Jump to content
IGNORED

O'Reilly out at FOX!


47of74

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 589
  • Created
  • Last Reply
1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

"They went through the scenario of the tape, why it was harassment and why it's something you should report," the employee explained.

I think the Trump "pussy grabbing" incident would be a fine segment for any sexual harassment training film, especially if it starts right now.  Also, how about some public service announcements.  He's so despicable.  I know little to nothing about O'Reilly, but I've worked with sexual harassers, and they create a horrible and difficult work environment. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

FOX stock hasn't tanked yet in the wake of Butthole's departure;

abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/fox-stock-holds-steady-oreilly-firing-46909255

Quote

Shares of Fox News' parent company, 21st Century Fox, held steady in morning trading Thursday following the firing of longtime and top-rated segment host Bill O'Reilly.

Shares were up 16 cents to $30.54 shortly after the market opened. The stock fell 1 percent to close at $29.81 on Wednesday.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Bill O’Reilly and the powerful men accused of preying on women in the workplace"

Quote

Wealth and power have allowed men to get away with sexual harassment and abuse for ages, that’s not new.

From Bill Cosby to Bill Clinton, from Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Donald Trump, high-profile men have been accused of preying on women in very ugly ways. And many of them duck allegations and legal consequences for years or even decades — right up until the gratifying day that their victims finally take them down.

Which brings us to the well-deserved downfall of Bill O’Reilly, the combative Fox News host who joined his heinous pal, former Fox chairman Roger Ailes, in the unemployment line this week.

These two men are accused of using their positions to sexually harass and abuse the women in their workplace over and over again.

For years, women who worked with O’Reilly — the co-author of a book on “Old School” values — said the talking head verbally abused them, called them up at home and described lurid (and ridiculous) sex acts he wanted to perform on them. He allegedly told his associate producer that he was masturbating while talking with her and offered others promotions in exchange for sex with him.

This is a guy who was recorded telling that associate producer that he wanted to fondle her with a falafel, though he actually meant a loofah. Yet somehow that wasn’t embarrassing enough to get him off the air.

Nor were the court records that had his teenage daughter describing the way he was “choking her mom” as he “dragged her down some stairs” by the neck. Nah, keep that guy on the air and let him promote his books on family values.

Let’s put aside the ethics and morality of those accusations to just look at the corporate cost of such accusations — the lawsuits filed, the hours in negotiations with lawyers, the $15 million in settlements. And still nope. Those things weren’t enough to make Fox News say adios to a guy who gets millions of viewers by spending all his time ripping into others from the comfort of a TV studio.

No, the Fox overlords didn’t consider ditching O’Reilly until the New York Times published a stunning story earlier this month about sexual harassment settlements with five women who worked at Fox over a 15-year period. That’s when advertisers began to flee and when the cable news channel finally began to take the allegations against their top-rated host seriously.

It was all about the Benjamins, baby. Not the behavior women said he was guilty of.

But it is a reminder of the awesome power of consumers with the companies who want to sell us stuff. The allegations against O’Reilly prompted a stampede of nearly two dozen big advertisers to run away from Fox.

Hooray BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Smart move Constant Contact. And yes, it was extra sharp for the men’s shirt company called Untuckit to high-tail it away from a man who allegedly called women at night and described himself untucking something.

I know, it’s all pretty disgusting.

But there is a funny part to this.

After Fox announced they were ousting him on Thursday, O’Reilly — who famously calls anyone opposing his conservative ideas “snowflakes” — continued to whine about his fate and deny the avalanche of allegations against him.

“It is tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims,” he said in a statement after Fox announced his axing. “But that is the unfortunate reality many of us in the public eye must live with today.”

He said his accusers — all of them successful, professional women — targeted him because he’s famous. That’s a familiar defense from men like him, who are accustomed to saying and doing anything they want to the women around them.

Our president once bragged on an “Access Hollywood” tape about kissing and groping women whenever he was attracted to them.

...

Most men, of course, would never talk this way. They treat their female colleagues with respect. But it is how some men in positions of power think. And in the 21st century American workplace, those men must be rooted out and fired.

The women who alleged they were being harassed by Bill O’Reilly should have been taken seriously right away. They should not have had to wait until advertisers spoke up.

