O’Reilly Fights Fraud: From Free Press To FOX

A towering 6’4″, Bill O’Reilly walks briskly through the doorway to enter the ring: the set of his hit television show, “The O’Reilly Factor.” His opponent: Enron, one of America’s commanding energy corporations, which recently stunned most of its stockholders by plummeting into bankruptcy.

O’Reilly is fuming that top Enron executives acquired millions through insider selling while the public knew nothing of the company’s poor economic conditions.

“If these CEOs are lying and they’re selling and saying everything’s great, that’s fraud in the inducement. That’s against the law,” O’Reilly yells.

His right eyebrow raised with suspicion, O’Reilly glares into the camera with his piercing blue eyes and demands a federal investigation. The next morning the Department of Justice announces they will investigate Enron.

“That’s what we do,” O’Reilly says, referring to his show. “We just embarrass the government so that they have to do the right thing. Now they are doing what they should have been doing two months ago, investigating Enron.”

Exposing Enron isn’t the first time O’Reilly has drawn attention to fraudulent activity or scheming individuals. He has been doing it practically every night since his program began airing on the Fox News Channel in 1996, interrogating and humiliating some of America’s most powerful politicians and celebrities.

“I just try to give the people watching the Factor as much information as I can,” O’Reilly said. “I’m fair. I don’t try to hurt anybody but if they are not going to tell the truth and I think they are doing bad things then I’m going to lay it out.”

In O’Reilly’s forum, also termed the No Spin Zone, anyone who isn’t quick, articulate and honest doesn’t have a chance.

“In the No Spin Zone rationalizations are scorned, lies are rejected and equivocations are mocked,” writes O’Reilly in his latest book “The No Spin Zone,” his second book in two years to top the New York Times bestseller list. “To anybody who uses power and fame to exploit the less powerful, the zone is a very dangerous place.”

O’Reilly, whose show primarily targets politicians, said he feels that many of America’s most powerful people learned to spin the truth at a young age and have subsequently made deception a lifestyle.

“The reason that Bill Clinton was the biggest spinmeister of all time was that he had a very indulgent mother who adored him,” O’Reilly said. “He could never do anything wrong. Any time he did, he made excuses and his mother said ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine Billy.’ He could spin his way out of anything.”

According to O’Reilly, politicians aren’t the only culprits, people are spinning the truth nationwide. In order to salvage America’s youth, O’Reilly said, public school systems need to enforce discipline by segregating compliant, hard-working students from liars, cheaters and disobedient students.

“Personal responsibility, particularly over the last 20 years, has dropped into a chaotic situation,” he said. “You can’t force parents to be good parents. The public school systems basically have to say ‘Look, there is a code of behavior and there is a level of performance that all students have to adhere to; if they don’t then they have to go to special schools.'”

The popularity of O’Reilly’s hard-hitting program, which he conceived about five years ago while earning a masters in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has soared over the past few years and the show now tops national cable television ratings. His ratings and his $20 million salary indicate that he is one of the most powerful men on television.

However, O’Reilly claims the money doesn’t phase him and prides himself on his modest, middle-class American upbringing in Levittown, NY. He frequently refers to himself as “your humble correspondent” and claims to be a thrifty, blue-collar guy who defends working class Americans.

O’Reilly recently said on “The Tonight Show ” that his wealth doesn’t define him, it only serves to provide security for his family.

Twenty-seven years of hard work and dedication to the field of journalism underlie O’Reilly’s monetary success. O’Reilly’s involvement in the industry first began when he decided to leave a teaching job and enroll in the graduate program at Boston University’s College of Communication. He graduated from BU in 1975 with a masters in broadcast journalism. One of O’Reilly’s first jobs as a journalist was as a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.

“I loved The Daily Free Press,” O’Reilly said. “When I was there it was just a lot of fun and it was just what a college newspaper should be. It was independent, it was feisty and it was one of the best years-and-a-half of my life.”

