“Personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled,” Mr. Trump told Times reporters in a wide-ranging interview. “Because you should have taken it all the way; I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”
“I think he’s a person I know well,” Mr. Trump said. “He is a good person.”
.. But the president has a particular rapport with Mr. O’Reilly, whose hectoring braggadocio and no-apologies nostalgia for a bygone American era mirror Mr. Trump’s own.
.. Mr. Trump called it “locker room talk” and apologized for the remarks. Mr. O’Reilly, on air that evening, allowed that the tape was “an embarrassment” for the Republican nominee. But he also criticized The Washington Post, the newspaper that published the footage.
.. But Mr. Trump’s advice to his friend on Wednesday — that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t have settled” — was consistent with the never-back-down ethos of a president, and former real estate magnate, who relishes the counterattack.
.. Fox News’s prime time and morning hosts are blatant champions of the administration — to the extent that NBC News’s chairman, Andrew Lack, recently compared the network to “state broadcasting.”
.. Mr. Murdoch’s former wife, Wendi Deng, is so close with Ivanka Trump that the president’s daughter became a trustee of the Murdoch children’s fortune.
.. Mr. Murdoch, meanwhile, had mentored Ms. Trump’s future husband, Jared Kushner, in the art of media moguldom after his purchase of The New York Observer in 2006.
.. Mr. Trump’s kind words for Mr. O’Reilly on Wednesday seemed a reciprocal gesture of sorts, from a leader who values loyalty.
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.
The Aspects of Health-Care Reform Republicans Don’t Like Discussing
Republicans should not hitch their wagon to any single, comprehensive bill, nor should they promise the voters a “Republican health-care plan.” Instead, they should seek to roll out a series of improvements to the health-insurance system, each with its own voting coalitions. That conclusion is supported by two observations. One, many parts of the AHCA were more popular than the bill itself, so the odds of passage — and sustainable entrenchment over time — increase as votes are broken into pieces.
.. But they can’t, any time soon, solve the basic problem, which is pervasive in education and health-care debates these days: The costs have spiraled so far out of the reach of ordinary middle-income people that they’ve despaired of paying for them from their own earnings.
.. I don’t like the fact that Obamacare added 10 to 11 million new people to the Medicaid rolls. But I also don’t think it’s wise, fair, or good to yank Medicaid coverage away from these people without a reliable way to move them to alternative affordable private coverage. This doesn’t make for good table-founding talk radio or cable news segments, but it is a fact of life.
.. The Republican answer can’t be, “don’t worry, with enough competition amongst different insurers, you’ll find a plan with premiums, co-pays, and deductibles that you can afford someday, maybe in about ten years, based on the CBO score.”
The French Elites, Comfortable with American Elites’ Playbook from 2016
.. The prospect of a Le Pen presidency upsets a kind of political positivism: the view that democracy can go only from good to better, from being a necessity to being a right. Ms. Le Pen’s election would run counter to the course of history, the reasoning goes, and therefore it cannot be.
Fox News’s Steady Nurturing of a Certain Kind of Right
.. When much of Fox News de facto backed Trump, midway through the primary season, it could hardly come as a shock: It was already obvious that the same type of person Fox had targeted for 20 years was likely to be an ardent Trump supporter.
.. Tomi Lahren, a former host on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, was attempting to re-create the glib, pugnacious Fox News model for a younger audience.
.. I recall a somewhat similar generational split in 2011 when easily forgotten presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexual harassment and affairs. Prominent conservative voices of the Baby Boomer generation were quick to insist the accusers had to be lying and this was all part of a smear campaign by liberals. Generation-X conservative writers weren’t so eager to rush to the ramparts to insist there was no way Cain would behave badly.
.. It seemed to the older voices, Cain was “one of us” and thus deserved to be trusted and defended on faith; the younger voices weren’t quite so certain that “one of us” couldn’t possibly have done something wrong. They remembered John Ensign, Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Bob Packwood…
Now That Bill O’Reilly is Out, Here’s Who Might Be Next to Go at Fox News
In the lawsuit, Roginsky states that she had a meeting with Shine on July 29, 2016, after the revelations about Ailes started coming out in the media. Shine allegedly told Roginsky that “everything they are saying about Roger is true.” How the heck did he know that?
Roginsky further claims that she had another meeting with Shine on November 29, 2016, where she informed him of Ailes’ sexual advances. “They were not surprised to hear this:they already knew it,” the lawsuit states. She claims even after this meeting, Shine took no action to investigate, and did not encourage her to report what happened to Paul Weiss, the law firm tasked with investigating the scandal.
Perhaps the most shocking encounter of all was a Spring 2015 meeting between Tantaros and Fox News Senior Executive, Defendant William Shine (“Shine”), during which Tantaros sought relief from Ailes’s sexual harassment and Briganti’s retaliatory media vendetta against her. In response, Shine told Tantaros that Ailes was a “very powerful man” and that Tantaros “needed to let this one go.”
.. A high-ranking Fox source confirmed that Fox moved Luhn to New York so Ailes could monitor her. Luhn remembers staying at the Warwick Hotel for six weeks. During this time, she said, Ailes told her he needed to approve all of her outgoing emails. “I’d show him all the emails I’m getting,” she recalled. For several weeks, he marked them up and would “dictate exactly” how to respond. “You don’t have friends,” she recalled Ailes telling her. “I’m your friend. I’ll protect you.” He told her to also forward her emails to Bill Shine for review, she said. “The second floor” — where top Fox executives work — “was in charge of my life. I wasn’t in charge,” she said.