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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Bill O'Reilly and the Scorned Women of Fox News
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Bill O'Reilly and the Scorned Women of Fox News
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- [00:00]
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- [01:17]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Friday, April 21st. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. For decades, the O'Reilly Factor, a Fox News talk show hosted by Bill O'Reilly, has been one of the most popular news shows on cable TV. On Wednesday, Bill O'Reilly was fired by Fox. This came two weeks after a New York Times report that Fox had reached settlements with five women who alleged that O'Reilly had sexually harassed them and paid out $13 million in exchange for their silence. Here's O'Reilly in July 2011 speaking with Leslie Marshall, a liberal radio personality.
- [01:58]
Michael Colory
So you, of course, as a liberal, have to agree that all birth control for all women should be paid for by the government, correct?
- [02:06]
Leslie Marshall
Absolutely. Because when you're talking about cost, Bill, the cost up front is very little in comparison to the cost in the long run.
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Michael Colory
Four billion a year. That's not little. Four billion.
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Leslie Marshall
No, the cost in the long run. The savings in the long run will be greater because as you know about half of the pregnancies right now are unplanned, unwanted. There are going to be less abortions. There are going to be less. Well, that's the biggest issue on welfare, less people on Medicaid, less people on food stamps.
- [02:34]
Michael Colory
Maybe, maybe not. Many, many people, many women, I hate to say it goes back to our previous segment. Many women who get pregnant are blasted out of their minds when they have sex and are going to use birth control anyway.
- [02:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
Rebecca Solnit joins me to discuss misogyny and conservatism. Hi, Rebecca. Welcome back.
- [02:52]
Rebecca Solnit
Hello, Dorothy.
- [02:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
Bill O'Reilly's disgrace is pretty late in coming, and Fox acted only after more than 50 advertisers fled the show. If this is a victory for women in the workplace, it seems like a pretty modest one.
- [03:08]
Rebecca Solnit
You know, it's hard not to be full of gorgeous schadenfreude seeing O'Reilly go away. And it's a huge victory to not have his voice out there. But it's also really interesting as a pattern we've seen over and over in the last few years, years that I'd argue are part of a feminist resurgence. We saw it with Bill Cosby. We saw it with Roger Ailes. We've seen it with a lot of other sexual harassers and sexual assailants where women had been saying things for years and finally the world was ready to hear them. And there were consequences.
- [03:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
And yet it took so long. At Fox, Roger Ailes, the founder and chairman, was finally forced out by the Murdoch after multiple claims of sexual abuse against him, including Fox anchors Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson. We see that treating women horribly is bad business.
- [04:05]
Rebecca Solnit
Part of what's interesting is that we now have the pussy grabber in chief in the White House. He was put there in part by Roger Ailes. You know, Bill O'Reilly, we could come up with so many conservative men and slightly too many sort of middle of the road and liberal men who are kind of this way. But there's a funny editorial in the New York Times this morning by a conservative woman saying that's not us, but like, hey, conservatives, that is you. You hate women. You don't quite grasp that we're human beings endowed with certain inalienable rights and you sure don't respect them and you sure work hard at taking them away.
- [04:44]
Dorothy Wickenden
Really? Is that fair? Are you not tarring everyone with too broad a brush?
- [04:48]
Rebecca Solnit
I don't think most Republicans are engaging in sexual harassment, but the whole platform, we're also debating anti abortion politics. You know, the Republican Party's platform about abortion is part of a misogynist agenda. And there's a lot of sort of dog whistles and now open stuff about not only reasserting the dominance of whiteness, but reasserting the dominance of maleness. I think it's baked in, not something that's sort of optional to who right wingers are. And you look at the alt right and you get into super crazy misogyny, you know. And I actually think it's really indicative that the two most powerful people at Fox were both serial sexual abusers who got away with it for decades. It says a lot about what Fox, which helped create the modern right wing in the United States, is. And I wanted to throw in this great quote from last summer when the scandal was about Roger ailes, not Bill O'Reilly, when Fox anchor Andrea Tantaros noted that under Ailes, Fox was, I quote, a sex fueled Playboy mansion like cult steeped in intimidation and decency and misogyny. And the fact that a lot of Americans are getting their news from a sex fueled Playboy mansion like cult steeped in intimidation and decency and misogyny kind of says a lot.