While at BU, O’Reilly said, he learned the importance of being an enterprise journalist. He saw his columns as an opportunity to educate and inform people in an original and creative way.

“I could have written about how bad the cafeteria was but I decided to try to make these columns a little bit different and bring some information into the campus that people might not know about, not just [rant] about stuff that everybody sees,” O’Reilly said. “I would look around Boston, see what was going on, see who was coming into town, what people were around and I would try to make my columns very creative and fresh so that nobody would know on Wednesday when my column came out what I would be writing about.”

O’Reilly attracted a large readership at BU and has since incorporated his bold and unpredictable approach into his show.

“Every time you tune in you really don’t know what you are going to get,” he said. “You don’t know what I’m going to say. You don’t know who we are going to have and it becomes a sense of anticipation.”

O’Reilly said he emerged from BU young, inexperienced and confused. He didn’t know what he was going to do and ended up taking a low-paying job at WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pa., which, after paying rent, left him with barely enough money for food. As he made his way to the national networks, O’Reilly said, he learned what it takes to be a successful journalist: discipline and sacrifice.

“You have to basically take each day and say, ‘Well, whatever I have to do to make the story good or the show good, I’m willing to do it even if it’s hard, even if I have to work an extra hour and even if I have to tear up my first copy because it’s not good enough,'” he said. “If you are out on a story, you are going to have three or four reporters out there on the same story and you have got to force yourself to be better than they are, to write a better phrase, to ask a smarter question, to do a little bit more research so you can put the story in perspective for the reader. You have to take the extra amount of time and effort to make your stuff the best and it’s painful sometimes to do that.”

According to O’Reilly, success doesn’t come easily and is accompanied by a price tag.

“You have got to move around, especially if you are in television,” said O’Reilly, who says it is nearly impossible to devote sufficient time to your personal life if you want to report at the national level.

Though BU has a variety of resources and great instructors, O’Reilly suggests journalism majors venture outside of Commonwealth Avenue and get internships if they want to learn the realities of the journalism industry.

“You have to go out of the campus and talk to the people who are really in the business and try to see it for what it is,” O’Reilly said. “You have to get into the real world because a lot of the professors are theorists. You will find fast that journalism is motivated by money and that your skills have to be better then the other person. The college campus makes it almost kind of glamorous but when you get out there you have to be self-reliant. It’s very competitive in the sense that people will try to hurt you to get your job. You have to be thinking about how to make your stories better and how to get stuff that’s hard to get and that people don’t want to give you.”

In his second book, “The O’Reilly Factor,” O’Reilly suggests that the media industry is run by power hungry people who are primarily interested in profits and who scorn individualism. While the industry demands that he be tough, prepared, skeptical and competitive, O’Reilly says he has never compromised his morality to achieve his goals.

“You always have to stay honest and if that means you have to leave the job, you have to leave the job because once you start to sell out then you go fast,” O’Reilly said. “You have to maintain your own integrity and you have to basically say ‘I’m going to do honest work. I’m not going to let you tell me how to slant the story.'”

Though O’Reilly said he has left more than one job over the years because of terrible people, he has never let animosity or criticism debilitate his ambitions.

“You have to be persistent and you have got to learn how to handle rejection,” he said. “People are not going to hire you, they are either going to say you are terrible or they are going to say you are never going to make it and you can’t fall apart.”

To O’Reilly, honesty is a crucial prerequisite for all journalists.

“The first responsibility of the media is to report the truth,” he said.. “Journalism was invented to make sure that the people were allowed to participate in honest government.”

According to O’Reilly, journalism is not needed in fascist or communist countries where there is no freedom of speech or freedom to vote. However, in free societies an honest press corps is vital to equip people with enough knowledge to vote and participate in government.

“If you live in Idaho, how do you know what’s going on in Washington?” said O’Reilly. “The politicians are never going to tell you the truth; they are going to spin it.”

The truth principle holds true in wartime according to O’Reilly. However, he said the government should have the right to censor the press while the country is at war.

