If anything, Mr. O’Reilly’s moralizing went up a notch in his 2006 book “Culture Warrior,” in which he
denounced a “philosophy of confronting harmful behavior by providing a variety of excuses for it.”
The “traditional cultural warrior” — he counted himself one — “believes in the Judeo-Christian code of forgiveness —
but with punishment and with penance.” Americans, he wrote, “must continue to uphold standards of behavior that protect people.”
The allegations that my colleagues Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt recounted in
their explosive article about Mr. O’Reilly last weekend sure don’t fit that code.
But late on Sunday the company said it had enlisted the same private law firm
that looked into allegations against Mr. Ailes — Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison — to investigate at least one accusation made against Mr. O’Reilly.
Some people barter sexual favors for a push up the ladder to success.” While
that might “work in the short term,” he warned, “in the long term, sexual exploitation almost always leads to disaster.”
Nearly 17 years later, that writer, the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, is flirting with disaster as never before.
Loyalty to an opinionated news personality can run deep enough to prompt a committed viewer to overlook potentially damaging details — as my colleague Julie Turkewitz pointed out in her article on devoted O’Reilly fans — or start with a presumption of innocence
that might not be extended to somebody on the other side.
On one hand, there was the question of whether Fox News and 21st Century Fox could gut it out and stand by Mr. O’Reilly in the face of mounting advertiser defections and internal and external pressure to show
that they are serious about fostering a modern work environment that treats women as equals (yes, in 2017, this is still an issue).
