It takes a certain gall to pair twice-accused sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly with serial adulterer Newt Gingrich as a team to complain about the media coverage of multiple allegations of Donald Trump’s sexual abuse. Even worse, each has been a major player in using the media to ruin other people’s careers and worse.
O’Reilly sat down with Gingrich last night to discuss the barrage of accusations, from a slew of different women, that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted or groped or slimed them. To be clear, the accusations, which came out Wednesday night, emerged after the release of Access Hollywood’s hot mic video of Donald Trump boasting about just that sort of behavior: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait… And when you’re a star, they let you do it. …Grab them by the p---y.”
Other than, say, Bill Cosby, it’s hard to think of two less appropriate and more biased pundits to defend Trump than O’Reilly and Gingrich. O’Reilly, a Trump buddy, has twice been accused of being a sexual predator himself. First, in 2004, there was the bombshell lawsuit (quickly settled) by former O’Reilly producer, Andrea Mackris. This year, Fox News host Andrea Tantaros cited O’Reilly’s behavior as part of the pattern of sexual harassment she endured during her employment at Fox. Fox did not defend him in a response to her suit.
As for Gingrich, before he was hoping to become Trump’s vice presidential pick, he repeatedly cheated on his first two wives, then dumped them when they got sick, as per New York magazine:
Newt famously dumped wife #1 for wife #2 while wife #1 was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. As in literally went to the hospital to present her with divorce papers while she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer.
He eventually dumped wife #2 for wife #3 shortly after wife #2 was diagnosed with MS back in 1999. And he was having the affair on wife #2 with wife #3 while he was turning the country upside down trying to drive Bill Clinton from office over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
To Fox News, this makes a perfect pair for a “fair and balanced” discussion of the allegations rocking the Trump campaign.
First, Gingrich painted Trump as a media victim: “Virtually the entire media attempt[ed] to destroy the candidate of one of the two parties,” Gingrich said sanctimoniously. As if he had not done exactly that, with Fox News’ help, to Bill Clinton.
Even more hypocritically, Gingrich whined that there would never have been such reporting on John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But, the two talking heads agreed sadly, this is our “totally broken” news media now and we have to live with it. Neither one acknowledged the role each played in making it that way. I guess they just never expected it to turn around and bite them. Now that it has, O'Reilly acted as though the reporting on Trump could have happened to anybody.
From the Media Matters transcript:
BILL O’REILLY (HOST): It’s not going to change. And that’s why good people aren’t stepping up. Because nobody is perfect. Everybody has things in their past that they don’t want to be on the front page of The New York Times or whatever. But there is a degree. And I do believe the press has a responsibility to bring the truth to the American people. Do you feel that’s happening now? Is the press bringing the truth?
NEWT GINGRICH: No, I think journalism in the sense that you grew up with and I grew up with has totally collapsed. And I think The New York Times, candidly, has been the leader in this collapse. The New York Times one time even if it was left wing with Castro and with Stalin in the ‘30s, it was nonetheless a place that would have very serious reporting. The stuff they have been doing recently on Trump, some of it is an absurdity. And it gets blown up.
If only these two media moralists had felt the same compassion for President Obama and Ward Churchill. Heck, Dr. George Tiller might even be alive today were it not for O’Reilly persistently calling him “Dr. Tiller the baby killer.”
Yet, O’Reilly has a set of ethics to keep him from discussing the allegations against Trump:
O'REILLY: See, I don’t even get into that stuff, because if it’s filed, if there is something filed and the police are investigating, then, but anybody can say anything at any time.
No wonder O’Reilly was the first, and so far only, interviewer Trump ran to after the Access Hollywood video was released.
Watch O’Reilly and Gingrich clutch their new-found pearls over the Trump scandals above, from the October 13, 2016 The O’Reilly Factor.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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