“I do believe the government has the right to restrict the flow of information in battle zones or in sensitive intelligence operations so that American lives aren’t jeopardized by the free flow of information,” O’Reilly said. “I’m a realist in the sense that you have to be responsible and not put anybody at risk while you’re reporting in a war, but at the same time you can’t, like they did in Vietnam, say ‘Oh they killed 2,000 Vietcong today, when they killed ten;’ that’s just flat out dishonest. No reporter should ever report anything that isn’t flat out honest. If you can’t report then you tell your audience why you can’t, but you never lie.”

Though he is a proponent of moderate military censorship, as a news analyst and a journalist, O’Reilly has said on his program that it is his job to be skeptical of political heresay. He never censors his own on-air opinions no matter how influential they may be. He also freely surveys government activity. Currently, O’Reilly feels the Bush administration’s war on terrorism has been relatively positive but has also been thwarted by systemic loopholes.

“The air war was successful, the political war against the Taliban was successful, but the subsequent controlling of the ground in Afghanistan has not been successful,” O’Reilly said. “Their intelligence apparatus obviously isn’t where it should be. They can’t pinpoint where individual people who are threats to the United States are and if that continues they will strike again and they will hurt us.”

While O’Reilly says his affinity for the truth is one of the things that propels him to instigate confrontation with some revered American figures, his criticisms frequently provoke negative viewer reaction.

“Anybody who takes a stand in one way or another in America is going to receive negative mail,” said O’Reilly, who reads critical viewer e-mails on his show. “I don’t let it bother me at all.”

Critics of O’Reilly have attacked everything from his conservative viewpoints to his on-air demeanor, calling him arrogant, intense and obnoxious. However, O’Reilly said he doesn’t spin the audience with an on-air image.

“I’m pretty much the same on and off camera,” he said. “I’m not a touchy feely kind of guy. I pretty much tell it like it is; I always have ever since I’m a little kid.”

Last month O’Reilly “told it like it is” to COM students when he returned to BU to accept the Distinguished Alumni Award and discuss his experiences in the media industry. He addressed an audience of eager, bright-eyed aspiring journalists and accomplished professors, saying that every morning he approaches his work equally as passionate and determined to do his best as when he first started out in the business. O’Reilly says his seemingly inexhaustible drive is nurtured by his competitive nature.

“I’ve realized that where I am at the national news level there are ten other people who are competing with me and trying to get the audience to watch them so if I want the audience to watch the Factor, the Factor has got to be better in the sense that it has got to be more creative and I’ve got to think about it and bring a lot to it,” O’Reilly said. “If I start to coast or if I start to say ‘Well on Wednesday I’m not going to read through all the papers or I’m not going to really prepare as much,’ then I’ll slip. I’m a very competitive person and I want to stay on top. It was hard getting here and I know if I don’t work as hard or I don’t work as smart that some other program will come up and take the audience away.”

For right now, O’Reilly said he’s going to continue to fight to sustain an audience until he decides to retire. Before joining Fox, O’Reilly spanned the world, reporting for various networks. He worked as the anchor of “Inside Edition”, was a network correspondent for ABC News “World News Tonight” and a reporter for WCBS-TV in New York and WCVB-TV in Boston.

O’Reilly has written three books, won two Emmys and was one of the first broadcast journalists to report on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“I’ve accomplished far more then I ever thought I was going to accomplish, so I don’t really have any other goals in journalism” he said. “I think I’ve done pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do and I’ll just keep doing this until it’s not fun anymore.”

Even though he didn’t cite any future goals in journalism, O’Reilly’s endeavors haven’t ceased. Now 52, he became a father a few years ago and has since been embarking on the challenges of parenting. Though he keeps his personal and professional lives separated, O’Reilly said being a father has impacted his career.

“It takes more time away from the work.” O’Reilly sighed and released a rare, endearing chuckle. “I get less sleep,” he said. “I just have to devote more time to stuff when I’m awake. I structure my days so that I make sure that I see the baby and play with her. I have to be a very responsible parent because that is the type of person I am.”