- [06:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
Let's go back to Trump for a second because you came on this program just before the election and we talked about some of this. And I believe at the time that shocking video had just been released of Trump boasting in the most vulgar language about making moves on a married woman. We thought at the time that this was going to be the end of Trump. Why wasn't it?
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Rebecca Solnit
I didn't think it was. I spent all of October kind of like in physical fear and pain that he might win in trying to forestall it. Part of it is that WikiLeaks started leaking DNC emails and the media really ran with that story. Part of it is that it felt like there's a way that Trump scandals cancel each other out. There was so much, you know, it wasn't like, here's a solid structure with one flaw. It's like here's a mountain of flaws and it's marching on you.
- [07:07]
Dorothy Wickenden
A number of women dismissed it and they said, oh, that, you know, all men are like that. It's just locker room talk.
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Rebecca Solnit
That was actually an interesting argument. I read after the Women's March about women who voted for Trump was that they might have been voting other self interests of theirs, whiteness or tax breaks or something like that. But also that there's a kind of cynicism among women where it's like, oh yeah, men do that. Like, are you surprised?
- [07:34]
Dorothy Wickenden
We have a piece in the upcoming issue of the magazine by Connie Brook detailing Steve Bannon's own history of aggressive remarks and behavior toward women. That's two men in the White House who have been publicly shamed. So why is it that their accusers feel the shame more acutely?
- [07:51]
Rebecca Solnit
And that's something that young woman on campus and feminism has been addressing very powerfully and with some effect, which is that shame has kept victims from coming forward in a culture that blames them for it. And you see that often when women testify now. And I think it happened with some of the Trump accusers. There was a culture in which women were, you know, and there still is, in which women, men are reliable and women are not. Women are in charge of ethics. And if a sexual assault happens, it's somehow their fault. And we even have the lovely term victim blaming feminism created not so long ago to talk about it. And I feel like the Bill O'Reilly case is in a lot of ways like the Bill Cosby case, where a very public figure got away with very private crimes for a long time because people didn't want to listen to women. And the news that Fox was willing to pay these women off so this guy could continue and who to this.
- [08:52]
Dorothy Wickenden
Day refuses to acknowledge that it happened, issue any apology and say that this is the price you have to pay for being a public figure.
- [09:01]
Rebecca Solnit
You know, and the whole I'm resigning for the sake of my children, the ones in front of which he allegedly engaged in domestic violence against his wife and et cetera, I don't expect accountability from those people. I think we're in a new era where there's less victim blaming. We understand a lot more about how sexual harassment and assault and domestic violence, which is also in the news this week, all unfold. And I actually think that a big factor in what's been happening from Emily Steele, who was one of the two reporters on the O'Reilly story at the New York Times that helped bring him down to so many of these other pieces, is that there's a lot of women in positions of power as journalists, commentators, editors, publishers, producers. And so the stories are not being dismissed. The sort of subtle biases of men are more reliable than women, or that this isn't very important, you know, might be being undermined just by the slow process of women assuming more and more positions in media.
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Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [10:14]
Michael Colory
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's director of consumer, tech and culture.
- [10:18]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired, and our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [10:27]
Katie Drummond
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [10:37]
Michael Colory
Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [10:47]
Katie Drummond
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [10:56]
Dorothy Wickenden
I've begun to read your new collection of essays, and I was really struck by the opening essay about women and silence, the history of women being silenced and bringing us right up to the current day. Could you talk a little bit about that?
- [11:10]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah. The big new essay in the book is called A Short History of Silence, and it really felt like the way to talk about the oppression of women is to talk about silence, because that's so central to all of it. The lack of ability to participate in government, to be on juries, to be judges, the lack of credibility when it came to testifying about things like sexual harassment and domestic violence. You can see something like reproductive rights as having a voice over what happens with your own body. You can see the fight against domestic violence as, again, saying women are autonomous human beings with inalienable rights who actually have voices that get to decide. You can see the recent no means no consent legislation in California and New York State as insisting that active consent is the criterion for consensual sex. But I also felt that there's a lot of ways in which men have been silenced and silenced to themselves. In some ways, you know, kind of the whole way we arrange our culture depends on reciprocal kinds of silence from men and women. In a way, you can see someone like Bill O'Reilly or Donald Trump as people who are kind of dead to their own humanity, unaware of themselves and others in deep ways, come from a kind of deep, ingrained silencing.
