Bill O’Reilly has long been about preserving an earlier time in America. He spent years standing on the front lines of the war on Christmas, railing against political correctness, and promoting bullish masculinity. And yet, that throwback masculinity finally did him in — and the longtime host has been ousted from his primetime slot on Fox News.
Technically, it wasn’t the years of sexual harassment allegations of Fox News employees and contributors that ended his tenure, though of course, this was a factor. Only weeks ago, the New York Times’s Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt revealed that O’Reilly himself and 21st Century Fox, the network’s parent company, paid about $13 million to five women who filed claims against O’Reilly for lewd behavior and workplace sexual harassment.
After the story broke, national outrage led to a campaign to get O’Reilly removed from the network, and then about 80 companies pulled ads from The O’Reilly Factor — even though it was the most watched show on the most watched cable news network in America. It seems that having the most eyes on your network means nothing when no one is paying to advertise in front of them.
The price tag for these sexual harassment allegations is very real. A business like Fox News knows firsthand that they cost even more than the millions in settlements and lost revenue from pulled advertisements. Consider Fox’s lost time, productivity, and talent stemming from the persistent culture of sexual harassment that started at the very top of the company with since-axed CEO Roger Ailes, and now O’Reilly (who has continued to deny any wrongdoing).
Fox News may see its bread and butter as lauding that nebulous time period when America was “great” — when men were men, and women took a back seat. But in the modern world, where their employees live, that vision of America is bad for the bottom line.
Is Fox News’s culture around sexual harassment really going to shift? It’ll have to.
Sexual harassment thrives whenever power imbalance can take precedence over everything else. In this case, this harassment took place behind the scenes at the most watched cable news network in America, across all rungs of the corporate ladder, from clerical workers up to its CEO.
And yet, as allegations against powerful men have unfolded over the years, you can’t help but watch in disbelief. “There’s this notion that’s like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening in 2017,’” said Bill Proudman, CEO and co-founder of the diversity training organization, White Men as Full Diversity Partners. “And that’s until there’s the next thing. A few weeks ago it was Uber. This week it’s O’Reilly.”
As Vox’s Jeff Guo wrote Wednesday, many attribute O’Reilly’s final ouster to the growing influence of Rupert Murdoch’s sons. Murdoch, who owns 21st Century Fox, and with it, Fox News, has been shifting power of the network to his sons Lachlan and James. The two also reportedly had a hand in pushing out Ailes after one of the stars at the network, Gretchen Carlson, came forward with her own allegations of years of sexual harassment, degradation, and retaliation from the then-CEO.
Carlson’s departure also opened the door for Megyn Kelly, an even bigger star at the network with some mainstream influence. She made it clear that she was leaving Fox for NBC News, in part, to cut ties with Ailes, and because of O’Reilly’s defense of him.
With the very public claims by two powerful women at the network, it was only a matter of time before the complaints of lesser-known women bubbled up. Once the Times report broke, women at the company railed against O’Reilly and the network’s handling of the matter. The company responded with a public statement, and an independent investigation was launched. But at that point, plenty of damage had already been done.
When the boundaries around workplace culture and the tolerance of sexual harassment aren’t clear, dealing with it can be costly for a business, let alone stressful and distracting for employees. When you think that Ailes and O’Reilly, two powerful, high-profile employees, were contributing to a culture where women’s bodies were up for debate and the future of their careers could be easily manipulated, one can only imagine how deep these ideas ran across the network.
“Sexual harassment happens in just about every workplace and every industry in this country,” said Maya Raghu, the director of workplace equality for the National Women’s Law Center. “We’re hearing about these cases because they happen to be taking place at a media company and involve high-profile people. In both cases, there have been allegations over a period of years, and they both appeared to be serial harassers. So the question is, if the company knew about this for years, why didn’t they take action sooner to address it? And why didn’t they make steps to make sure this didn’t happen again?”
Externally, of course, anyone working in media now has a picture of what it means to work at Fox News headquarters, especially if you’re a woman. Sure, men and women will continue to apply for jobs at Fox News, but it’s likely that a sizable chunk of potentially high-quality staffers won’t consider working there simply because they don’t want to be harassed, or they just don’t want to deal with the drama of this workplace.
Internally, however, a culture of harassment can be detrimental to those already working there. The Times reported that women within the network’s ranks were vocal about getting the company to push O’Reilly out. Yet, who’s to say those women won’t face any retaliation or conflict later for doing so?
The situation also speaks to a caustic workplace attitude toward women in general. After all, even as late as this week, yet another woman came forward to alert the company of O’Reilly’s behavior toward her on the basis of both her gender and her race. Other women felt a need to push the company’s leaders to act because Fox’s response on this would send a clear, company-wide, message of what is and what is not tolerated. At the very least, it may get men in the ranks to question their own behavior.