But the money folks are listening. Remember that. It’s a start, and that power is in our hands.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"The attitudes about sex that doomed O’Reilly hid in plain sight for years"

Quote

For years when I was growing up, Fox News was the soundtrack of my family home. I’m convinced my father slept with it on so he could sublimely absorb more Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and friends. So my parents were thrilled in August 2002 when producers from “The O’Reilly Factor” called to book me for a segment to promote my book “A Girl’s Life Online.” Before taping the show, O’Reilly came out to introduce himself, and my mother was giddy to tell him that she watched him when she was hot and sweaty, while on the treadmill. O’Reilly seemed baffled.

Though this was almost 15 years ago, I can remember the experience of being a guest on “The Factor” so well because it’s an episode that still haunts and disturbs me to this day. And the dismissive way O’Reilly dealt with my own history as a victim of assault made the allegations that finally pushed Fox News to fire him this week feel all too familiar.

At 19, I appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” to tell my story in the hopes that it would prevent sexual assault. Six years earlier, I had been molested by a man who I went to go meet after I spent six months developing an online relationship with him. The assault occurred in 1996 and resulted in a landmark federal case.

O’Reilly challenged me about the fact that I decided to go meet this person I didn’t know. He then insisted that at 13, I should have known better than go meet someone, and I should have been able to predict what would happen. Fair enough; in the back of my head, even then, I did know I was taking a massive risk. In typical O’Reilly preaching, though, he told me I made a huge mistake and appeared to suggest that I deserved to become a victim of sexual assault because I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t have done.

I sat there speechless. I stared at him. All I could think to ask was, “You’ve never made mistakes at 13?” His answer, “Well, that’s a really big one to make.”

Of course, I didn’t know it when I was on the air, but the women whose accusations of sexual harassment forced O’Reilly out of his job say he was already subjecting them to sexist remarks, leers and worse at the time. Which means that in O’Reilly’s mind, meeting a stranger off the Internet who you think is your friend at 13 is a mistake. But sexually harassing your staff as an adult is just fine.

A number of his viewers were so outraged by his treatment of me that he felt moved to address it the following night. One viewer wrote to tell him he’d “judged” me in a way that was “very unfair” and “cruel.” O’Reilly disagreed.  “I didn’t do that,” he said on air.

“I pointed out that she made an enormous mistake, so that children watching ‘The Factor’ would get the point.”

I couldn’t stomach watching him after that. I actually agreed with many of his political beliefs, but not his hypocrisy. I can only wonder how many people watched the night I was on, who saw that in the “no-spin zone,” it was acceptable to blame the victim. I can only wonder how many other victims he blamed when they appeared on his show. (He did it often enough that it became a frequent trope for his critics.) I can only wonder how many other victims watched those nights and then chose to be silent for fear that they, too, would be blamed.

Over the past decade, I ran into O’Reilly a handful of times for events at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. As they played videos of victims, I would wonder if he was trying to figure out who became a victim “by mistake” and who was a “real” victim. I never said anything to him, and he couldn’t have cared less who I was.

I never said anything to him, because I believed that his hubris and karma would settle the score. But that didn’t happen until people spoke up. Fox News perhaps made its most “fair and balanced” decision by firing O’Reilly for his sexual harassment of women. But the network has known about O’Reilly’s treatment of women for almost two decades. It was all silenced because the show, at its peak, was earning $178 million. The network only began investigating when advertisers such as Mercedes-Benz and others pulled out. O’Reilly’s bosses only cared when his behavior cost their bottom line. That profit was made at the expense of many women’s emotional well-being — both staffers and viewers.

...

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Quote

This is a guy who was recorded telling that associate producer that he wanted to fondle her with a falafel, though he actually meant a loofah. Yet somehow that wasn’t embarrassing enough to get him off the air.

Yeah, 'cause we all want to be fondled with falafels.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, JMarie said:

 

Yeah, 'cause we all want to be fondled with falafels.

I know, right? Of course a loofah isn't any better. Frankly, I would want Billy O near me just about as much as he'd want to be around me, that is to say NOT AT ALL.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Gee, must be nice to get $25 million in severance: "Bill O’Reilly’s gone — with $25 million in severance. Now the hard work really starts for Fox News."

Quote

With Bill O’Reilly’s ouster from Fox News Channel, the hard part may be over for the scandal-scarred network. Now the harder part begins.

Fox’s abrupt termination of O’Reilly’s contract on Wednesday puts the leading cable-news network in rebuilding mode, beset by uncertainty. Will O’Reilly’s loyal audience of roughly 4 million viewers stick around without O’Reilly on the air? Will advertisers that abandoned O’Reilly return to back his replacement? Will the loss of the network’s most popular host set off a ripple effect that diminishes the rest of Fox’s lineup?

