Trash Talk
Posted by James Wolcott
Roger Ailes--the good Roger Ailes--usefully reminds us that with all the fun to be had with falafel, the Bill O'Reilly sexual harassment case has a classic brutal overtone that shouldn't be ignored. Behind the breathy phone sex was the bare-knuckled threat to wreck any woman fool enough to cross him--"I'll make her pay so dearly she'll wish she'd never been born." I'm reminded of the caveman boasts in the Nixon White House about sticking Kay Graham's 'tit in wringer," and Karl Rove's shouting into the telephone about a political operative with whom he was not pleased, "We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him." Conflating sex with violence, such big shots pride themselves on their destructive prowess, sadism is never far from the surface. And other men get off on this. Last night on Topic A with Tina Brown, Jim Cramer became more aroused than usual at the prospect of O'Reilly, Roger Ailes (the bad Roger Ailes), and Rupert Murdoch bringing down their wrath on Andrea Mackris, destroying her.
Watching the case unfold in the media, it's impressive how much supposedly informed people get wrong. On Howie Kurtz's Reliable Sources, Laura Ingraham, who received her law degree at Virginia Law School and clerked for Clarence Thomas, said that it was illegal for Mackris to tape O'Reilly without his consent; not so. And "expert" after "expert" hurls the $60-million figure Mackris was supposedly demanding as evidence of how ridiculous the case is. On Anderson Cooper's CNN show, Mackris' lawyer Benedict Corelli explained where the number came from. They were working out ballpark numbers as a basis for the settlement, and Corelli mentioned that a recent Business Week article put the yearly take from O'Reilly's various enterprises at $60 million a year; this was the basis for them to work from. He was not demanding every dollar O'Reilly makes in a given year. I think O'Reilly slapped that number on the screen during his Talking Points memo because he knew it was a sum everyone would find outrageous--highway robbery!--and make Mackris and her lawyer look like fortune hunters. As a public relations gambit, it's worked.
But the legal system is a whole 'nother labyrinth, and as Steve Gilliard says, once Corelli is able to depose O'Reilly's present and past coworkers and subordinates, dig into his past at other stations, who knows what'll seep to the surface.? Most of the supersavvy legal experts and media watchers didn't think Martha Stewart was going to be convicted. Those who blithely declare Bill O'Reilly will tough this out and emerge bigger than ever may be equally surprised.
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