” to “Boston 25 News” because it considers the Fox brand a liability.
My first thought about Fox would be that it doesn’t give a flying fuck about image, not even brand image – but my second is that if brand image is causing advertisers to flee, then of course yes it does.
It would be nice to think the toppling of BillO means the beginning of a wave of male bullies being pushed out of the corridors of power…but it’s not going to happen.
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7 responses to “Will Bill go splat?”
One straw into the wind (NYMag) :
Sources: Fox News Has Decided Bill O’Reilly Has to Go
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/sources-fox-news-has-decided-bill-oreilly-has-to-go.html?mid=twitter-share-di
Update fail. Sorry all, read the next item for more.
Bill’s only mistake was to get caught. If he had been able to keep the women from coming forward (and apparently FOX has tried that over the years) he would still be the fair haired boy. They don’t really care that he harassed women, only that he was found out.
It also demonstrates how having high ratings isn’t the only thing. Obviously they can still deliver plenty of eyes to advertisers, but the advertisers have to worry about the rest of their customer base, those that find this distasteful. They can’t afford to take that risk.
Maybe Fox needs advertisers who are as deplorable, consistently, across-the-board, as their audiences. (I’m not going to help them, mind you.) They’re part of an information echo chamber that hasn’t yet developed into a closed commercial one.
It’d probably help them if their politicians DID complete getting their way and their businesses could exclude all the Wrong People without punishing litigation. And contrariwise, it’s because we DO have some measure of that still operating in the U.S. that we don’t have full-on apartheid keeping O’Reilly well-employed and well-advertised on White Male TV.
Jeff, Fox probably thought they did. And they were right too; if it hadn’t been for those pesky human eyeballs complaining with their wallets. Shades of the United Skies.
It just goes to show something that’s plain to see, but bears repeating now and then: viewers are not TV networks’ customers. Viewers are the product they’re selling. The customers are the advertisers. So little wonder Faux dropped Bill when the customers started shopping elsewhere.
Thirteen million in hus-money buys you, perhaps, a decade of license to carry on bullying and pussy-grabbing.
Of course all the rest of his lying and bullying never counted. E.g. inventing a ‘Paris Business Journal’ to support his claim that his ‘boycott’ of France had actually harmed the French economy. Comforting the tin-foil hat crowd with bellicose lying keeps the revenue flowing.
If Ailes hadn’t been brought down, would OReilly have been given a pass, or wrist slap? Trumps viva voce admission didn’t seem to have enough traction to affect HIM>