Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
I have never, not once, taken Bill O’Reilly seriously as a journalist. Not now, not during his recent fact-versus-opinion nervous breakdown with Geraldo Rivera, and certainly not going all the way back to his days on Inside Edition, where journalism went to put on a trench coat, lower its voice, and ask whether your neighbor might secretly be a cannibal.
That does not mean O’Reilly is stupid, or that he was never capable of doing real journalism. Quite the opposite. The man is aggressively educated. He has a bachelor’s degree in history from Marist College, a master’s in broadcast journalism from Boston University, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also won two local Emmys, one for reporting on a Denver skyjacking and another for exposing corrupt city marshals in New York. In other words, Bill O’Reilly had every credential necessary to become a serious journalist and somehow used them all to become the loudest man at a televised bar fight.
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Somewhere along the way, he figured out that reporting was harder than performing, facts were less profitable than outrage, and shouting over a guest was much easier than answering one. My introduction to him was Inside Edition, the program that helped turn tabloid television into a national ecosystem alongside A Current Affair and Hard Copy. These were shows where every missing housewife, satanic babysitter, miracle diet, celebrity divorce, and suspicious stain on a motel carpet could be stretched into a four-night investigative event. O’Reilly did not invent that kind of journalism, but he clearly looked at it and thought, “This needs more yelling.”
When O’Reilly left Inside Edition, he did not retreat to a quiet local station to spend a few years laundering the tabloid residue off his résumé. He walked directly into the inaugural lineup of a brand-new cable news network conceived by Roger Ailes, which is a little like leaving a carnival sideshow and immediately being appointed dean of a clown college. His show, originally titled, The O’Reilly Report and renamed The O’Reilly Factor in 1998, debuted on Fox News Channel on October 7, 1996, the same day the network itself went on the air, with Ailes hiring him practically straight out of Harvard. Nothing says “Kennedy School of Government” quite like spending the next two decades shouting, “Shut up!” at a schoolteacher from Vermont.
From the first time I saw him on Fox News Channel, I knew exactly what his show—and eventually the entire network built around it—was going to be. The Factor evolved into an hour of O’Reilly yelling at people, interrupting them, misrepresenting what they had just said, and occasionally having their microphones cut when they committed the unforgivable broadcasting offense of making a point he could not answer. His debating style was basically to invite someone into his house, scream over them, unplug their telephone, and then congratulate himself for winning the conversation. Real cute operation for something called the “No Spin Zone.” Apparently the rule was that nobody was allowed to spin except the host, the producers, the graphics department, and whichever intern was operating the kill switch on the guest’s microphone.
And as obnoxious as it was, I have to admit that in the early days I found the show thoroughly entertaining. It was not journalism so much as professional wrestling for people who kept a pocket Constitution in the glove compartment. You did not tune in expecting to learn anything. You tuned in to see which mild-mannered college professor O’Reilly would accuse of destroying America before abruptly going to commercial for gold coins, reverse mortgages, or a book explaining why children needed more discipline...
