AS the Church Lady would say "Bye Bye Bill, Bye bye.....". Good riddance to this loud mouth, fascist liar, this serial sexual predator, this domestic abuser. One can only wonder about the morality of fox news and why it took them so long? The answer of course is money. They tolerated him as long as he was bringing in the money but once that started to go away it was decided bill o'reilly had to go. So all the bull about a change in corporate attitude at fox is just that, bull. From +NPR and +Mother Jones ......
Bill O'Reilly Is Out At Fox News
Updated at 6:15 p.m. ET
Fox News is parting ways with Bill O'Reilly, who for years stood as one of cable news' most popular hosts. The network's parent company, 21st Century Fox, announced the move in a statement Wednesday.
"After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the Company and Bill O'Reilly have agreed that Bill O'Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel," the statement read.
O'Reilly released a statement, calling it "tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims. But that is the unfortunate reality many of us in the public eye must live with today."
The host's top-rated program, The O'Reilly Factor, had recently suffered an exodus of advertisers amid revelations that O'Reilly, Fox News and 21st Century Fox had quietly paid out roughly $13 million in settlements to five women who had accused him of sexual harassment.
Several weeks ago, a woman named Wendy Walsh stepped forward with another complaint against O'Reilly. NPR's David Folkenflik reports that Walsh went through Fox News' formal complaint process, alleging O'Reilly made unwelcome advances during what she believed to be a business dinner.
"It was a sad cocktail party story that women tell each other and shrug our shoulders and go, 'Ugh, another one,' " Walsh told NPR earlier this month. "I can't believe this is still going on."
The New York Times reports that an African-American woman — who remains anonymous — came forward this week with allegations of her own, saying O'Reilly would at various times grunt like a "wild boar" at her desk, leer at her and refer to her as "hot chocolate."
O'Reilly has largely remained quiet in the face of these accusations, though he has rejected them and said he agreed to the settlements only to protect his family.
His lawyer has come out more forcefully, however.
"Bill O'Reilly has been subjected to a brutal campaign of character assassination that is unprecedented in post-McCarthyist America," Marc Kasowitz said in a statement. "This law firm has uncovered evidence that the smear campaign is being orchestrated by far-left organizations bent on destroying O'Reilly for political and financial reasons. That evidence will be put forth shortly, and it is irrefutable."
O'Reilly has enjoyed support in the White House, as well.
"I don't think Bill did anything wrong," President Trump told the Times in an interview earlier this month. "Personally, I think he shouldn't have settled."
Yet the allegations against O'Reilly fit into an uncomfortable narrative for the cable news network. As David notes, the revelations came less than a year after his former boss, Roger Ailes, saw his tenure at the top of Fox News unravel under separate sexual harassment allegations:
Up to last week, the effects O'Reilly's scandal had on his program appeared mixed.
As we reported last week, an independent analysis by the ad-tracking firm iSpot.tv showed O'Reilly's program had lost about half its advertisers in a span of several weeks due to the allegations.
Yet his ratings did not seem to suffer, still easily hovering at the top of the cable news landscape even amid the poor press.
O'Reilly — who has denied the claims — has been off the air since last week, when he announced he would be taking a vacation. At the time, O'Reilly said he planned to return to the program on April 24. It remains unclear whether the network will allow the host to say a farewell of his own on-air.
Tucker Carlson will replace O'Reilly in the 8 p.m. ET time slot.
Here's what O'Reilly called us--and why we're proud of it.
It's official: Bill O'Reilly is out at Fox News. This comes in the wake of reports of multiple sexual harassment complaints against him, as well as a social-media push for a boycott against his show. You can read more about those developments here.
For us at Mother Jones, though, one element of the O'Reilly saga jumps out: How consistently he (and Fox News) denied not only the harassment allegations, but his journalistic missteps. O'Reilly has also violated basic standards in a way that would end the careers of many other journalists. Perhaps the most memorable of these episodes involved his repeated claims that he had been in "war zones" and "combat."
In 2015, MoJo's David Corn and Daniel Schulman broke the story that while O'Reilly's has said he was "in the Falklands" during the 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina, and that he saw "combat" there, the closest he came to covering that conflict was a protest in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In response to the exhaustively researched article, O'Reilly called David a "liar," "far-left assassin," and "despicable guttersnipe."
What's so interesting about that moment is that it prefigured the "post-truth" approach to the facts that we saw play out in the 2016 campaign: If you repeat an untruth loudly enough and often enough, some people will believe it. It will take on a life of its own. "In a way, it's impossible to win a debate with O'Reilly," David wrote presciently at the time, "because he is not bound by reality." So when the sexual harassment allegations—complete with detailed accounts by multiple women—came out: O'Reilly and Fox News both insisted that none of this could possibly have happened. (Notice the echoes of Trump and his friend, former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who have insisted that the women who accused them of harassment were making it up.)
But here's the thing that acolytes of the "post-truth" school forget: The truth is slow, sometimes quiet, sometimes not aggressive enough. But it is tough as nails. Denying it doesn't make it go away; it just pushes it underground—for a while. Eventually, it will win out. And when the post-truthers of the world call reporters "guttersnipes" for digging up the facts, we wear that badge with pride.
Sincerely,
 |  Monika Bauerlein, Chief Executive Officer Mother Jones |
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