Thoughts on The Decline & Fall of Bill O'Reilly

I've always had mixed feelings about Bill O'Reilly. So I think it appropriate that I have mixed feelings about his forced departure from FNC.


To start with, I began watching O'Reilly before FNC when he hosted the syndicated tabloid show Inside Edition. Then as now he had a dynamic, magnetic presence, but less confrontational. But confrontation is what made O'Reilly big & he kept viewers tuning in even in the midst of revelations he had settled numerous sexual harassment lawsuits.


I stopped tuning in two or three years ago. It wasn't any one thing. For me, it was just the same one note song to which I no longer wanted to listen. Someone recently asked me what I thought of O'Reilly. I said that I could take or him or leave him and that I had decided to leave him.


Part of me always thought he was a jerk and a bully. I remember years ago when he invited a gay student onto his show only to berate him exclaiming, "Shut up about your sexuality". Perhaps O'Reilly should have shut up about his own.


But he was a jerk and a bully who was right from time to time. I also liked the fact he would interview the likes of Peter Falk, Harvey Korman and Dick Martin of Laugh-In at a time when other media outlets no longer cared, much less knew about their show business contributions. I also liked the fact he used words like perspicacious and ninnyhammer and did his best to put them back to the rightful place in the English lexicon.


There is also an element of hypocrisy in those who delight in his fall. The people who condemn O'Reilly turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the Juanita Broadrricks of the world because Bill Clinton supported the right politics. If O'Reilly had been a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton or the "secular-progressive agenda" I have little doubt the people casting stones would be erecting walls in his defense.


With that being said, O'Reilly has only himself to blame for his actions and Fox News was complicit in letting him get away with behavior that would not be tolerated if it was done by one of us. That would be "The folks". To borrow a word of the day, Bill O'Reilly was a miscreant.


When it is all said and done I do not feel sorry for Bill O'Reilly. Your humble correspondent will leave the spotlight and retire to a not so humble abode in Montauk. All things considered, he will pay for a small price for his transgressions.