Fox’s dynastic Murdoch family — patriarch Rupert and sons James and Lachlan — cashiered O’Reilly after a nearly three-week drama surrounding sexual harassment allegations against him. O’Reilly and the Murdochs were unable to ride out the public-relations debacle triggered by accusations that he had abused female employees throughout much of his 21-year career at the network.

O’Reilly, the biggest star on cable TV news, will walk away from Fox with as much as $25 million, a severance figure set by the contract he signed only last month, a source close to the negotiations confirmed to The Post.. He just last month reupped at the network with a three-year contract whose terms reportedly awarded him a year’s salary in severance.

Neither Fox nor O’Reilly’s representatives have officially disclosed what O’Reilly’s severance will be. The contract’s play-or-pay terms made his booting relatively simple, if financially painful, for the Murdochs.

For his part, the characteristically loquacious O’Reilly went relatively quietly. He issued a statement on Wednesday saying, in part, “It is tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims.” He hasn’t said anything further about his future.

O’Reilly’s summary dismissal may have lifted the immediate cloud over Fox. But it also raised new issues.

Among the largest: Has Fox really reformed a workplace culture that saw the removal of its co-founder Roger Ailes last summer due to serial harassment allegations? Given that almost all of the senior executives hired by Ailes remain in place at Fox, that’s still an open question.

The programming issues seem more prosaic by comparison. Tucker Carlson, who will replace O’Reilly at 8 p.m., proved to be a strong successor to Megyn Kelly after she abandoned her 9 p.m. program and jumped to NBC in January (Carlson and Kelly, of course, benefited from the enormous lead-in audience O’Reilly supplied). Now, seemingly all at once, Carlson will be the linchpin of Fox’s lineup; he will precede Fox’s new 9 p.m. program, “The Five” (which formerly aired at 5 p.m.), followed by network fixture Sean Hannity at 10 p.m.

...

“The departure of O’Reilly is a big hit to FNC, but it is by no means fatal,” said Jeffrey McCall, a DePauw University professor who studies the news media, in an interview on Thursday. “For one thing, the [Fox] brand is bigger than O’Reilly, and further, the people who watch really have nowhere else to go for the kind of news they seek. CNN and MSNBC will not benefit from O’Reilly’s departure.”

He expects Fox’s ratings and image to recover, particularly since Carlson speaks to the same older conservative audience that was O’Reilly’s core viewer. The change may eventually even prove beneficial, he added: Carlson, 47, is 20 years younger than O’Reilly, and thus gives the Murdochs a younger face around which to build the network’s future.

Audience surveys on O’Reilly’s effect on Fox News are somewhat murky, notes Dan Cassino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of “Fox News and American Politics.” It’s unclear, he said, whether viewers come to Fox News to watch O’Reilly and stick around to watch other programs, or vice versa.

Nevertheless, “my sense is that any replacement will likely get lower ratings initially,” he said. “But that could actually wind up being more profitable for the network, as a Tucker Carlson is a heck of a lot cheaper than Bill O’Reilly is, so marginally lower ad rates aren’t going to hurt as much as they otherwise would.”

Already, the sponsor boycott that seemed to seal O’Reilly’s fate is showing signs of receding. . Several sponsors — Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Sanofi Healthcare — said on Thursday that they are “reevaluating” their plans.

And one of the first companies to pull its ads from “The O’Reilly Factor” says it’s coming back. The men’s fashion company Untuckit said it has told Fox that it would like to restore its ads to the hour formerly occupied by O’Reilly.

...

If other advertisers follow suit, as is likely, the net effect of the sponsor exodus will have been both minimal and yet profound.

Minimal because Fox appears not to have lost any money when dozens of companies pulled their ads from O’Reilly’s show when the New York Times revealed in early April that Fox and O’Reilly had agreed to a series of secret settlements over his harassment allegations. The ads were simply rescheduled and appeared at other hours during Fox’s broadcasts.

But the boycott ultimately had a devastating effect on O’Reilly. According to people close to him, the Murdochs concluded that sponsors were unlikely to return to “The O’Reilly Factor” as long as there was a chance of new accusations. In the end, even though O’Reilly’s audience remained loyal, there was no assurance that sponsors would be.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I remember watching that episode with my dad.  We used to watch Bill a lot.  After that segment, my dad turned the channel.  We never talked about it the way we usually talked about what we watched.  We didn't need to.  Whenever Bill came on TV, whoever was nearest to the controller changed the channel without prompting.  The horror of that segment was that powerfully awful.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Jug Band Baby said:

I remember watching that episode with my dad.  We used to watch Bill a lot.  After that segment, my dad turned the channel.  We never talked about it the way we usually talked about what we watched.  We didn't need to.  Whenever Bill came on TV, whoever was nearest to the controller changed the channel without prompting.  The horror of that segment was that powerfully awful.

