- Overwhelming aggression is how O’Reilly rolls, and how he manages in the end to skate away from each potentially career-harming controversy: answer every criticism with total warfare; respond to a lobbed grenade by going nuclear. In this sense, at least—despite his doubters and detractors—he exists in a perpetual war zone.
The people who watch his show are the people who think that the media are all liars except Fox, so I'd be surprised if he wasn't loving this. Ailes' wet dream is for the more liberal media outlets such as Mother Jones to point out how many lies Fox tells. They feed on it, because it gives them more fuel to tell their audience that everyone is out to get them.
It's a short term, not a long term problem.
Fox News is the oldest-skewing network on television, and Bill O'Reilly has the oldest-skewing demo. The last time I saw numbers was 2007, and the median age of Fox News viewers was 72. It had been going up a year every year since 2000, when it was 65. That his numbers are considered "good" says a lot about how low the expectations are any longer; Bill O'Reilly gets 2-3m viewers an afternoon while Jon Stewart gets about 1.5, but Bill O'Reilly gets effectively zero online.
- The people who watch his show are the people who think that the media are all liars except Fox, so I'd be surprised if he wasn't loving this.
Exactly.
I actually think that a controversy like this only serves to feed Fox's narrative and how it positions itself in the media landscape. Everybody else sees an unethical news (I use that term so very very loosely) host that lied to his viewers in order to build up his image. Fox viewers see a targeted liberal media character assassination attempt that seeks to take O'Reilly down by twisting and distorting the context of a few words he said decades ago.
But at the end of the day, if you step back and actually look at what he said, he's just a bald face liar who's job it was to deliver a factual account with as little bias as possible.
He's in the right place now though. His current job requires massive spin and maximization, not minimization of bias.