“With a lot of men, when it comes to gender equity, there’s a detachment,” Proudman said. “Men say, ‘Well, I’m not groping women, I’m not sexually harassing women, so I don’t have anything to do with this. O’Reilly’s just a pariah.’ But I think he’s just the latest manifestation of a long systemic culture. For men in the US, the way we are conditioned to be with other men is by objectifying women, and treating them as objects. Of course if you treat people like objects, you don’t think of them as fully human, and then this sort of stuff is the natural manifestation of men with power and money doing whatever they want because they can.”
After all, when the Murdochs announced O’Reilly was leaving the network, they didn’t apologize to the women he had been accused of harassing. They didn’t say he did anything wrong. Publicly, at least, they didn’t address the women who work at Fox News and pushed for action. Instead, they underscored their “commitment to fostering a work environment built on the values of trust and respect” while making sure to stress that Fox News still has a “deep bench” of talent.
Normalizing sexual harassment is a costly way to do business
The earliest reports of O’Reilly and sexual harassment go back more than a decade ago — his reported behavior went on for more than half of the network’s existence. Because of Ailes’s and O’Reilly’s powerful positions at Fox News as its leader and one of its biggest stars, respectively, it sends a signal when there’s little to no accountability for harassing co-workers at the highest levels.
This normalizes behavior like groping women, or telling talent to show more cleavage, or making obscene phone calls to employees. This leads to long periods in which people don’t report their experiences or things they witness. (Experts like Raghu say about only one in four incidents of sexual harassment are actually reported.) Harassment claims against Ailes reach back to the 1960s, and for O’Reilly, the earliest incidents of sexual harassment in particular go back to 2004, according to the New York Times report.
Witnessing and experiencing unchecked harassment then silences other victims from coming forward, Raghu said. “And it can create a lot of fear in the workplace, because victims of sexual harassment have to weigh, is it worth coming forward? Is anything actually going to happen or will I be ignored? Will I be called a liar? Am I going to be told not to rock the boat? There might be threats, and retaliation, there might be impacts on their jobs, on their safety, and their future careers. They can be labeled as troublemakers and denied opportunities in the future, and blackballed in their industry, so what is the incentive for someone to come forward in this situation?”
All of this affects the workplace’s atmosphere as well as the bottom line — not just for the targets of harassment, but also their co-workers and even their harassers. “The victims are in constant fear of being harassed again, or threatened, or losing their jobs,” Raghu said. “Co-workers are seeing this happen and this creates an atmosphere of fear. And harassers too — they’re spending time stalking and harassing people that they should be spending on their work.”
In an analysis of data by Rebecca S. Merkin of Baruch College and Muhammad Kamal Shah of AIR University, job satisfaction, productivity, and retention rank low in workplaces with unfettered sexual harassment. Harassment also contributes to anxiety, depression, stress, and absenteeism. It turns out that when a person is experiencing harassment, abuse, or if their worth at work is being constantly diminished, they’re just not as productive.
“They’re depressed about having to work, they’re more distracted, and they’re more likely to leave the job otherwise, and generally not able to thrive as employees,” said Sheerine Alemzadeh, co-executive director of the organization Healing to Action. “So that’s got a huge cost to companies when they’re not doing anything about that.”
For this and other obvious reasons, that’s why it’s best for leaders to establish a culture that completely shuts down harassment in the first place. She echoed Raghu’s assertion that even co-workers witnessing abuse can feel stress from the situation.
Could better sexual harassment training have prevented any of this? Probably not.
In situations like O’Reilly’s, some might suggest simply throwing more sexual harassment training at the problem. And sure, that can be helpful — but it’s not a cure, especially since people tend to dread such training in the first place.
Alemzadeh has worked with women workers seeking help in reporting and dealing with sexual harassment, and she said sexual harassment training cannot be a glossed-over step when it comes to cultivating a healthy workplace culture.
“A lot of workers I’ve spoken to say the training is really technical and legal, and it’s not being taken seriously by the company, but it’s just that the company is covering itself in case this kind of thing happens,” she said. “I actually had someone tell me recently, ‘When I started my job, they spent a lot of time talking about tardiness and punctuality policies, and then they spent two or three minutes talking about sexual harassment and gave a hotline we can call if something happens.’”
Even something as small as not spending a lot of time to let employees know that sexual harassment isn’t tolerated on the job sends a signal that outweighs the lack of time spent.
“I’ll use the safety analogy in manufacturing,” says Proudman. “Safety training is not something you do once every two quarters and then forget about. There’s a mindset you want to instill in every person. You want to build into the core fiber of the system because you’re constantly on guard about creating a safe environment, and thinking about how this works into the system. Inclusion is the same way. And we’re constantly having to push against it. There’s no finish line.”
So, Fox trudges ahead with the task of rebuilding its workplace culture. And with that task comes another big price tag: potentially $25 million for O’Reilly’s exit package, less than a year after allocating $40 million for Ailes. To the other employees, the message about who really pays for sexual harassment is crystal clear.