BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I’m Bob Garfield. So, Bill O’Reilly is gone.
[CLIP]:
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: The host of cable’s most popular show for 16 years, out at Fox News, in the wake of that growing sexual harassment scandal.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: Of course, this comes after the revelation earlier this month that O’Reilly and 21st Century Fox had paid out $13 million in settlements to five women who had accused him of sexual harassment and/or verbal abuse.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: One word, more than 50 companies have stopped advertising on The O’Reilly Factor.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: And with that news comes a confession, not his, of course, ours. For 16 years, we at On the Media have had more or less perpetual discussion about how and how much to cover Fox News. We don't have this editorial issue over ripping CNN or MSNBC. In fact, we stand ready to condemn the entirety of cable news, with clips and commentary whenever the occasion calls for it. But Fox News presented a challenge. When a station’s prime time is driven by concocted conspiracies and controversies, when it does not cover politics so much as instigate politics, the question for a show like ours is not so much where to begin as where to draw the line. We could talk about Fox on every segment on every show, but should we?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As we performed our weekly gut check – is this outrage bad enough, are the stakes high enough for us to cover - how we admired the persistence of Jon Stewart at The Daily Show, who, when sharing a stage with O'Reilly a few years back, proclaimed Fox News “B.S. Mountain” and O'Reilly its mayor.
[CLIP]:
JON STEWART: Christmas, the most ubiquitous holiday in the history of mankind, is under threat on Bullsh—Mountain –
[AUDIENCE CHEERS/APPLAUSE]
- because somewhere, somehow a parade in Tulsa has changed its name from “Christmas” to “Holiday.”
[LAUGHTER]
I have come here tonight to plead to the mayor of Bullsh—Mountain…
[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE/END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He was always scaling B.S. Mountain, like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill, knowing the exertion would never, could never end. So, in the face of multimillion- dollar settlements and proliferating charges, the mayor of B.S. Mountain now calls himself a victim as he’s pushed out of office with as much as $25 million. And we are compelled to ask, what, if anything, does it signify?
Gabriel Sherman is the author of The Loudest Voice in the Room, a biography of Fox founder and mastermind Roger Ailes, who, of course, also left the network, in the midst of sexual harassment allegations last year. Sherman says that ditching O’Reilly was a purely financial decision for the Murdochs who own the network, as advertisers were pulling out and the scandal threatened a multibillion-dollar deal with Sky TV. It certainly wasn't about morals.
GABRIEL SHERMAN: You know, I think we should point out that Roger Ailes was forced out of the company almost a year ago, and yet, many of the lieutenants that ran the network during the period in which he was practicing serial sexual harassment are still in leadership positions.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It seems to me that the deciding factors here were advertisers and perhaps regulators that will oversee the deal for Sky TV. Does the audience figure into this much at all?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: I think the short answer is no. They see situations like the Bill O'Reilly scandal as just more liberal media piling on. In fact, you could argue that the Murdochs are taking a risk by taking out Bill O'Reilly, the number-one-rated host with an incredibly loyal following. He was the Long Island everyman, the blue-collar guy from Levittown, looking out for the folks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But Bill O'Reilly grew up in a middle-class house and he went to Harvard and exaggerated his award-winning run at Inside Edition, and so forth. I mean, it's a made-up persona.
GABRIEL SHERMAN: Well, I think, you know, we’re talking about Fox News here, and I don't think we would ever let the facts get in the way of a good story.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Fox was once the sole owner of the right-wing TV space, no longer. In fact, it’s seen fire from the right. Breitbart, for instance, has slammed it for being insufficiently anti-globalist at times. Where does Fox stand now, amidst a sea of potentially competitive right-wing media?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: This is maybe one of the ironies. Fox News, having built a media empire by claiming that mainstream media was biased and not looking out for the audience, Fox News is now subject to the very same line of attack from anti-establishment conservative outlets like Breitbart News or The Daily Caller or Newsmax TV, which is looking to expand. I mean, Fox News is now being subject to the very splintering that fuel its rise to prominence.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so, what’s it do?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: In the short term, they don't have to do much because most of its revenue is derived from these cable contracts where Fox News earns as much as $2 per subscriber. The only more lucrative channel on cable TV is ESPN.
I think the long term, as the cable TV industry as a whole is in decline, it's going to come under increasing pressure, and I think it’s gonna be up to the next generation of Murdochs to try to figure out a way to modernize Fox News to position it for either a post-cable TV culture or potentially a post-Donald Trump culture. And I know from my sources inside the company that James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s younger son, is very intent on trying to steer Fox News in a more moderate center right direction, less of a, you know, bombastic circuit.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A dangerous strategy.
GABRIEL SHERMAN: It is a risky one, yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is this story really about something bigger than Bill O'Reilly sexually harassing women and then getting fired when the cases become too numerous and too hard to cover up? Is it possible we’re reading too much into this?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: I argue, actually, it's a much bigger story than Bill O'Reilly. This is a function of a culture that Roger Ailes built over 20 years that was a cult of personality structured like a political campaign in the guise of a news organization. And Bill O'Reilly thrived in that. But it was a culture where women were subjected to serial harassment. If you spoke up about it, you were railroaded out of the company. You know, the legal, the HR and the public relations departments were all extensions of Ailes’ power. And so, this story is about the slow-motion unwinding of that culture that both made Fox News so successful but, at the same time, did so much damage to so many people, including, I would argue, the fabric of, you know, the American political discourse.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think, as some have suggested, that Fox paved the way for Trump, because I’m very suspicious of that. I think Fox was able to channel, heat up an environment that was already incredibly polarized. What do you think?
GABRIEL SHERMAN: Oh, I think without question. I don't say it’s just limited to Fox News, but I think Roger Ailes did a lot to till the ground for Donald Trump’s rise, making the whole notion of truth subject to debate, turning news into combat sport and turning offensive speech into a debate over political correctness, gleefully sticking your thumb in the eye of the establishment.
You know, we should point out that Roger Ailes was Rush Limbaugh's executive producer during a short stint in television, and he understood that there was this audience that wanted news, rather than, you know, informing them, wanted to be their voice and their weapon to wage ideological war with their opponents. And using politics and entertainment as tools to advance a conservative agenda is what Donald Trump, you know, did so brilliantly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Starting on Fox –
GABRIEL SHERMAN: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - with his campaign about Obama's citizenship.
[CLIP]:
DONALD TRUMP: People have birth certificates. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. Now, he may have one but there’s something on that birth - maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim, I don't know.
[END CLIP]
GABRIEL SHERMAN: And if you listen to Donald Trump’s stump speeches, he could have stepped into any of those Fox News host chairs and probably delivered a bigger audience. So it’s very different than the old Bill Buckley National Review, erudite George Will-style conservatism that, in many ways, was the movement of the Ronald Reagan years. There was fringe and very extremist elements of the right wing but, again, they were marginalized in kind of newsletters and talk radio and carnival barkers. Here, you had Fox News wired into as many as 100 million homes, pumping conspiracy theories and extreme right-wing messaging into Americans’ homes every night. You do that for 20 years, you get to a point where Donald Trump runs for president and questioning things that are objectively verifiable all of a sudden doesn't seem so crazy.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gabriel, thank you very much.
GABRIEL SHERMAN: Good to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gabriel Sherman is national affairs editor at New York Magazine and author of The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and—Divided a Country.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, the headlines proclaim that tensions with North Korea have brought us to a dangerous pass but is it true?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media.
