| | | | | Fox bracing for Bill O'Reilly scandal fallout | | If Bill O'Reilly weren't the biggest star at Fox News, would he still have a job at Fox News?
If the answer is no, what does that answer say about Rupert Murdoch's media empire?
The media world devoured Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt's explosive NYT story about the harassment allegations that have cost O'Reilly and Fox millions of dollars. The story landed on Saturday morning... and ran above the fold in Sunday's paper... the biggest play the NYT can give a story like this.
Steel and Schmidt answered some Q's and raised some new ones... which means this scandal will remain a big story as the work week begins... I'm hoping this edition of the newsletter is a well-rounded view of the situation. | | Murdoch and his sons are standing near O'Reilly, but not right next to him. By renewing his contract, but not issuing a full-throated defense, they're signaling support for Fox's biggest star, while also keeping a bit of distance.
In this Sunday night story, I reported that Fox execs are expecting that more women will come forward with allegations against O'Reilly... One of the accusers quoted by the NYT, Wendy Walsh, is holding a press conference on Monday morning... | | -- WashPost's Paul Farhi tweets: "When should employer say enough's enough and fire a person?"
-- Were there any other settlements, or just the five the NYT described?
-- Joanna Coles tweets: "Anyone know of any female TV anchors who have run up this sort of settlement total? Mmn, thought not."
-- Will O'Reilly say anything about the Times story on Monday's "Factor?"
-- Will advertisers feel pressure to withdraw ads from the show?
-- Will O'Reilly's viewers care enough about the controversy to stop watching?
-- Conversely, will his fans just dismiss the Times story as a liberal hit job, a piece of "fake news" from the "failing NYT?"
-- Schmidt on "Reliable Sources:" "Is there any other pressure on Fox to really do anything?" For example, will the O'Reilly settlement issue become part of the ongoing federal investigation?
-- How are Fox staffers reacting to the weekend's revelations?
-- O'Reilly's lawyer told the NYT on Friday, "We are now seriously considering legal action to defend Mr. O'Reilly's reputation." Will anything come of that? | | Key graf in the NYT story: "The reporting suggests a pattern: As an influential figure in the newsroom, Mr. O'Reilly would create a bond with some women by offering advice and promising to help them professionally. He then would pursue sexual relationships with them, causing some to fear that if they rebuffed him, their careers would stall." | | Let's be honest -- Murdoch and co. did not need a New York Times investigation to find out about O'Reilly's reputation. His alleged behavior has been a liability for a long time. Besides -- the execs knew the story was in the works for months.
The NYT began looking into the $$$ settlements late last summer, right after Roger Ailes resigned... Murdoch associates wondered how damaging the story could be... and discussed ways to blunt the impact.
Obviously the story went through an extensive legal review process... Read more of the tick-tock here... | | | What O'Reilly's allies are saying | | Channeling Team O'Reilly: This is a completely unfair pile-on, merely proving what O'Reilly has said in the past about media vultures. These women never contacted HR at the time of the alleged incidents. But now these old, unprovable assertions are hurting a father and his family. Oh, and Fox's willingness to settle with Ailes accusers has made a bad thing worse, causing more women to come forward. O'Reilly is uniquely vulnerable because of the highly publicized Andrea Mackris settlement in 2004. (Mackris accounts for $9 million of the $13 million that the NYT is trumpeting.) As O'Reilly said in his statement, "the worst part of my job is being a target for those who would harm me and my employer." | | | What Lisa Bloom is saying | | Lisa Bloom is representing Wendy Walsh, who hasn't sought a settlement, but is speaking publicly about alleged harassment and retaliation. Here's what Bloom told me on Sunday's "Reliable Sources:"
"This is not my first case against Fox News. And I don't expect it will be my last... There needs to be an independent investigation of sexual harassment at Fox News... How many women have to come forward? How many millions of dollars have to get paid before Fox News takes sexual harassment seriously? In my opinion, this network is the Bill Cosby of corporate America..." | | | What Murdoch allies are saying | | Channeling Murdochworld: Rupert, James and Lachlan have been taking this very seriously. It's been clear for months that they're "making things right," creating a safer climate for women, breaking from the boorish Ailes era... Just look at the new H.R. staffers, sensitivity training, sexual harassment training, etc... | | | What Mark Fabiani is saying | | O'Reilly is being represented by "master of disaster" Mark Fabiani, a crisis comms veteran whose past clients have included the Clintons and Lance Armstrong. Fabiani declined our requests to come on "Reliable Sources" and deferred to O'Reilly's statement... | | The situation has parallels to pro sports, in which the business interests of teams and leagues sometimes override concerns about players' off-the-field behavior. Millions of people look past the unsettling news coverage and tune in for the show.
