O’Reilly’s Reign Ends: Lyin’ Liar Finally Gets Fired

Now that FOX NOOZ has finally fired their resident sexist sociopath, A.K.A. Bill O’Reilly, questionable eulogies of his career have started. Some reporters and commentators are ascribing his downfall to macho behavior in the workplace gone bad. And yet, they’re also romanticizing his rise and fall as some kind of Great American Tragedy. These storytellers aren’t working for the mediacorp owned by FOX, but they’re still taking their cues from his ex-employer. They’re still ignoring the basic truthiness about O’Reilly’s story.

Yeah, it was pretty unfortunate that, after having so many inappropriate and illegal and costly interactions with women, he finally got canned. Too bad. Boo-hoo. How sad. How unbelievably stupid of him. But tragic?

The real tragedy here was that O’Reilly denigrated and physiologically harmed so many women for so long and got away with it and still kept his job…along with his huge salary.

Now THAT’S pathetic. Shame on O’Reilly the sociopathic employee, and shame on FOX the sociopathic employer.

What’s especially troubling, though, are the illustrious accolades FOX kept bestowing on him for his so-called job performance. Management did it when he worked at FOX, and now that he’s their ex-employee, they’re still doing it. As if all that aggrandizement is going to come back to haunt O’Reilly in the form of another highly lucrative job.

By publicly giving him credit for things he never accomplished or affected, O’Reilly’s bosses puffed him up to an undeserved level of excellence. So he never was THAT good. But FOX said he was, so people believed he was.

Of course, laws do prohibit ex-employer FOX from publicly bad mouthing ex-employee Bill O’Reilly. Why, laws even prohibit FOX from publicly admitting or acknowledging that he was fired. But while he worked there, no laws prohibited FOX from publicly deifying him, either.

While he was their employee — and even after he got sacked — FOX continuously extolled him. Bill O’Reilly is one of the finest, most successful, most popular, highest-rated TV personalty in history! And his “Killing” books (mostly researched and ghostwritten by someone else) are best-sellers! What a guy!

Needless to say, playing fast and loose with reality has long been both earmark and mainstay of FOX NOOZ. That organization has always constructed alternate reality — complete with unreliable information, mythic spins, and outright lies — then labeled it “news.” No unbiased, unslanted reporting ever took place on that cable “news” network. Remember, FOX’s slogan was “fair and balanced,” not honest and reliable.

Because FOX NOOZ was — and still is — the Republican Propaganda Network, FAUX FOX FAX always predominated their reporting, programming, and overall agenda. That meant truth was always expendable. At FOX, truth would always be a stranger who kept knocking at their door but kept being turned away. So why not lie about everything, including your employee?

That’s the one true thing about FOX: those myth-makers know all about everyday psychology. Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and their crew never went broke by underestimating the sheer gullibility of the American public. They knew, they just KNEW, that the more they kept repeating a lie (or an opinionated half-truth) the more people would believe it. And so they did.

FOX’s TV viewers blindly accepted all the hype about O’Reilly that the network handed out. Rarely did his fans even consider that he and his employer were fudging numbers about his ratings, exaggerating his popularity, or fabricating what he was actually accomplishing. They really were THAT gullible.

Unfortunately, too many professionals are now going along with FOX’s hyperbolic accounts of O’Reilly’s historic contributions (?!) and intrinsic value to the network (!???!). They shouldn’t. They shouldn’t be as gullible as the TV viewers, but they are. These journalists and commentators and researchers, who have more information about O’Reilly than any viewer could ever covet, are on script with FOX’s storyline. Shame on them.

Shame on them because they know all about The Spin.

Never mind that O’Reilly used to host a show that featured a “NO SPIN ZONE.” There WAS spin. His TV show, his on-air persona, everything he said or did — spin, nothing but spin. Nothing but spin, more spin, and a lot of smoke and mirrors.

And now these professionals are so immersed in FOX’s frenzy of B.S. that they can’t (or won’t) function. They seem almost incapable of offering readers or viewers another perspective on O’Reilly. Aside from some in-depth reporting by The New York Times on his victims, the same old script keeps emerging.