Wow, that's interesting. I can say that I've not watched more than a few minutes of Billy O's show because it would make me angry. I'm sure that segment would have made me furious and sad.

 

I thought this was a good opinion piece: "Fox’s conduct is even more contemptible than O’Reilly’s"

Quote

...

When the New York Times reported this month that the network and its star anchor had paid about $13 million to settle sexual harassment suits brought by five women, O’Reilly cast himself as a target of extortion and said his decision to settle was driven by — get this — a sense of paternal responsibility. He was settling “to spare my children,” O’Reilly said, as “a father . . . who would do anything to avoid hurting them in any way.” If there is anything more sickening than O’Reilly’s reported behavior, it is stooping to use his own children as a shield and the excuse of fatherly love to evade responsibility.

O’Reilly’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, one-upped his own client in moral repulsiveness when, on the eve of the anchor’s departure from Fox News, he complained that O’Reilly “has been subjected to a brutal campaign of character assassination that is unprecedented in post-McCarthyist America.”

Sen. Joseph McCarthy used the power of his office to make unfounded smears of treason, and helped ruin the lives and careers of hundreds of Americans. Here, O’Reilly is the figure with McCarthyite power, not the victim, no matter how hard he tries to present himself as one. Invoking the ghost of McCarthy should be done nearly as carefully as making a Hitler analogy. At least White House press secretary Sean Spicer was deploying the Holocaust analogy in the service of denouncing war crimes.

If anything, Fox News’s conduct is even more contemptible than that attributed to O’Reilly, driven as it seems to have been not by sick compulsion but by cool financial calculations: Paying off its anchor’s alleged victims made better business sense than cleaning up its already soiled workplace. Most astonishing, the network signed its latest contract with O’Reilly not only after the forced departure of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes over similar complaints but also when it was fully aware of the impending publication of the Times article. As The Post’s Paul Farhi reported, Times reporters “had sent Fox’s executives a long list of questions, placing senior executives on alert months in advance of its publication.”

In other words, it wasn’t necessarily a problem for Fox News if O’Reilly was harassing women, or even if O’Reilly’s behavior was costing it millions in settlement money — so long as his market power was such that he made the network millions more in advertising revenue and cable fees. The news that O’Reilly will walk away with a severance package worth a reported $25 million is salt in the wound inflicted on every woman who works at Fox News — no, make that every Fox News employee who believes in a workplace free of such behavior.

It would be nice to think that the rest of corporate America will no longer tolerate O’Reilly-esque behavior. Certainly, the public outcry against O’Reilly and advertisers’ consequent flight from his program are evidence of change. Companies now have mandatory sexual harassment training and HR departments that are supposed to intervene. Yet in practice, the tolerance may be greater than zero for those who are star performers, and while the Fox News culture may be particularly toxic, it is not unique. See the description by a former engineer at Uber about what happened when she complained of sexual harassment there.

Meanwhile, legal constraints and societal repercussions combine to dissuade women from coming forward. Complaining of sexual harassment remains risky business. Women fear looking like troublemakers — or worse. Staying in your job may become untenable, finding another impossible if you have taken legal action. At the same time, rules requiring that disputes be mediated, or settlements reached only with the proviso of gag orders prohibiting disclosure, as happened in O’Reilly’s case, serve to keep harassment hidden and to protect harassers.

Finally, there is Trump, who, in the aftermath of the Times article, declared, “I don’t think Bill would do anything wrong.” He probably doesn’t — and doesn’t see anything wrong with someone in his position rushing to O’Reilly’s defense. Just another disturbing twist in an already dispiriting tale.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah this is The Onion but I could easily see this being true

http://www.theonion.com/article/bill-oreilly-tearfully-packs-framed-skirt-photos-d-55818

Quote

Former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly reportedly grew teary-eyed Thursday as he packed up the framed up-skirt photos from his work space following his termination by the cable channel. “God, I have so many great memories from this place,” said the longtime host of The O’Reilly Factor as he stared down at the 8-by-10 glossy print showing a woman’s exposed underwear taken from underneath a news desk, before wrapping it in tissue paper and placing it gently in a cardboard box alongside a smaller three-panel frame containing photos of various women’s bare thighs

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I enjoyed this Alexandra Petri humorous piece about Billy O: ‘Killing Bill’ (in the style of noted historian Bill O’Reilly)

Quote

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

The man with a day left to live is anxious.

