gracchusdixit

Bill O’Reilly, the most watched commentator on cable news, has been fired by Fox News Channel, after revelations that he and his employer paid out at least $13 million to settle five lawsuits accusing him of sexual harassment.   Before this particular episode, O’Reilly had a long history of sexual misbehavior, much like his former boss, Roger Ailes.   Although Fox finally clamped down on Ailes, it continued to turn a blind eye to O’Reilly’s behavior, because he was far and away the network’s biggest audience draw.  That stratagem became untenable when scores of major advertisers, under intense public pressure from protestors and activists, decided to pull out of O’Reilly’s prime time show and began hinting they might withdraw all their business from Fox News Channel.  Television ratings are worthless if they can’t be monetized, and in the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox, money always has the last word.  Thus it came to pass that O’Reilly came tumbling down.

His demise raises innumerable questions—not only about Fox News Channel but about everything it represents.

Fox News Channel began life 20 years ago as a long-odds upstart hoping to challenge CNN, which had invented the idea of wall-to-wall cable news coverage.  In those early days, you would have had to look long and hard to find anyone who thought Fox had even a ghost of a chance.  I certainly didn’t.  When Fox News Channel was getting started, I had already spent more than twenty years in the television business, and my best assessment of its chances at the time was both slim and grim.

But I was wrong.  Like many others, I was a victim of conventional wisdom and conventional thinking.

The one person who defied that thinking was Roger Ailes, Fox News Channel’s founding father. To liberals, Ailes qualifies as an evil genius.  The evil resides in his political views and deplorable personal behavior.  The genius resides in his uncanny knack for manipulating public opinion.

From the beginning, Ailes knew precisely what he wanted Fox News Channel to become, and in Bill O’Reilly, he found the perfect embodiment of that vision.  Within a few years of O’Reilly’s arrival, Fox News Channel was an upstart no longer.  It had become not only the center of the right-wing political universe but a money-making machine without precedent in the history of the television news business, producing annual profits of more than a billion dollars.  No other national news organization—not ABC, not CBS, not NBC, certainly not CNN—had ever raked in so much cash.

What O’Reilly’s departure portends for the future of Rupert Murdock’s biggest profit center is anybody’s guess.   Tonight, his place will be taken by Tucker Carlson, who, apart from his political opinions, couldn’t be more starkly different from the man he is replacing.  For almost 20 years, O’Reilly brilliantly played the part of a perpetually aggrieved middle-aged white male—a lavishly paid but endlessly grumpy Archie Bunker.  This “act”—and it surely has to have been an “act”—was never terribly convincing to anyone with open eyes or an ounce of common sense.  But to the sightless germs that squiggle about in the petri dish called the Fox News audience, O’Reilly was the fulfillment of their every primordial wish.

Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, looks like he just stepped off the pages of a prep school yearbook.  Although he shed his signature bow ties several years ago, everything else about him screams:  entitled, snotty, smug rich kid.  When Carlson inherited Meagan Kelly’s spot in the Fox News line-up, after she had jumped ship for a job at NBC, he did well enough.  But he was sandwiched between two juggernauts, the now defrocked Bill O’Reilly and the still priestly Sean Hannity, who serves as Donald Trump’s principal cheerleader and, when Sean Spicer is embarrassing himself, as Trump’s ex-officio spokesman.  Without that hammock to hold him up, it is unclear how Carlson—or Fox News itself—is going to fare.

Nearly all the talk about O’Reilly has focused on the transgressions of the man himself, the culture of the organization that employed him, and the backstairs maneuvering that led to his demise.  However pruriently interesting these things may be, there is something much bigger going on.

Bill O’Reilly and Fox News Channel all but created today’s Republican Party, and they were largely responsible for creating the political career of Donald J. Trump, who could not have won the presidential election without their help and connivance.

But they did more than that.  In the long-run-up to Trump’s nomination and eventual election, they unleashed a toxic social subculture—long suppressed—that now openly peddles sexism, racism, and authoritarianism, all in the name of patriotism and “law and order.”

The gun-toting, pickup truck-driving, flag-waving denizens of this subculture appear to believe that “real men” and “real Americans” have been subverted by effete and condescending elites, by “uppity” and underserving minorities, by “depraved” homosexuals and cross-dressers, and by feminist women who refuse to play the role assigned to them by that whitest of all white males, the god of the Old Testament.  They dismiss those who refuse to countenance their ignorance and boorishness as “whiners,” “snowflakes,” or “buttercups.”  They disparage any criticism of their blatant prejudices as “political correctness.”

For all this, we have Bill O’Reilly to thank.  We can only hope that he will prove to be the first of many Archie Bunkers to fall.  There is another one waiting, and he is waiting in the White House.