In the days before Fox News abruptly bid farewell to ratings star and noted windbag Bill O’Reilly, recently revealed emails obtained by Politico show that his team was working hard to keep his dumb ass on air.
The emails were sent by accident to Politico’s Joe Pompeo by a member of O’Reilly’s legal team and contain what looks to be the evidence of the “smear campaign” O’Reilly’s people said was “orchestrated by far-left organizations bent on destroying O’Reilly for political and financial reasons.”
In the emails, O’Reilly and his team were discussing whether or not to share with Fox News leadership emails from Democratic fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner about an “advertiser education campaign” intends to get advertisers to pull out of The O’Reilly Factor.
In an interview with Politico, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone made it clear that their tactics—which included a #StopOReilly campaign that was pretty effective—had nothing to do with smearing the good name of an honest man trying to do his job, or whatever bullshit Billy boy would have you believe.
“This is not based off of an outrage moment, but rather, it’s responsive to a deep pattern of sexual harassment,” he said. “It doesn’t have a political partisan lens, the way maybe a comment around an individual would have or a statement that some people may find outrageous and others may not. This is about behavior that is universally wrong.”
If Media Matters was trying to sully O’Reilly’s name by asking advertisers to retreat from a show headed by a man who paid $13 million in hush money to women accusing him of sexual harassment, certainly Fox News would see it as evidence confirming the vast, mounting conspiracy against him, right?
The email, whose recipients’ names were redacted in the version that was shared with POLITICO, announced two conference calls — originally scheduled for this Thursday and Friday — with Media Matters President Angelo Carusone. The purpose was to discuss “the success of the campaign so far, and our plans moving forward.
O’Reilly didn’t want his people to send the emails to Fox, which, as Politico notes below were forwarded to them by mistake. How on earth do things like this happen? How does one send an email to a reporter by mistake? I bet the legal team at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman have had a very stressful few weeks; maybe that’s why.
“If we show to Fox tomorrow, word will get out and the Thursday call may be cancelled,” O’Reilly wrote in an April 18 email exchange that was forwarded to POLITICO on Wednesday night by a member of O’Reilly’s legal team at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, but which a representative for O’Reilly subsequently said had been sent by mistake.
“So no formal sending to Rupert until after the call,” O’Reilly continued, before venting: “You all should know that I will not put up with much more from FNC.”
It looks like O’Reilly was pretty salty about Fox News giving him the runaround about whether or not he’d have a job! Maybe he was also grumpy about having to deal with all this mess while on vacation. Either way, O’Reilly was clearly getting pissed at his bosses who were simply unable to see the value of a man who cost them thousands of dollars in settlement money and untold amounts of scandal and shit.
See ya never, bud!!
Update (April 21, 12:12 a.m.): Media Matters Communications Director Laura Keiter provided Jezebel with the following statement from Media Matters president Angelo Crusone:
“So, Bill O’Reilly’s last ditch effort to save his job was to run to Glenn Beck, dust off the old chalkboard and conjure a conspiracy? lol. Nothing nefarious here. Media Matters’ efforts were very public. We’re a nonprofit and the call was to ask our supporters to help make sure we could dig in on this for the long haul. But O’Reilly got fired beforehand. At least this explains why Glenn Beck launched a short-lived counter boycott yesterday morning against the companies that dropped O’Reilly.”