He is the best cable news anchor in the world. He is a colossus among men, with piercing eyes, large hands and an elegant wattle like a turkey prince. If he is anxious, it is because he knows that other men — lesser, smaller men who hate to see a man like him — are gathering to plot against him.

He is rakishly handsome and universally admired. When he opens his mouth, people are impressed. When he closes it, they weep. Sometimes, just as a special favor to them, because he is broad-minded like that, he will call women on the telephone and allegedly give them a wonderful compliment: his sexual attention and a reference to a loofah.

But some of these women are ungrateful, and instead of being flattered, they complained to a lawyer. And now a vile and pointless newspaper has gotten wind of it.

And a conspiracy is brewing.

The conspirators come from Australia. They are not great men themselves, merely the sons of a great man. Lachlan. James. The names are not even prepossessing. But like King Lear, their great father is waning in his dying years. He has grown soft, and like vultures with bad hair, they are swooping in. Just looking at them, you can definitely tell that they had not bedded as many women as John Wilkes Booth. (Editor’s Note: Citation?) (NOTE TO EDITOR: NO! THAT ISN’T HOW WE DO THINGS!)

But what they hoped to do would be, in the end, far worse than what he had done.

They conspired against the one beacon of spinless light still left in a chaos-ridden world. They wanted to destroy the “Factor.”

While they meet, Bill sits in Italy. He is in the city of St. Peter. But someone far more noteworthy is about to be crucified.

...

I needed a laugh today.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Turd is gone, but sadly he got paid some bank on his way out the door to the tune of about $20 mil. What ever will he do now? :5624795532b4c_32(10)::boom:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm thrilled to see O'Reilly leave Fox News. He and Fox were a real thorn in my side the last few years of my mother's life. Her basic satellite package changed so that the only cable news network was Fox, just as her mobility took a real nosedive. A steady diet of Fox News had a very negative effect on her views of the world.:pb_sad:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

David Corn had this piece in Mother Jones about Butthole the Clown;

motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/fox-owns-oreilly-legacy-david-corn

Quote

Two years ago, Daniel Schulman and I reported that O'Reilly had repeatedly mischaracterized his limited wartime reporting experience. Over the years, he had said he had witnessed combat while serving as a war correspondent for CBS News during the 1982 Falklands war between Argentina and the United Kingdom. He had also claimed that in this "war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands," his cameraman had been injured and O'Reilly had saved the man. None of this was true. Numerous colleagues of O'Reilly noted that no American reporters reached the Falkland Islands during the fighting and that the US correspondents covered the war from Buenos Aries, about 1,200 miles away. The cameraman said no such incident had happened. O'Reilly, like other American journalists there, had never been in the war zone.

O'Reilly also had bragged in the past that while in Buenos Aires, he had covered a riot at the war's end, which he characterized as a combat situation, with troops gunning down and slaughtering demonstrators. News reports from the time and eyewitness accounts noted there had been no killing. And O'Reilly's own reports from the time contradicted his boastful account. There was no massacre. Schulman and I also reported that O'Reilly had exaggerated his account of an assignment covering the civil war in El Salvador in the early 1980s.

Our story was followed by other media reports chronicling instances when O'Reilly had fibbed about his derring-do. The Guardian noted that six of O'Reilly's colleagues from Inside Edition disputed his account of having been attacked by protesters while he reported on the Los Angeles riots in 1992. The Washington Post questioned a passage in an O'Reilly book in which he asserted he had "seen" Irish terrorists "kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs." O'Reilly's response: He saw photos of bombings. Media Matters, a liberal advocacy group, caught O'Reilly in a similar lie. He had claimed he had seen nuns gunned down in El Salvador. But nope—just photos. And CNN blew apart another boastful O'Reilly story: He had been present when a mysterious witness in the John Kennedy assassination case committed suicide.

This was a boatload of credibility-destroying stories. Fox News, though, stood by their man. And it did so as he attempted to lie and bully his way through this series of imbroglios—with me as his No. 1 target. O'Reilly refused to acknowledge the contradictions between his tall (and false) tales and reality. Instead, he went ballistic with invective. He called me a "liar," "dumb," a "left-wing assassin," and a "despicable guttersnipe." He denounced Mother Jones as "the bottom rung of journalism in America." And he got violent and said that I deserve "to be in the kill zone."

