Fox News has ended its association with Bill O’Reilly, the combative TV host and commentator who has ruled cable-news ratings for nearly two decades and who was the signature figure in the network’s rise as a powerful political player.
The conservative-leaning host’s downfall was swift and steep, set in motion less than three weeks ago by revelations of a string of harrassment complaints against him. His departure, and the questions swirling around him, represented yet another black eye to Fox, which had sought to put a sexual harrassment scandal involving its co-founder and then-chairman, Roger Ailes, behind it last summer.
“After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel,” 21st Century Fox, the news channel’s parent company, said in a statement today.
Fox and 21st Century Fox — both controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family — had vowed then to clean up an apparent culture of harrassment at the news network. Instead, the allegations kept coming — against Ailes, O’Reilly and some of the senior executives that Ailes had hired and Fox kept in place after Ailes’ exit.
Fox had re-signed O’Reilly to a multimillion dollar, three-year contract only last month, fully aware of the long history of complaints against him. In less than a month, however, Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, were forced to decide whether the economic and reputational fallout from the O’Reilly scandal were irreversible.