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Dorothy Wickenden
The other really interesting element here is social media. And the White House released a photo that got a lot of attention on Twitter several weeks ago. Mike Pence meeting with Republicans about the health care bill. And it was. They were all sitting around a big conference table, all men and female journalists wrote about it, got it out there. Do you think that this is another way that women and men can break the silence on some of these issues?
- [13:09]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah. And it's interesting because, of course, Trump's team looks like the teams that have governed this country since 1770, whatever. And, you know, and the regression make America White, Male and hateful again campaign, you know, was really about that rolling the clock back. And these are, in a way, victory statements that they've succeeded in doing it. But it doesn't go unnoticed. But what I would say about social media is that it's been an important tool for feminism. And we saw with a number of hashtags like, yes, allwoman, I believe her to support stories that were being told in the news. But what I love about Trump's Twitter feed is every time he tweets something, hundreds of Americans start immediately telling him how much they despise him. And it's got to have some kind of effect.
- [14:07]
Dorothy Wickenden
I also don't want to let liberals off the hook here. You've written about Silicon Valley. You live out on the West Coast. It is mostly a liberal bastion, and yet we see examples of the same kind of behavior emerging from there. Uber is one company that's been rightly scrutinized for some outrageous sexual harassment claims. Tell us a little bit about that.
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Rebecca Solnit
Yeah, Susan Fowler wrote a great blog post about Uber a couple of months ago about leaving Uber after a year of experiencing sexual harassment from the male majority at Uber, which, like almost every tech firm, is mostly white men. And about the human resources people being absolutely uninterested in addressing it until, like, with Fox News, it became a public relations debacle. I grew up in the Bay Area. I used to be really proud of being from here. Silicon Valley has really changed what this place means to the world. And there's a lot of libertarians, and it's hard to think of anyone who's a billionaire, except maybe Tom Steyer, the climate activist billionaire from San Francisco, as a liberal. You know, they might not be homophobic. They're kind of libertine, which is a little different than liberal. Somebody like Uber, like, who surprised their sexual harassment there. This is a company built on driving down wages and creating ruinous lives for workers. Just like Airbnb is sort of built around destroying the housing economy in cities around the world. It's a pretty nasty place in a lot of ways. There was a story this week about a tech startup CEO brutally beating his wife for a decade. You know, when you mentioned it to me in an email, I was like, oh, yeah. Let me share with you all the other stories I've seen over the years about tech CEOs beating their wives or their girlfriends or engaging in rape and other kinds of sexual assault, because there's a big collection of them. And like the multiple accounts at Fox tv, it feels like it kind of says something about what this place is.
- [16:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
You talked at the beginning of our conversation about feminist resurgence. Just reflecting on what we've seen since the inauguration, beginning with the more than half a million people turning out for the Women's March in Washington, along with millions more across the country and the world, I just would like you to talk a little bit about the kinds of energetic resistance we're seeing and how hopeful you are that it is going to cohere in some way and carry us forward.
- [16:40]
Rebecca Solnit
I have to say it's a scary time and sometimes I wonder if the word backlash is adequate to the scale of hatred of women and attempts to deprive women of reproductive rights and full equality. But I also feel like women have generally been progressing slowly over the last half century. Well, you can really go back to the 19th century women's movement, which started to focus on getting women to vote. But what gets called second wave feminism starting in the 60s has made enormous changes around fundamental beliefs about a woman's place. But it feels like there's always been pushback, to put it as gently as possible. Now it feels like an open war. And in some ways maybe that's okay because the lines are drawn. Clearly we know what we're up against and it's being fought wholeheartedly. Not by everybody on the left, because I think part of what came out of the recent election was evidence of how much misogyny there is on the left to, but by a lot of people. And I think one thing Trump, like Fox, may do is clarify what is the right wing agenda? What do they stand for so that people you know are clear that it poses a real threat to the rights of the majority of people in this country.
- [18:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thank you so much, Rebecca.
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Rebecca Solnit
You're welcome, Dorothy.
- [18:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, recently published the Mother of All Questions, a book of essays on contemporary feminism. This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review the political scene on itunes. This podcast is produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com with help from Daniel Wenger. I'm Dorothy Wickenden. America is changing and so is the world.
- [18:59]
Michael Colory
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [19:07]
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I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [19:10]
Michael Colory
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [19:14]
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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story.
- [19:15]
Dorothy Wickenden
From this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [19:19]
Rebecca Solnit
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [19:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
From.
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Rebecca Solnit
PRX.