 

5 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

I'm thrilled to see O'Reilly leave Fox News. He and Fox were a real thorn in my side the last few years of my mother's life. Her basic satellite package changed so that the only cable news network was Fox, just as her mobility took a real nosedive. A steady diet of Fox News had a very negative effect on her views of the world.:pb_sad:

Did you ever see this piece from Jen Senko about how thanks to that fuck Limbaugh and Faux News her father went from a non political Democrat to a angry reich winger?

thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/17/how-fox-news-and-the-right-wing-media-machine-made-my-dad-crazy.html

Quote

When he retired, he continued with his talk radio habit and started listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would rarely miss a Limbaugh lunch. And that’s when my Dad became angry all the time, argumentative, and hateful of particular groups of people. Of all things, he began lashing out against gay people. I couldn’t believe it. He would get red-in-the-face angry whenever I tried to ask him why he suddenly hated all things gay. And didn’t he still like my friends? I never got a coherent answer other than, “I just don’t want it in my face!” 

When Clinton came into office he hated him so much it was disturbing—something I figured had to do with his hero, Rush Limbaugh. He called Al Gore an “asshole,” and even after he saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth years later, said it was “stupid.” He railed against “liberal universities.” He railed against illegal immigrants and Mexicans, and literally started telling my mother she should wait on him because he was the man of the house. He started calling my mother and aunts “girls,” and did not like it when I would correct him and say “women.” “Girls,” he’d repeat, his face filling with blood.

I saw the writing on the wall early on and mentioned it to my mother. She didn’t know what to do about it, so she downplayed it. No one took it too seriously at first. Then email came into play. My Dad joined and/or contributed to every right-wing organization, from the NRA to Christian right groups. Both of these choices struck everyone as especially strange considering he wasn’t a hunter and was a medic in WWII. And only a few years earlier, he’d announced he didn’t believe in God anymore.

Gradually, my Dad had become a completely different person. He was angry all the time, and you couldn’t discuss anything remotely political with him. At the same time, he tried to engage everyone he met to talk about politics, and always tried to find out what “team” they were on. If we didn’t agree with him, he got angry with us. And he wouldn’t stop sending these strange emails. My older brother blocked him first, then I did, and then my younger brother did. My mother was so unhappy with the change in him that she resolved to email him back, hoping beyond hope that he would question some of these newly held beliefs and return to being himself.

Thankfully my parents aren't into the Faux News or reich wing bullshit.  Mine complained to the local radio station when they put that fuck Limbaugh on the air.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a rather right wing conservative person on my Facebook feed. He's posted several articles acting as if good old dip shit Billy O'Reilly aka the love child of genetically deranged chicken and turtle man McConnell is a victim. There was one post on the "hypocrisy" of the left with a classic what about the Clinton's. I have taken a new approach to the Godwin ' s law, but in terms of the Clinton card. Anytime someone on the right is criticized a conservative will inevitably bring up Clinton. I'm sorry, but obsficating the issue with an unrelated person who had sexual issues, does not negate the said action of the person being discussed. I mean does every rapist get to go but Brock Turner only got a few months, why am I getting a few years. We would say no one was a miscarriage of justice and does not qualify as a valid argument. This whole false equivalency tactic is rather comical in a way. The right tell people they have higher standards and are better morally. However, when held to higher standards and now you're accused of being hypocritical or engaging in left wing smear campaigns. Oh wait because the right never engages in smear campaigns [emoji23]. I swear I read some of the stuff and mentally did the Dana Carvey imitating his teenage sons walking away going this is funckin bull shit.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Did you ever see this piece from Jen Senko about how thanks to that fuck Limbaugh and Faux News her father went from a non political Democrat to a angry reich winger?

Yes, I saw that! Her movie about her experience with her father is currently available for free to Amazon Prime members.

 I've read so many comments the last few years from people who considered a friend or relative to be in the "conservative, but sane" category, and then after a steady diet of Fox News and/or right-wing talk radio and internet websites, they turned into Jen Senko's father. 

5 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Thankfully my parents aren't into the Faux News or reich wing bullshit.  Mine complained to the local radio station when they put that fuck Limbaugh on the air.

I envy you. :pb_sad: 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Did you ever see this piece from Jen Senko about how thanks to that fuck Limbaugh and Faux News her father went from a non political Democrat to a angry reich winger?

