What's hate got to do with it?

Plenty, because media firebrand Bill O'Reilly spawns enmity in all that he does - and he's sick of it.

America's most combative cable pundit is tired of people being mean back.

What's hate got to do with it?
BY VERNE GAY
STAFF WRITER
October 18, 2005

In a corner office high over 47th Street in Manhattan, Bill O'Reilly stretches out behind a medium-sized desk that seems like a medieval fortress. Those papers piled high in the corners? Battlements. The pens, pencils and letter openers? Pikes, longbows and spiked flails.

The computer where O'Reilly had just filed his newspaper column moments earlier? Let's call that a drawbridge beyond which an angry mob has assembled. Google the words "Bill O'Reilly" and 6.5 million hits instantly appear. The first two are the flame-throwing newsman's own Web sites, but those are followed by the seething mass of obsessive O'Reilly haters who would love nothing better than to reach through the screen and throttle the tall, wan, rich, famous/infamous fellow on the other side.

Gauging the animus against O'Reilly has always been a rough art, but by his own estimation "it's gotten worse. Now it's so bad that I spend an enormous amount of money protecting myself against evil."

One usual suspect behind this rising tide of hatred, he says, is the Liberal Media Establishment, infuriated because it "can't marginalize me." But whatever the reason, almost exactly a year since he settled a sexual harassment lawsuit with former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris - the anniversary is next Thursday - the embattled life of O'Reilly has become an increasingly strange and scary one.

As O'Reilly puts it, here are the facts: There are death threats. He has to hire bodyguards. He can't check into hotels with his family. People on the street with cell phones are stealth paparazzi, capable of snagging a picture one minute, then posting it on the Web the next. He adds that during the past year he's had to "even get more stuff to make it more difficult for people to get through the wire. Who wants to live like that?"

And as a direct consequence of the lawsuit - which was settled for undisclosed terms and which both parties agreed to never speak of publicly - O'Reilly must have a third person present whenever he conducts a rare interview like this one, or talks to someone on the phone. (Dave Tabacoff, executive producer of "The O'Reilly Factor" is the minder on this early fall day.) "Anyone can accuse me of anything and [then] it's on a Web site." So little wonder that when Bill O'Reilly is asked about his future after his current contract ends a little more than two years from now, he blurts out one word even as the question is asked: "Retirement."

Only so much he can take

"I might. I might," he adds. "That depends on how I feel physically. Like an athlete, the body breaks down after a while. There's only so much aggression you can absorb [but] right now, I have no other vocational aspirations." He will do no other shows for Fox, he says. He recently started writing a book titled "Culture Warrior," but claims that will be his last. He once mulled a run for the Senate and even the presidency as an Independent but now categorically rules out a political future. He insists that he finally sees the road ahead, and it probably leads out of Fox News headquarters and away from the scorching spotlight - forever.

O'Reilly initiated this interview - his only one for a newspaper, though he's scheduled to appear on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" tonight - in part to talk about a milestone "Factor" had just surpassed. In late August it became cable news' top-rated program for 200 weeks, with slightly less than 3 million viewers a night.

A feared man

But he spins his own enormous and, by all accounts, undiminished success with little apparent relish, and almost by rote. Yes, the show's doing well. Yes, so's his 2004 book, "The O'Reilly Factor for Kids," which just came out in paperback. If anything, "his cultural power has grown" during the past year, says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center For Politics and a frequent "Factor" guest. "He's feared in Washington - mainly by Democrats but by a lot of Republicans, too." Sabato nearly laughs when he hears O'Reilly's talk of retirement. "People do walk away when they're on top and it's the right time to walk away, but he enjoys too much what he does."

And for O'Reilly, who turned 56 in early September, that may be the problem. Nine years running, "The O'Reilly Factor" has been a battleground, but the fight rarely ends when the curtain goes down on this nightly theater. O'Reilly then picks up the cudgel on his radio show, in his newspaper column or on his Web site - and the list of combatants is now so long, and the many battles so rancorous, that he needs a book to chronicle this multifront war; he promises to do that in "Culture Warrior."

Recent fights have been with: seemingly any newspaper in the country with the word "Times" in its title; Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman; the ACLU; anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, and any state that refuses to pass mandatory minimum sentencing for child sex abusers, the campaign he started after the murder last March of a 9-year-old Florida girl named Jessica Marie Lunsford.

He says, "We're a defensive player except on the kids' stuff [and] then we're on the offense."

But that would appear debatable if not delusional. A favorite punching bag is The New York Times. Of the Sept. 29 "Factor" edition, for example, he said that "just for fun" he counted up 53 anti-Bush editorials in the paper. "My question to that paper is why bother? Why not just put the bold letters up on the editorial pages, 'We hate Bush.'"

Then, there's the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, which had already drawn O'Reilly's ire by quibbling with his on-air prosecution of the Lunsford case, among other things. In mid-September, the paper's media critic, Eric Deggans, chastised O'Reilly for saying on his show of Katrina victims that "if you refuse to learn [or] live a gansta-lifestyle you will be poor and powerless just like many of those in New Orleans." O'Reilly shot back on the air, calling "Deggans ... a dishonest, racially motivated correspondent writing for perhaps the worst newspaper in the country" for lifting his words out of context.

Of the attack, Deggans says, "I often felt that with that style of journalism, you need an enemy."

Stop the viciousness

But how many enemies can any one man have? O'Reilly calls the ongoing battles "tremendously wearing and debilitating," adding, "I don't need the approval of the press, but I just wish they'd stop the viciousness. It's reached a level of almost comical proportions and it does affect people around me and they do get upset. I keep it from them as much as possible, but there are some very, very bad people out there and we're dealing with those people."

Revenge will be served ice cold in "Culture Warrior," which will be published a year from now. The book begins with an interview O'Reilly held with ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell years ago when Cosell - who died in 1995 - was the most controversial broadcaster in the country. "He was very, very bitter [and] I kept saying to myself, 'I'm not gonna wind up like that. I'm not going to let them get me.'

"I don't need to do the show anymore [and] I'm as famous as I need to be. I don't like being famous. ... I can't take my family and stay in a hotel, so what good is it?

"You have to worry about who's looking at you - are they taking your picture? Did you curse at this guy? If you nudge somebody's bumper, are they going to sue you for $80million?

"I never felt sorry for people like Lindsay Lohan in my life. I thought they were dopey little movie stars. Now I feel sorry for those people. That poor little girl is 19 and can't leave the house without some idiot doing something."

Still has some fight

One wonders, though, whether this means the warrior is about to shed his chain mail and lay down the crossbow. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says, "The lawsuit didn't do much to tarnish him, and while he says he's tired of the fight, the fights are the things that define him, he doesn't fill the role of everyman champion."

Indeed, three weeks before newsman Peter Jennings' death in August, he offered to step in the ring for his old friend. In an e-mail to Jennings, he made an offer, he says: "'If you want me to take care of anybody for you ...' I was serious. If he felt there was someone who he felt had done him or his family or the nation wrong, I would have done that for him."

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
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