Again and again, we keep hearing that it was all about the money. O’Reilly kept his job because he was making money for the network. And he was making money because of his show’s high ratings. And his show was highly-rated because of his popularity, and — you know the rest, you’ve heard it before.

Here’s another analysis with more Truthiness: Despite the high costs of his out-of-court settlements, Bill O’Reilly got to keep his job because his boss Roger Ailes liked him, he really liked him. That’s the real reason O’Reilly kept getting away with sexually harassing women and ruining their careers. It wasn’t because of his popularity with viewers, it was because of his popularity with his boss.

They were just two peas in a testicle, those guys.

So let’s just dismiss all that network hyperbole and self-promotion from O’Reilly, once and for all.

Let’s stop drinking the Kool-aid that FOX NOOZ wants us to keep slugging down. Let’s get real on O’Reilly. Let’s enter the NO HYPE/NO HYPERBOLE ZONE and advance toward the VERACITY HORIZON.

*The ratings for “The O’Reilly Factor” never were as phenomenal as the host and and his network kept claiming they were.

Throughout its nearly 20-year run, “The O’Reilly Factor” only garnered around 2-3 million viewers per show. Usually ratings hovered a little under or a little over 3 million. Even if viewership would have increased to 3.75 or almost 4 million, the ratings still wouldn’t have been that great.

Look at it another way. The United States has a population of roughly 320 million people. 1% of that would be 3.2 million. So O’Reilly’s program attracted around 1% of the total population. So he did have a loyal following. It’s just that 99% of Americans were NOT watching his show.

Even if we generously granted him more viewers, for argument’s sake, the numbers would only climb to 2 or 2.5 % of the population. Not very significant. So much for all that puffing about “winning the time slot” and being a “ratings winner, year after year.”

*Bill O’Reilly and his show were NOT bringing in the advertisers and advertising dollars that he and FOX alleged.

Gone are the days when Arthur Godfrey used to deliver advertising testimonials by personally hawking Geritol on his radio and TV shows.

Nowadays, there’s no real credible, reliable way to evaluate how much influence O’Reilly’s show would have on your advertising dollars. Does anyone really believe that the sales of Jenny Craig or Ainsworth Pet Nutrition would skyrocket because their spots were featured on “The O’Reilly Factor?” Like, his fans are all going to run out and buy BMW’s just because BMW sponsored his show? Come on.

*Contrary to the ongoing script, advertising pullouts and loss of advertising dollars for FOX were NOT O’Reilly’s undoing.

After mounting accusations of O’Reilly’s sexual misconduct began surfacing, a lot of advertisers did stop sponsoring his program on FOX.

But those pullouts didn’t cause FOX to lose that much advertising. After all, the majority of these companies just pulled out of sponsoring his show. They didn’t end their relationship with FOX entirely: most of them shifted their TV advertising to different shows or different time slots.

In an interview from USA Today (from Thursday, April 20, 2017), Tuna Amobi, equity analyst with CFRA Research, also doubted the significance of such “losses.” He estimated that “The O’Reilly Factor” only brought in around $150 million in advertising last year. When compared to the $7 billion FOX NEWS made, Amobi shrugged off this “loss” as “…a drop in the bucket for them.”

More likely, analysts speculate, advertisers didn’t want to be involved in any kind of consumer boycott or backlash that might have been waged against O’Reilly, sexual harasser.

Bill O’Reilly finally got his comeuppance after Roger Ailes himself had to exit FOX because of his own sexual misconduct in the workplace. Once his protector and defender departed, O’Reilly had to answer to the sons of Rupert Murdoch. Now that Murdoch Sr. is trying to buy SKY ( the UK’s news and satellite titan), he’s enlisted sons James and Lachlan to clean up messes in his workplaces. That’s just what they did when they delivered O’Reilly’s walking papers to him.

So long, Good Ol’ Boy Network. The new sheriffs from 21st Century Fox no longer have Bill O’Reilly’s back.

Now if only Rupert Murdoch had brought daughters — and not sons — into the world as his top executives, O’Reilly’s reign would have ended considerably sooner. That photo op of O’Reilly shaking hands with the Pope probably wouldn’t have gone viral, either.