The end of Bill O’Reilly’s reign as the King of Cable TV on the Fox News Channel, due to multiple allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct, is a big moment in American media and political history. O’Reilly tapped into and articulated the sensibilities and cultural resentments of the middle-aged and older white men who were the base of his audience through the force of his personality and on-screen persona, which was larger than life. His many fans are in mourning; liberals, progressives, feminists and others who celebrate this country’s ethnic, racial, gender and sexual diversity are breathing a sigh of relief, if not openly celebrating the public downfall (for now) of a person many consider a glorified and highly-paid bully.
To mark this occasion, I’ve compiled some passages from my 2016 book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity, (Interlink Books) in which O’Reilly figured in multiple chapters:
On his bullying persona
No discussion about the power of conservative media to narrow the range of a president’s political operating space through bullying tactics and raising questions about his masculinity would be complete without some discussion of the top-rated Fox cable TV host Bill O’Reilly. According to author and media critic Jeff Cohen, O’Reilly is an “imposing TV presence whose face exudes emotion— annoyance, frustration, fury—better than most TV actors,” allowing him to tap into and articulate the anger and resentment of conservative white men toward a culture many of them no longer recognize as their own. A key part of the fight he wages is against liberal elites in Washington and Hollywood, but perhaps his strongest venom is reserved for progressive intellectuals, whom he delights in skewering, even if he routinely has to resort to verbal bullying tactics to “win” an argument. Jeff Cohen, who appeared as a guest on The O’Reilly Factor several times in the late 1990s, surmises that Bill O’Reilly is someone who knows, at least subconsciously, that research and inquiry might erode his beliefs. “With O’Reilly,” Cohen wrote, “his beliefs are bedrock, immovable. Everything else—facts, logic, perhaps someone’s jaw—can be rearranged.”
On framing policy debates
Like Limbaugh, O’Reilly has been at this a long time and has mastered the art of framing policy debates—especially on issues of homeland security and foreign policy—as tests of manly resolve. Consider: in December of 2008 President-elect Barack Obama was in the process of selecting a person to nominate as head of the Central Intelligence Agency. O’Reilly asserted on his TV and radio programs that unless Obama backed off his campaign pledge to end “enhanced interrogations,” he would have trouble finding someone to accept the job of CIA chief, because, he said, everyone knows that we have no chance of beating the Islamist radicals without resorting to such “unpleasant” tactics. O’Reilly then upped the ante by arguing that if Obama stuck with the “loony left” (O’Reilly absurdly included The New York Times in this designation) and failed to accept the need for enhanced interrogations, and Americans die as a result (“which they will”), the new president would lose O’Reilly’s support for good, and presumably the support of millions of Americans who look to the Fox host as a source of cultural insight and political guidance.
As always, O’Reilly’s pronouncements were infused with the pretense that what he believed was just common sense; he wanted to test whether the newly elected president was going to measure up.
On Stephen Colbert’s satirization of O’Reilly and “truthiness”
If Jon Stewart undermined the masculine mythification of the presidency in part by using video to carefully deconstruct the words and actions of sitting presidents as well as would-be challengers, Stephen Colbert directly satirized right-wing masculinity more generally on The Colbert Report. On the show, which ended its nine-year run in 2015, Colbert played a right-wing talk show host patterned self-consciously after the top-rated Fox News Channel personality Bill O’Reilly. Colbert described the character he played as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot.”
Colbert’s show first aired in 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush, who used the presidential bully pulpit to valorize anti-intellectualism and champion, as a guide to policy, (conservative) religious faith over reasoned argument or scientific evidence. Likewise Colbert’s character frequently invoked gut feelings and tortured logic to justify his beliefs, despite the obvious absurdity of the conclusions he often reached. On the show’s debut, Colbert’s character declared that “I am not a fan of facts. You see, the facts can change, but my opinion will never change, no matter what the facts are.”
Out of character, Colbert explained,
“Language has always been important in politics, but language is incredibly important to the present political struggle. Because if you can establish an atmosphere in which information doesn’t mean anything, then there is no objective reality…what you wish to be true is all that matters, regardless of the facts.”
He added the term “truthiness” to the contemporary lexicon, to express the idea of something that seems to be true, the “truth we want to exist.”
While O’Reilly’s fans tune into Fox to hear the snarling host angrily battle secular humanist elites who are waging a “war on Christmas” and other cherished traditions in white middle-America, Colbert’s audience on Comedy Central was treated to a nightly parody of O’Reilly and the angry white men he represents. O’Reilly rose to the head of the pack in the cable talk universe by playing the part of the beleaguered Everyman whose most cherished beliefs have been under relentless assault for decades—and who is not about to go down without a fight.
Anti-intellectualism
Colbert’s signature satiric contribution was his running parody of anti-intellectualism among conservative white men, which is a running feature in American politics but which has seemed to accelerate over the past couple of decades as the Republican Party has shifted ever further to the right. The right-wing populist disdain for facts when they don’t conform to right-wing ideology, or science when it doesn’t support conservative dogma, has placed Republicans who accept the settled science of evolution or human-caused climate change in a precarious position, especially Republican men who reject the absurd notion that adherence to logic and science is somehow unmanly.
Conservative women and O’Reilly: “The big man on campus”
Sarah Palin was a guest of Bill O’Reilly’s on The O’Reilly Factor on her first night as a paid commentator for Fox News in 2010. At the end of the show, O’Reilly asked the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee how she felt the interview had gone. Palin seized the moment. “I was with the Big Man on Campus!” she gushed. Commentary about the Palin Fox debut in the blogosphere and elsewhere mentioned this, but few bloggers and pundits seemed to attach any significance to the statement, or to the cultural meanings it conveyed. By contrast, it is precisely those cultural meanings surrounding Palin’s flattery, and the gender politics they suggest and advance, which concern me here.
…..Presumably, something about Sarah Palin as a woman and as a political figure compensated for, or neutralized, the aversion many conservative white men have for independent women as leaders. Or maybe those men don’t have an aversion to all independent women—only to moderately liberal women like Hillary Clinton, who refuse to assuage men’s egos and make them feel as if they’re still in charge. Many conservative men experience that kind of woman as emasculating, a fear that was (in)famously articulated by TV personality Tucker Carlson, who said that when Hillary comes on television, he involuntarily crosses his legs. Which brings us back to Palin’s “Big Man on Campus” comment.
Palin’s use of that term (in reference to Bill O’Reilly) evoked the idealized white suburban world of the 1950s that plays such a powerful role in the right-wing cultural imagination. It especially conjured up images of the prefeminist gender order, where the most popular boys were jocks and the most popular girls aspired to be cheerleaders—and there was no confusion about which sex was on the field and which was on the sidelines cheering. Feminism and the 1960s challenged those social norms, both by objecting to the unquestioned subservience of women in that sexist arrangement and by emphasizing women’s right to engage in their own athletic contests. One of the many ironies of Palin’s political career is that she developed the self-confidence to bash liberals in part by playing sports that were opened to women as a result of the passionate activism of liberal feminists.
Postscript
I might add that Bill O’Reilly’s downfall at Fox was catalyzed by the growing empowerment of women and their demands to be treated fairly. Despite the best efforts of O’Reilly and other “conservative” men to block women’s progress, they march on and persist. And O’Reilly’s mourning fans notwithstanding, our democracy and our country are all the better for it.