The REAL O'Reilly factor: His ego
Saturday, October 16, 2004
BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Star-Ledger Staff
In no time flat, Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly has gone from being a cable news loudmouth to a poster boy for rubberneck TV: You know you should turn away, but you can't, because if you do, you might miss an even more spectacular disaster.
Ever since Wednesday, when O'Reilly sued a former producer for allegedly trying to blackmail him and was countersued for sexual harassment, "The O'Reilly Factor" has ceased being a yap-fest and become a nightly spectacle of self-destruction, a chance to watch a powerful obsessive pour kerosene on the bonfire of his own ego.
O'Reilly's bosses have ordered him to stop talking about the case, but that would require him to quit behaving as if the entire world revolves around O'Reilly, and we all know that's not possible. Like Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull," O'Reilly never seems more ecstatically alive than when he's being attacked. These past few days, he's not only made himself into a human punching bag, he's invited friends and foes alike to believe the worst and take their best shot.
He opened his Wednesday program with a blistering "Talking Points Memo" about his former associate producer, Andrea Mackris, who sued O'Reilly and Fox for sexual harassment and intimidation, charging the cable news star with behavior so lurid and surreal that exact details can't be printed in a family newspaper. The suit claims O'Reilly made repeated mentions of phone sex, vibrators and Caribbean vacations.
O'Reilly said he pre-emptively countersued Mackris because she was a disgruntled liberal trying to extort $60 million from O'Reilly and "punish" him and Fox News Channel. "There comes a time when enough's enough," he told viewers. He called the lawsuit "...the single most evil thing I have ever experienced, and I've seen a lot. But these people picked the wrong guy."
O'Reilly continued the attack on Thursday morning's "Live with Regis and Kelly," telling the hosts, "If I have to go down, I'm willing to do it. I'm going to take a stand. I'm a big mouth on the air and a big mouth off the air."
On "The O'Reilly Factor" that night, he avoided directly discussing the case, but did get in a conversation with his guest, fellow super-narcissist Ann Coulter, about her dating experience as a single, right-wing commentator, and duly noted her preference for short skirts. Then he spent a few minutes wondering which of them was more hated, him or Coulter. It was a truly weird segment: just a coupla right wing icons with persecution complexes, sitting around talking.
Considering the legal crisis that has enveloped O'Reilly, his nonchalant flirtiness with Coulter can only be seen as bullheaded defiance. He must have known anyone watching would think of the lawsuit and be creeped out. At that moment, he confirmed his status as the raging bull of cable news -- a super-macho drama queen bashing his head against the wall of a jail cell he built himself, and grooving on the pain.
It's ironic that so much of O'Reilly's fame was built on his scathing criticism of President Bill Clinton, whose sexual misconduct O'Reilly blasted night after night throughout the scandal. The behavior alleged in the lawsuit is as ugly as anything in the Starr Report. Maybe O'Reilly's next book will have to be called "Glass Houses."
O'Reilly's celebrity was always precarious because while the man was hot-tempered and thin-skinned, his TV strategy was intuitive, risky and quite delicate. He always prided himself on transparency, or the illusion of it, and made sure that every topic led back to Bill O'Reilly. He devoted an inordinate amount of time to reading and answering viewer mail on the air, a practice that built immense loyalty among viewers and has since been mimicked by every other news program on cable.
And during interviews and soapbox monologues, O'Reilly didn't just tell you what he believed; he told you who he was. Even his dishonesty was honest. He was a human blog inviting viewers into his head, a tangled place full of brusque cheer, paranoia and good-vs.-evil fantasies. Newsweek called him "Everyman on a barstool, mad as hell, but with a wink."
This sense of intimacy built O'Reilly into a top-rated cable news anchor, a radio talk show host and a best-selling author, and made him compelling even to people who rarely agreed with his politics. It made him an icon of the right-leaning American middle, sort of a scowling doppelganger to Comedy Central's fake newscaster and Bush-baiting court jester, Jon Stewart. (I explored the similarities between O'Reilly's and Stewart's strategies in a lighthearted piece that just happened to run the day the lawsuits were filed. Man, I wish I were clairvoyant.)
Unfortunately, O'Reilly's success placed him in a position of such influence so quickly that nobody could tell him no, even when his behavior was way beyond stupid.
Last year, for example, left-wing comedian Al Franken ridiculed O'Reilly in a humor book about conservatives titled "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them -- A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," and exchanged harsh words with him at a book fair. O'Reilly persuaded his bosses to file a lawsuit against Franken and his publisher, charging copyright infringement of Fox's "Fair and Balanced" slogan.
O'Reilly's bosses strongly resisted filing the suit, but O'Reilly made it clear he would not be happy unless they went ahead. So they did, and it was laughed out of court.
Last year's nonsense appears to be repeating itself on a bigger scale -- and this new controversy is so vulgar and depressing that unless O'Reilly puts his ego in a lockbox and lets the lawsuit run its course, he'll destroy himself before anyone else can do it first.
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