Bill O'Lielly is perhaps the biggest bully ever to gain a corporate media outlet for his bullying.
Nicholas Lemann has a great story about the O'Lielly phenomenon in the New Yorker. One of Lemann's themes is that O'Lielly is remarkably vengeful -- anyone who criticizes him, particularly those who mention his sexual predation of at least one underling, gets some kind of slanderous treatment from Big Bill the Bully.
An Ohio paper, the Dayton Daily News, suffered from O'Lielly's bullying, and responded by showing that O'Lielly is full of shit.
How the Dayton Daily News dissed O'Lielly, below.
O'Lielly pretends to be a champion of underage victims of sexual predation, so he has proclaimed the Dayton Daily News as "the most friendly (newspaper) to child rapists" in America because of what the paper editorialized about a judge's lenient sentence in a sexual battery case.
Here's the real reason O'Lielly is picking on the Dayton paper, told by Editor Jeff Bruce:
O'Reilly is upset with the newspaper because in an editorial we referred to his own recent legal history in which he was accused of sexual harassment. His producer threatened that unless we published an apology they would resort to their "bully pulpit." (This is a term that usually applies to presidents, not to Faux News bullies. But it fits likie a glove here.)
That's what they've done. This isn't about being "soft" on child molesters. It's about Bill O'Reilly getting even.
We never defended Judge Connor's decision to sentence a child molester to a year of house arrest and five years' probation. What we said is that if the judge deserves to be removed from office, then due process should be followed -- the same sort of due process that Bill O'Reilly relied upon when he was sued and, ultimately, settled out of court.
The editorial also noted that the prosecutor in the case, while disappointed with the judge's sentence, was afraid his evidence was so weak that he might have lost the case entirely if it had gone to trial. He agreed to settle the case.
In America we have a system of checks and balances that includes the independence of the judiciary. There are rules in place to remove bad judges. Our editorial simply said we should follow those rules, not allow ourselves to rush to judgment because of a television commentator's opinions.
That's not an endorsement of Judge Connor or his decision. The fact that a child molester got off so lightly is disgusting. If I would fault our editorial for anything it is that we could have said that and said it firmly.
But that's not why O'Reilly asked his readers to write the newspaper. His producer, in a conversation with me, acknowledged the logic of our editorial's argument. But they felt dragging O'Reilly's own legal problems into the article was gratuitous.
While I expected O'Reilly to take a shot at us, I was shocked that he would suggest that this newspaper "has sympathy for child rapists." That is a deliberate distortion of what we said and what we stand for, and nothing could be further from the truth.
So you know, on the same page that we published our editorial, we also printed a package of opposing views, including those from O'Reilly himself. We made every effort to be fair and balanced in our presentation of this issue. It is a pity that sense of fairness was not reciprocated.
Bully O'Lielly threatens callers to his radio show with visits from "Fox security," and slanders anyone in the media who mentions his sexual predations.
Like Joe Pyne and Morton Downey Jr., O'Lielly's time in the
corporate media will soon pass.
Sooner, rather than later, I hope. Because no one likes a lying bully.