Sexism is alive and well in the US. First we elect a president who publicly brags about grabbing women by the pussy. I mean, seriously? However, I suppose Trump voters could possibly excuse this by claiming that they voted for him for other reasons.
But consider this. Recently, Bill O’Reilly and Fox News paid out around $13 million to at least seven women to settle lawsuits accusing the Fox News host of sexual harassment of fellow employees at Fox News. O’Reilly was criticized in the media (including on NPR), a prominent women’s organization called for him to be fired, and over fifty advertisers dropped their sponsorship of O’Reilly’s show.
But when the next O’Reilly show aired, the number of viewers soared from 2.3 million to 3.8 million viewers. That’s right, O’Reilly’s viewers not only stuck with him, they rewarded him after the news broke. Not only that, but Fox News renewed his contract despite knowing about the lawsuits.
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Maybe viewers just think that now that all the sponsors have gone, there will be less ads.
I cant stand the man, but I was thinking about watching it to see what he would have to say. I didn’t, but maybe that was what was driving the ratings bump.
And did Fox renew before or after the boycott started? He gets viewers in, regardless of what he does. There seems to be nothing Fox and their fans will not tolerate, well except for being named Hillary Clinton. I guess Fox may be hoping that they will come to watch the “skank” and stay for some other shows that have advertisers. In many cases, that’s all that’s happened. They just shifted the advertising to other time slots. The advertisers aren’t ditching Fox, just skank man.
Well, it’s no big surprise his viewership went up (temporarily?) after the scandal broke. He seems to have an ardent base of admirers, presumably not all of whom tune in every single day, and the ratings spike may simply reflect their collective concern and indignation about Papa Bear’s No Spin Zone possibly getting spun out of control by this small army of shameless, lawyered-up gold diggers being trotted out by the fake news mainstream media messing with their daily fix of hard hitting blabber. We’ll see how things hold up there because apparently this thing is not going away anytime soon.
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/328023-oreilly-accusers-lawyer-this-is-not-blowing-over
Given the recent related scandal involving Jabba the Ailes, however, it’s perhaps a bigger surprise (but not really) Fox renewed his contract so readily, assuming the deal was actually struck after poor Bill was set upon by these obviously sex-crazed harpies.
BTW, I understand that many of the companies that pulled their ads off his show simply rescheduled them to run on other Fox “news” venues, so I wouldn’t hold them up as bastions of moral civility either. Like the network, they know what side their bread is buttered on.