Bill O’Reilly embodied everything I hate about US cable TV

For the first two and a half weeks we spent in the US after my wife and I moved to Kansas in 2011, we were put up in a Hampton Inn near the outskirts of town. Those initial two weeks of immersion in American media, culture and hotel room doses of television were enough to convince us to never have TV in our home.

It wasn’t until many years later that we finally gave in, by which time we could curate our own on-demand viewing via Netflix, Hulu and YouTube, bypassing the bizarreness that is cable TV, local news channels and those God-awful commercials. Whatever about chewing gum for the eyes, this was more like a steady stream of sugary soda for the mind - the kind that quenches your immediate thirst and fires up your dopamine but ultimately leaves you unsatisfied and dehydrated. American TV is the delicious sugary substance that if you left your brain to soak in a glass of it overnight, it would wither and rot away to nothing by morning.

The only way I ever got to watch actual US cable TV was through a short-lived gym membership. Fascinated by the spread on offer and this glimpse into what huge swathes of America consumed as news and information, I invariably ended up watching TV that was the most bizarrely extreme and diametrically opposed to my viewpoint; namely Fox News, and in particular, Bill O’Reilly’s show.

Old Papa Bear’s hour of turbo-charged insanity was a masterclass in right-wing conservative brand-building. The adverts sold gold coins and back-pain medication, giving further hints of the weaknesses and fears of the oldest, whitest and most racist of viewers, to which O’Reilly was appealing.

O’Reilly beat the drum to the tune of the greatest and worst editions of white male privilege. It was fascinating, horrifying and sometimes hilarious to watch, while I ran on a treadmill or pumped away on an elliptical. Occasionally I would laugh out loud and look around to make sure other gym patrons knew I wasn’t buying this shit, but that I was actually watching O’Reilly to understand how the enemy operated; how their propaganda got inside people’s heads. It was masterful.

You could say O’Reilly pitted Americans against each other, but really he pitted older white middle class men against everyone else.

He covered all bases: the lazy inner city “thugs” who chose the continued decay of the American family unit, hip hop culture and a life of crime over hard work and family values; the criminal illegals who murdered people on the streets of sanctuary cities and walked away scot free; the liberal elites who needed to constantly be taken down a peg or two; and not to forget the barely-veiled racism and tone deaf perpetuation of cultural stereotypes though the show’s Watters World man-on-the-street style “comedy” segments - frequently more terrifying than anything else under the laughably coined “Fair and balanced” slogan that regularly appeared on screen.

I remember vividly watching O'Reilly's reaction to Barack Obama's 2012 presidential victory. When the results looked like incumbent Obama was going to defeat GOP establishment candidate Mitt Romney, it suddenly became clear to O'Reilly that Obama was not a fluke or a failing of the Republican Party, but rather a reflection of the changing nature of the United States.

"It's a changing country," O'Reilly told Fox News's Megan Kelly. "The demographics are changing, and it's not a traditional America any more ... the white establishment is now the minority." It was as if he had just declared a death in the family. White, wealthy, patriarchal America was gone, time of death: November 6th, 2012. For O'Reilly the battle had been lost. For me, it was a joyful moment.

In the end, O’Reilly fought on at Fox News for another five years. If anything, he doubled his efforts to convince white America that the system was now stacked against them, and they hammered it home every night via satellite dish and in Talking Point memos, in gyms and hotels and living rooms all across America, coast to coast, 7pm EST.

Four years of an obstructionist GOP in congress, and conservative media's unflinching barrage of anti-establishment, anti-political correctness and anti-intellectual sentiment resulted in the noxious concoction that ultimately led to the election of Donald Trump to the White House. O'Reilly's role in that cannot be understated.

It is fitting that his allegedly horrid treatment of women was responsible for his ultimate demise at Fox News. It proves that if you continually peddle the values of “traditional America,” where the white man has power over everyone and everything, sooner or later the laws of the 21st century and the resistance of women, “minorities” and ultimately - we hope - voters will catch up with you.

O’Reilly’s 2012 prediction of the demise of the white establishment is now finally showing actual progress, nowhere more so than at Fox News. Irrelevance and inappropriate behavior will continue the drive towards obsoleteness and extinction for the white men of Fox News.

In the weeks leading up to his dismissal, advertisers abandoned The O’Reilly Factor en masse, in light of allegations of sexual harassment and poor comments directed toward a black female congresswoman. Advertisers exercised that one power that trumps law suits or votes: their dollars.

With a reality TV president who watches ratings as much as Trump does, you can only hope that he’s looking carefully, watching his own approval ratings, and wondering when his extinction level event will happen. As with O’Reilly, we’ll be similarly ready for Trump to go. Back to TV screens, and eventually to extinction.

Nick Carswell moved to Lawrence, Kansas with his wife Hannah in 2011. He is a musician, and currently works for the University of Kansas managing a radio information service for the blind and print-disabled.