Letters to the Editor: Bill O’Reilly and the Culture at Fox News

Re “Fox News Ousts O’Reilly, a Host Central to Its Rise” (front page, April 20):

So Bill O’Reilly’s departure is supposed to show a company changing its culture? The letter that Fox sent to its staff announcing that Mr. O’Reilly would step down in the face of mounting sexual harassment charges sure spent a lot of time praising him. It declared him “one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news,” and if that weren’t enough went on to say that “his success by any measure is indisputable.”

How in the world does heaping praise on this departing sexual harasser honor the women whose careers he damaged? How does it begin to foster “a work environment built on the values of trust and respect”? How does it stand up for women in the workplace?

Far from showing a change for the better, the letter Fox sent to its staff confirms that the sickness at Fox starts with those at the top. These same people covered up Mr. O’Reilly’s behavior — and so put countless other women at risk — by paying out hush money to those who came forward, while doing nothing to solve the problem itself. Business. As. Usual.

KATH JONES, NEW YORK

.. To the Editor:

What is sad about this news is that allegations of sexual harassment can get a television host fired in America, yet it cannot stop the election of a president! Have the standards for the office of the president fallen lower than those for a television host?

GURMEET S. KANWAL
DOBBS FERRY, N.Y.

In Sexual Harassment Cases, What Are We Settling For?

at least five women have received payments from either him or Fox that together total about $13 million, most of which were never previously made public. Many of the payments have come with agreements that the women won’t speak about what happened to them.

.. She fought hard against being forced into private arbitration. Buried in Fox’s contracts with its employees is fine print saying that they can’t bring lawsuits against the company in court. Instead, those disputes have to be settled by a private entity with the details kept private, too.

.. Because she isn’t an employee, but a contributor, she is unbound by arbitration restrictions

White supremacism is ready to roar

“I’ve been to Europe and I’ve spoken on this issue and I’ve said the same thing as far as 10 years ago to the German people and any population of people that is a declining population that isn’t willing to have enough babies to reproduce themselves. I’ve said to them, ‘You can’t rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birthrate up and you need to teach your children your values.”

.. King told CNN that he is merely “a champion for Western civilization,” which he called “a superior civilization.” Which means, of course, that he considers other civilizations inferior.

.. a guy from Iowa who keeps a Confederate battle flag on his desk is definitely sending some kind of message. He tried unsuccessfully to block the federal government’s plans to remove Andrew Jackson’s image from the $20 bill and replace it with that of Harriet Tubman.

.. today’s white supremacism tends to shy away from overtly racial terminology. Listen instead for words such as “culture” and “civilization.”

.. The idea is that the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave because its “civilization” is “European” or “Western” — euphemisms, basically, for “white.” According to this view, immigrants have been assets to the country only to the extent that they have fully assimilated into the dominant culture.

.. The first Africans were brought here in bondage in 1619, one year before the Mayflower. Americans have never been a single ethnicity, speaking a single language, bound by the centuries to a single patch of land. We have always been diverse, polyglot and restless, and our greatness has come from our openness to new people and new ideas.

.. King’s distress about birthrates can be read only as modern-day eugenics. If he is worried about the coming day when there is no white majority in the United States, he has remarkably little faith in our remarkable society — or in the Constitution

.. President Trump played footsie with the white supremacist movement during his campaign. His chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, waged civilizational war when he ran the Breitbart News site.