The Missing O'Reilly Factor
It takes three things for a scandal to reach soap opera status: a celebrity, sex and cable. The Bill O'Reilly mess promised all three.
O'Reilly, 55, who was sued for alleged sexual harassment last week by a 33-year-old producer, is host of the highest-rated show on the highest-rated cable news channel. (He also broadcasts on radio two hours daily.)
The sex in the O'Reilly case, like everyone's, is somewhat risible -- replace thong in the Oval Office with loofah in the Caribbean to get an idea. The long verbatim quotes in the complaint suggests that Andrea Mackris, the woman bringing the suit, has audiotapes. Add a nice dollop of hypocrisy on the part of a family-values proponent in an ostensibly happy marriage and you've got yourself a good month's worth of shows featuring lawyers, counselors and clergy chewing the whole thing over.
But the O'Reilly scandal lacks one critical factor to drive it forward: constant coverage on "The O'Reilly Factor." There's no bigger scold or sterner values enforcer on TV than O'Reilly -- he feasted on Bill Clinton like no other -- and ordinarily he'd be on top such a story. Unless, of course, he was the one sitting in the eye of the storm.
To be fair, right after he filed a preemptive extortion claim against Mackris and her lawyer, he briefly mentioned his predicament on his show, without denying the charges or pressing himself on whether they were true.
Otherwise, a hush has fallen over the Fox News commentariat, and its brothers and sisters in arms. Apparently, there's no morals police to police the morals police. I like to scold as much as the next person, but when the shocker about virtues czar Bill Bennett gambling away hundreds of thousands of dollars came out, I didn't demand he stop gambling, just that he stop scolding the rest of us for the vices we try but sometimes fail to overcome. Ditto for Rush Limbaugh, who needed treatment for his addiction, not prison.
Right-wingers, of course, were late to the cause of sexual harassment. (Remember how they were convinced that Anita Hill was just trying to lynch Clarence Thomas?) They didn't embrace it until Paula Jones did, and then they worked it to nearly lynch a Democratic president.
