All campaign long, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has served as one of the country’s chief media critics. When Donald Trump has weathered controversies for his remarks about minorities and women, O’Reilly has been there to assess the messengers. “Americans are tired, sick and tired of far-left media people accusing others of racism, bigotry, and hatred,” said the host on his program last month.
And now O’Reilly may have landed perhaps his biggest media scoop ever. Bigger than Brian Williams embellishing; bigger than his former boss’s sexual harassment scandal; bigger than the Rolling Stone rape story; bigger than Tronc-Gannett; bigger than O’Reilly’s own embellishments about his reportorial career. It’s so big that the Erik Wemple Blog fears that abridging it would do it an injustice. So let’s just leave O’Reilly’s own words as the authority on this matter. In an interview this morning with Fox News host Bill Hemmer, O’Reilly, ever the investigative reporter, said this in the context of the country’s reaction to last night’s second presidential debate:
It’s a complicated situation, but I think everyone can agree — except for the media organizations that now have ordered their employees to destroy Trump — there’s at least three of them. And, I can’t say who they are right now because I don’t have it nailed down, but I am 100 percent convinced, and these media organizations have actually put out, ‘If you support Trump, your career is done done here.’ … News organizations have sent, not officially, but through the corporate grapevine that we don’t want anybody supporting Trump. If you study it, you can see which ones they are.
Now this is the toughest form of reporting out there: There are no documents, no emails and no memos, apparently. Just “grapevine” communications, as O’Reilly terms them. Hats off to this cable news talent. In between promoting his new book, “Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan,” hosting his industry-leading primetime show and doing all the other things that the King of Cable News must do, O’Reilly has managed to gather the necessary human intelligence — that is, real-live sources high on the command chain at major U.S. media conglomerates — to aver on live television that perhaps the most sprawling media conspiracy in U.S. history is afoot.