The overnight ratings are in, and Bill O’Reilly is snorting. Larry King? Whupped him again by 2 to 1. And Keith Olbermann? Please, don’t even ask. “MSNBC’s off the air,” chortles O’Reilly, in his dressing room. “You could put on monkeys jumping up and down and get bigger numbers than MSNBC.”
No spin there. Bill O’Reilly is the undisputed king of cable news. Don’t believe it? Just ask Connie Chung and Phil Donahue. Oops, you can’t: “The O’Reilly Factor” left their slaughtered corpses behind, forgotten roadkill in a drive to the top that has made O’Reilly’s Fox News Channel show No. 1 — not just in its time slot, but in the entire cable news universe — for 20 months in row.
With an average 3.1 million viewers a show, O’Reilly most nights has a bigger audience than his competition on CNN and MSNBC combined. And on his good nights, he’s the class of not just cable news but cable, period. The 7 million viewers he drew on the first day of the war against Iraq beat out even such cable powerhouses as “Sex and the City.”
Then add the 3 million listeners who tune in to O’Reilly’s syndicated radio show each week, the millions who have bought his two No.1-on-The New York Times-best-seller-list non-fiction books and read his weekly newspaper column, and the potential zillions who are likely to see the movie of his novel “Those Who Trespass” when Mel Gibson, who owns the rights, gets around to making it. Oh, yeah, don’t forget the cybergroupies who hang out at the new www.billoreilly.com.
Powerful TV man
No wonder Television Week magazine earlier this year named O’Reilly the second most powerful man in TV news, calling him “a one-man multiplatform, cross-promotional machine.”
Not bad for a one-time TV news gypsy who once moved 10 times in 15 years, flitting to and from places like Hartford, Conn., and Portland, Ore., writing jokes for monster movie matinees (surely you heard his stuff on “Uncle Ted’s Ghoul School” in Scranton, Pa.) when the newscasts alone didn’t pay the bills. And flyspeck as some of those towns were, his audiences there dwarfed the 30,000 or so viewers who watched him each night when “The O’Reilly Factor” debuted on Fox News in 1996.
About the only guy who never doubted O’Reilly would make it big was O’Reilly. “I always knew news analysis would work in prime time,” he says. “We just had to give it time.”
O’Reilly, 53, calls what he does news analysis. His enemies — and if you’ve ever watched the show, you know there’s no shortage of them — call it right-wing attack-dog-ism.
“A bully and a jerk,” sniped the magazine Progressive Review. “Bloodthirsty,” adds the lefty media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “A liar,” liberal comedian Al Franken said — for nearly half an hour — during a nationally televised debate with O’Reilly earlier this year. For the truly hardcore, the invective is non-stop at www.oreilly-sucks.com and the Web’s “Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly” blog site.
O’Reilly shrugs that stuff off as the prattle of people who don’t like the way he enforces his so-called “no spin zone” on “The O’Reilly Factor.” “We don’t allow b.s., and I call people on it,” O’Reilly insists. “But it’s not like I call them names.”
That might come as a surprise to author Jacob Sullum, whom O’Reilly referred to as a “pinhead” after he suggested legalizing cocaine and other drugs. Or to Atlanta radio talk host Neal Boortz, whom O’Reilly labeled “a vicious [s.o.b.]” when Boortz needled him for making a tasteless joke about some inner-city kids.
Video red meat
Rude? Or great showmanship? Or just a spontaneous reaction to a provocative statement? As O’Reilly would say, you folks can decide for yourselves. What’s beyond dispute is that it’s the kind of video red meat that brings in viewers.
Says Victor Navasky, publisher of the left-wing magazine the Nation, “He’s overbearing. He interrupts and sneers at his guests. I enjoy that.” Navasky, whose magazine routinely calls President Bush a liar and demanded Donald Rumfeld’s resignation as secretary of defense, seems an unlikely candidate for O’Reilly’s audience. But he says O’Reilly’s brutishness is non-ideological fun. “He’s nasty and I don’t agree with him,” Navasky says. “But it’s entertaining.”
In fact, O’Reilly’s audience may be more diverse than people think. He’s not the knee-jerk conservative he’s often portrayed. He has beaten up on Jerry Falwell and Tom Selleck, among other conservative icons, and he tore into Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “Powerful, cold and evil.”
Lashes out at all
He’s furiously bashed away at corporate America over the Enron and WorldCom scandals. And several religious-right organizations even called for boycotts against O’Reilly’s advertisers after he ridiculed a minister campaigning against gay rights as “a religious fanatic.”
“He’s surprising and not as stereotypical as some people make him out to be,” says Andrew Tyndall, whose newsletter The Tyndall Report monitors TV journalism. “It’s lazy to characterize him as being a conservative broadcaster. He’s much more of a populist.”
O’Reilly says his world view has been shaped more by his early life: A lower-middle-class upbringing in a Long Island tract development, followed by a couple of years teaching in Opa-locka, Fla.
Skepticism of authority — the constant suspicion that big shots are screwing the little guys — very much colors “The O’Reilly Factor.” And it’s why O’Reilly, married with a young daughter, still considers himself a working-class stiff, even though he has a Harvard degree and makes a reported annual salary of $4.5 million.
“Class is a sensibility,” he argues. “You don’t have to sell out, you don’t have to be one of the swells, just because you have a lot of money. I have a nice house. I drive a good car, though it’s not a luxury model. And that’s it. I’m not really into materialism.”
Some conservatives who have agreed to do the show have doubtless regretted it — including George W. Bush, who appeared in March 2000, when he was still locked in a tight race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Bush, pushing his message of “compassionate conservativism,” was nonplussed when O’Reilly asked if he thought Jesus Christ would have approved of the hundreds of death warrants Bush signed as Texas governor. After all, O’Reilly noted, Jesus had some first-hand experience with the downside of capital punishment. “I can’t justify the death penalty in terms of the New Testament,” Bush sputtered.
Another ambush victim was Barry McCaffrey, the retired Army general who became Bill Clinton’s drug czar. O’Reilly taunted him with questions about why the drug war was failing. “McCaffrey came off the set, and he was yelling at the producer who booked him,” recalls Bill Shine, network executive producer at Fox News. “He couldn’t believe how he was treated and the questions he was asked. …”