I've recounted this story on another thread here, but years ago, my mild mannered friend took Rush Limbaugh's rants to heart, sold her house, and moved to a rather secluded, rural area to escape the coming riots in the streets (of our little city, which doesn't even have a real downtown).  This behavior really came out of the blue, and I'd never really heard of the guy, but now that Trump is in the White House, I see these media personalities have a real impact on average people.

I have always taken TV and radio ranters, fundie preachers, etc., with a grain of salt, and thought their messages were generally ugly, but only there for entertainment value.  I wish I'd understood earlier how harmful they could be. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes!! I was too young for my parents to talk politics to me in the 90s, but I could have sworn my mother was a liberal. She had a steady diet of soap operas and Oprah (she had a job, but she gave that up in '97). And then 9/11 happened, and she decided that if there were soldiers sacrificing their lives overseas for us, it was only right that she watch the news 24/7. She flipped through several channels (I remember CNN and BBC amongst them) before settling on Fox as the only one that was truly "fair and balanced" (because they apparently have a Democrat and Republican on at the same time).

It's gone steadily downhill since then. The racism isn't anything particularly new, but now there are people on TV justifying her views!

Fortunately (?) my dad is an alcoholic and he just wants to watch sports (though I did overhear the horrifying question "So which ones are the good guys?" And mom's response: "Remember, Democrats are always bad").

I really should have asked her what she finds so objectionable about Democrats.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, AmericanRose said:

It's gone steadily downhill since then. The racism isn't anything particularly new, but now there are people on TV justifying her views!

When I was growing up, my mom always said things like she just didn't understand racism. She was a teenager in the 50s, and she told me about the separate water fountains in her hometown, and how stupid it was to treat people like that. My late father was a racist, and I was used to his ignorant bullshit, but mom was always there saying it was wrong. 

Mom and I were on the phone once during the last year of her life, and she started to refer to someone by a racial slur. I guess she remembered who she was talking to at the last minute, but it was obvious what word she started to say. I was so heartbroken at the change in her world view.

I shudder to think what might have happened if either of my parents had lived long enough to see Trump become the Republican nominee, much less the president.  :pb_sad:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

55 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

When I was growing up, my mom always said things like she just didn't understand racism. She was a teenager in the 50s, and she told me about the separate water fountains in her hometown, and how stupid it was to treat people like that. My late father was a racist, and I was used to his ignorant bullshit, but mom was always there saying it was wrong. 

Mom and I were on the phone once during the last year of her life, and she started to refer to someone by a racial slur. I guess she remembered who she was talking to at the last minute, but it was obvious what word she started to say. I was so heartbroken at the change in her world view.

I shudder to think what might have happened if either of my parents had lived long enough to see Trump become the Republican nominee, much less the president.  :pb_sad:

Yeah, that's one good thing about the grand paternal units being gone is that they don't have to see Fornicate Head in the White House. 

Did you mom have dementia?  I know sometimes people with dementia can turn racist as they regress to childhood. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I know the feeling.  My dad used to be a Dem, but the last few years he's been a Repub.  So far, he's not a crazy one, but he is a full blown supporter of Lord Dampnut and a big Faux News watcher.  I cringe when I think about it.  How a man with several daughters can support someone who bragged about sexually assaulting women is beyond me.  The mental gymnastics it takes to justify that is phenomenal.  This is a person who always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted in life regardless of my gender.  To say it disappoints me is an understatement.  At least he's wise enough to not talk about it in front of me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, 47of74 said:

Did you mom have dementia?  I know sometimes people with dementia can turn racist as they regress to childhood

No, but I hadn't heard that before about people with dementia. That's very interesting. :think:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"How the Murdochs took a multi-million dollar gamble on Bill O’Reilly — and lost"

Quote

Earlier this year, when Rupert Murdoch and senior executives at Fox News’ parent company signed Bill OReilly to a new multiyear contract, they knew something the rest of the world didn’t: The star host had been accused of sexual and verbal harassment by women at Fox five times over the preceding 15 years.

They knew it because the company, 21st Century Fox, had paid money to settle two of the complaints. They also knew that the public was unlikely to find out because attorneys for O’Reilly and the company had signed his accusers to agreements binding them to confidentiality. In exchange for their silence and a promise not to sue, the women received payments totaling $3 million from 21st Century Fox.

