Pressure mounted on Tuesday for Fox News to take action against its top-rated host, Bill O’Reilly, as a series of prominent companies pulled advertising from his show and a leading women’s rights group called for his ouster.
Following an investigation by the New York Times over the weekend that revealed multiple settlements [with payouts totaling $13 million] over allegations of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by Mr. O’Reilly, the network faced a major advertising revolt as more than a dozen marketers said that they were withdrawing their ads from the O’Reilly Factor. Escalating the tension, the National Organization for Women called for Mr. O’Reilly to be fired and said an independent investigation should be conducted into the culture at Fox News.
(New York Times, April 4, 2017)
Famed attorney Gloria Allred represents many of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. Her daughter Lisa Bloom represents one of the many who have accused Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment.
Of course, these accusations against O’Reilly come on the heels of similar ones that forced Fox News to fire its founding chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes. This is why Bloom can be forgiven for advancing her cause by alluding to her mother’s:
This is not my first case against Fox News and I don’t expect it will be my last. …
It’s already been dozens and dozens of women … to have come out against Roger Ailes and now Bill O’Reilly and others. …
This network is the Bill Cosby of corporate America.
(CNN, April 2, 2017)
Mind you, she would have been fairer and more accurate to assert that Bill O’Reilly is the Bill Cosby of cable television. Indeed, the number of women coming out of the woodwork suggests that O’Reilly has harassed just as many women as Cosby has assaulted.
This is why Fox News will fire O’Reilly in due course. It’s the only way it can prevent the continuing flight of advertisers and recapture those who have already flown the coop. It’s also the only way Fox can atone for the moral turpitude of resigning him to a very lucrative contract knowing full well that he was every bit as compromised as Ailes.
Incidentally, it hardly helps that President Trump has vouched for his character. This, after all, is the same notorious “grab them by the pussy” creep who vouched for Ailes’s to no avail.
What’s more, Trump is so clueless, I doubt it even occurred to him that, in defending O’Reilly, he was making a mockery of April as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, which the White House proclaimed in his name, without any hint of irony, just days ago.
After commenting on the accusations against Ailes, however, there’s hardly any socially redeeming value, and even less titillation, in commenting any further on those against O’Reilly.
In fact, what I find most interesting about the unfolding O’Reilly scandal is the comment former Fox News contributor Jedediah Bila made about the “strict dress code” Ailes enforced:
People always say ‘Why didn’t you wear pants?’ You notice I wear pants a lot here. I didn’t wear pants because I wasn’t given a pants option. I had to choose skirts.
(ABC News, April 4, 2017)
It’s noteworthy that Bila shared this as part of a panel discussion on The View marking Equal Pay Day. But the reason I find it so interesting is that it affirms the cheeky observation I made about all of the women of Fox News in “Women Complain Fox News Head, Roger Ailes, Has Dick for Brains,” July 20, 2016.
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Close friends will tell you that I have often decried the way all “prominent Fox News women” seem to abide a dress code that requires them to bare as much leg and wear as much makeup as possible.
Watching them, as I do on occasion for ‘fair and balanced’ news reporting, I always get the sense that they look more like beauty pageant contestants than cable news reporters. What’s more, camera shots invariably reinforce the impression that tits and butts are every bit as important as brains and skills.
Frankly, their objectification is such that Fox News women are often barely distinguishable from the vaudevillian ‘Benny Hill foxes.’ Hence, one can hardly blame Ailes for at least thinking of them, eponymously, as his Fox News foxes.
Far more troubling, though, is the rumor that he hired women based solely on whether or not he found them ‘f**kable.’ After all, these allegations not only give credence to that rumor, but also make it impossible to watch Fox News women henceforth without wondering what sexual favors they performed to get, and are performing to keep, their jobs. What little professional credibility they had has now been shot.
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Finally, apropos of affirming another of my observations, there’s this tidbit about the professional credibility of all Fox News foxes being shot:
A new lawsuit against Fox News and its former chairman Roger Ailes has been filed by an on-air contributor [Julie Roginsky of The Five] claiming that she was discriminated against when she refused Ailes’ sexual advances — and was recruited to defend him amidst sexual harassment claims by another female host.
Roginsky claims Ailes would also make comments to her about other on-air talent who she appeared alongside on The Five.
‘For example, Ailes stated that Kimberly Guilfoyle would ‘get on her knees for anyone,” the complaint reads.
(BuzzFeedNews, April 3, 2017)
Fox News markets itself as a Christian sanctuary in a wasteland of moral degeneracy. But these scandals expose it as just a proverbial Peyton Place.
Related commentaries:
Women Complain Fox News head…