But other people -- probably a smaller number of them -- are also looking at how the Murdochs are conducting themselves. "Rupert's sons, you know, don't like this one bit, I can tell you. And there are people within the network itself who don't like this one bit," the FT's Matt Garrahan said on Sunday's show... | | Last summer O'Reilly was quoted saying "I don't want to work this hard much longer." His contract was set to expire at the end of this year. But it was "recently renewed," WSJ's Joe Flint scooped on Saturday. Dylan Byers confirmed this with a source. Fox declined to comment, and there's no word on when the new deal expires... | | | Based on past performance... | | Brian Lowry emails: O'Reilly usually doesn't like to directly fuel a negative story like the one that broke over the weekend. But based on past performance, don't be surprised if he ratchets up criticism of the NYT in particular, and anyone else he sees as having wronged him, in the weeks ahead... | | "What it really shows is that, you know, nothing has changed." That's what Tina Brown told me on Sunday's show when I asked her to react to the O'Reilly story.
"At this point," she said, the Murdochs need to "clean out that entire shop. That culture is not fixed. And it won't be really until Bill O'Reilly hits the door..." | | -- Erik Wemple's must-read blog post: O'Reilly "shouldn't be trusted to share space with his colleagues, nor to report on women and men. He is an awful, awful man."
-- Was Gabriel Sherman doing a bit of foreshadowing with this headline last Thursday? "The Trouble at Fox News Keeps Getting Worse"
-- How's it playing elsewhere: About a minute of coverage on Fox News on Sunday. Zero minutes on MSNBC.
-- From the You-Can't-Make-It-Up Department: The title of O'Reilly's next book is "Old School." | | -- Congrats to newly married Politico media reporter Hadas Gold and husband Christopher Hooton... (NYT)
-- "S-Town," the new podcast from the "Serial" folks, was downloaded "more than 10 million in the first four days of its release — setting a new record in the podcasting world..." (Variety)
-- "NBC's Lester Holt will anchor Nightly News from South Korea Monday and Tuesday for what NBC calls 'unprecedented access to the U.S. military's combined air, ground and naval capabilities...'" (TVNewser)
-- "A newspaper in the Mexican border city of Juarez announced Sunday that it is shutting down because of the climate of insecurity and the impunity for killings of journalists..." (The AP) | | My vacation last week doubled as an experiment: what it's like to opt out of @realDonaldTrump's Twitter feed. I didn't see any presidential tweets or read about them for almost an entire week. And I gotta say... when you scroll through a whole week's worth... it really is shocking. I know it's easy to feel numb to his constant criticism of real newsrooms as "fake news," and it's definitely no longer "surprising," but when you view it with fresh eyes, it is seriously shocking... | | In an interview with the Financial Times, Trump says he has no Twitter-related regrets. To the contrary, "without the tweets, I wouldn't be here."
POTUS says he has over 100 million followers across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram combined. (That's an inflated figure, not accounting for overlap, bot accounts, etcetera. But I digress.)
Why did Trump cite his social media stature? In order to tell the FT, "I don't have to go to the fake media." | | Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti on Sunday's show: "Trump was elected to be commander-in-chief, not media-critic-in-chief. And I even feel when you go and you talk to a lot of his supporters, there's some kind of exhaustion with the endless criticism of the media. They want to see the jobs. That's what that's what they put him in office for." | | | April Ryan profiled in the NYT | | -- Happy "International Fact-Checking Day!" I marked the occasion on air with PolitiFact's Angie Holan... Here's the segment...
-- Recommended read: Lena Dunham "talks to former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson about getting fired, supporting young journalists, and the sign outside her door that says 'Push.'" (Lenny Letter)
-- Steven Levy: "No, the internet is not so much the wild, wild West anymore. Increasingly, it's more like Westworld. And we're the androids..." (Backchannel) | | Brian Lowry emails: After shooting an airball last year, NCAA basketball ratings rebounded nicely on Saturday.
Per CBS/Turner Sports, the average of 16.8 million viewers for the two Final Four games was the second-highest in 19 years, behind 2015... | | | Lowry reviews "The Walking Dead" finale | | Jamie and I... getting acquainted with kid-friendly flicks... saw "Boss Baby" on Friday. Our theatre wasn't crowded, but "the animated comedy bottled up a leading $49 million from 3,773 locations, edging out Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast,' a box office juggernaut that's dominated the multiplexes since debuting three weeks ago," Variety's Brent Lang reports.
>> More: "The weekend's other new release, Paramount's 'Ghost in the Shell,' bombed, taking in a demoralizing $19 million..." | | | Another milestone for Jordan Peele | | Jordan Peele's "Get Out" is now "the highest-grossing movie ever for a feature debut for a writer/director of an original screenplay..." | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We appreciate every email. | |  | | We'd love to share our other newsletters with you. Check out Five Things for Your New Day, CNN's morning newsletter. Give us five minutes, and we'll brief you on all the news and buzz people will be talking about. | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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