Those settlements came on top of some $10 million that O’Reilly himself had paid earlier to three other women who had complained about his behavior while working at Fox. They also came after a bruising sexual harassment scandal involving Fox News co-founder and chairman Roger Ailes last summer, one in which 21st Century paid some $35 million to settle a lawsuit by former Fox presenter Gretchen Carlson and allegations against Ailes by several unidentified women. This was in addition to $40 million paid to Ailes as severance.

In effect, Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan, who run 21st Century, took a calculated risk. They re-signed O’Reilly — Fox News’ most valuable asset — fully aware of his history but in the apparent hope that they could continue with business as usual, according to knowledgeable people at the company. Just to be safe, however, the company added an unusual feature to O’Reilly’s new contract: A clause permitting 21st Century to terminate him, with up to a year’s salary as severance, if new allegations arose.

In the end, the Murdochs’ bet on their guaranteed moneymaker didn’t pay off.

...

The O’Reilly debacle raises questions about 21st Century’s stated commitment to ensuring a hostility-free environment. In one of their few public statements about the problem in the scandal-scarred Fox News Channel workplace, James, 44, and Lachlan, 45, said after Ailes’s ouster last summer, “We continue our commitment to maintaining a work environment based on trust and respect.”

Yet after making that pledge, the company settled two more allegations against O’Reilly — one with former anchor Laurie Dhue, who left the network in 2008, and another with Juliet Huddy, a former network host.

According to the Times, the company also offered last year to settle, for $1 million, a lawsuit brought by Andrea Tantaros, who appeared regularly on Fox News. Tantaros’s suit is against the network and Ailes, but she also claimed in her complaint that O’Reilly made unwelcome advances. Fox has denied her claims; her suit is in “confidential arbitration,” according to Irena Briganti, Fox News’ spokeswoman.

...

Through all of this, 21st Century has taken steps to keep the allegations and settlements as quiet as possible.

In addition to binding Dhue, Huddy and other women who have settled to silence through nondisclosure agreements, most full-time employees at Fox have arbitration agreements that “force them into secret corporate courts,” said Nancy Erika Smith, the attorney who represented Carlson. “Secrecy is what allows harassers to keep it up,” she said.

As a corporate matter, 21st Century has made minimal public disclosures about the cost and extent of the problems. The company’s entire official accounting of the Ailes drama is contained in a half-sentence buried in two quarterly 10Q reports, a financial disclosure document required by federal securities law.

“For the three months ended September 30, 2016,” the disclosure reads, “the Company recorded . . . approximately $35 million of costs related to settlements of pending and potential litigations following the July 2016 resignation of the Chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel after a public complaint was filed containing allegations of sexual harassment.” (The complaint referred to is Carlson’s lawsuit.)

The company has meanwhile kept its internal investigation of the Ailes and O’Reilly matters under wraps.

After Carlson filed suit, lawyers for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison were hired to look into the complaint and Fox’s workplace practices. 21st Century called on the same firm this month after Wendy Walsh, a former contributor to O’Reilly’s program, formally complained about O’Reilly on a company hotline.

According to people at 21st Century, the law firm’s findings weren’t contained in a written report. Instead, the lawyers presented their conclusions to the Murdochs in a series of oral briefings, a step that would minimize leaks or unauthorized dissemination of a document.

Lisa Bloom, an attorney for Walsh and two other women who have alleged harassment by O’Reilly, said 21st Century’s attorneys typically insist on some of the strictest nondisclosure terms in the business.

“Their strategy has been to duck and cover every time a woman complains of harassment in their workplace, and then to drive her out, pay her off and silence her,” Bloom said.

Attorneys Smith and Bloom both note that almost none of the women publicly identified as accusers continue to be employed by Fox. They also note a seemingly opposite fact: Many of the senior executives who were employed at the time Ailes and O’Reilly were allegedly harassing women continue to run Fox.

Among them are Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, who became co-presidents of Fox News after Ailes’s departure.

In her lawsuit, Tantaros said Shine warned her to drop her harassment complaints about Ailes or face a campaign of retaliation.

...

The pattern of allegations, settlements and secrecy at 21st Century suggests a kind of “organizational deviance” in which multiple actors play a role, said Mark Feldstein, a University of Maryland journalism professor who is writing a book about media scandals, including the ones involving Ailes and O’Reilly.

“Essentially, the Murdochs made a business calculation as to how much and how long they could get away with all this before the price they had to pay was too great to bear,” he said. “It’s not how [the parent company of] a news organization to supposed to behave. It’s not how any company is supposed to act.”

Boy, political views aside, as a woman, I can't imagine working at Faux.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Destiny locked this topic

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.



×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.