Tim Graham and Brent Bozell begin their April 21 column this way:
Fox News took Bill O’Reilly off the air after a heavy campaign to fire him led by CNN’s media unit and The New York Times. If all the charges of sexual harassment are true, his case is indefensible. That said, it’s time for his media critics to stand down. They are guilty of rank hypocrisy.
Hold it right there. Two guys who couldn’t be bothered to say anything publicly about the accusations against O’Reilly until Fox News had safely fired him — and after Graham had appeared on the final episode of O’Reilly’s old show, renamed “The Factor” after O’Reilly’s official departure, where even then he couldn’t be moved to say a word about O’Reilly — are accusing others of hypocrisy? It’s as if Bozell and Graham care more about ensuring they continue to appear on Fox News in the future than speaking truth to power.
Graham and Bozell go on to play the Clinton Equivocation card, complaining about a Times editorial that “noted that Hillary Clinton had told a New Hampshire town hall questioner a month earlier that Juanita Broaddrick’s tale of rape was not to be believed.” Well, that’s not exactly what happened; the Times editorial did note that Clinton responded to a question about whether Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones should also be believed — but added that “Mrs. Clinton’s response was odd, and unhelpful.”
The two also fail to mention that there’s a good reason why Broaddrick’s accusation has believability issues: she spent nearly two decades denying that any rape had taken place.
Graham and Bozell huffed that the Times editorial was in service of bashing Trump as “sexist and beyond the pale” for bringing up old Clinton stuff — but then, they went even harder on the Clinton Equivocation when tales of sexual harassment against Trump began to surface late in the 2016 campaign. Bozell whined that “you did not get as much coverage of Juanita Broaddrick as you got on Donald Trump in 48 hours.”
That’s hypocrisy.
Speaking of which, Graham and Bozell weren’t done with their hypocritical ranting:
On April 2, 2017, the Times published a 3,148-word front-page article lamenting “O’Reilly Thrives as Settlements Add Up.” Reporters Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt declared that their investigation found five women who received payouts from either O’Reilly or Fox “in exchange for agreeing to not pursue litigation or speak about their accusations against him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.”
As they noted, the lion’s share of that total came in a $9 million settlement from 2004. That was 13 years ago, but it didn’t qualify as a “tired subject” or some “ancient scandal.”CNN relentlessly pushed for O’Reilly’s dismissal, calling up advertisers and pressuring them to take commercials off their competition. Bashing O’Reilly dominated their Sunday show “Reliable Sources” for weeks and their “news” programming after their victory.
[…]
But two days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, CNN aired a town hall meeting titled “Investigating the President: Media Madness?”Back then, it was “media madness” to investigate whether then-President Bill Clinton might be assaulting women in the workplace — the Oval Office. There was zero concern about a “culture of abuse” inside the White House. For good measure, CNN moved on to specials attacking special prosecutor Ken Starr for prudishly investigating where CNN and the rest of the press never wanted to go.
[…]Women deserve a workplace where men don’t harass them for sex. But that’s not what these sanctimonious liberal journalists care about. It just doesn’t matter how brutal the alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick was. What matters is that Bill O’Reilly had to go.
Bill Clinton is laughing.
Probably because he, like the rest of us, can see through the sanctimonious load of horsepuckey Graham and Bozell are serving up here.
Bozell and Graham have no problem with sexual harassment if a conservative or a Republican does it, and they cannot criticize a conservative’s harassment on its own. They rant at length about Clinton’s sex life at the slightest provocation, but they offer only a token one-word criticism about the terrible behavior of O’Reilly and Trump — then rant about Clinton some more. Their outrage is driven by partisan politics, not by any sense of morality they claim to hold, which is why they give O’Reilly and Trump a pass. They’re more mad that the media exposed O’Reilly’s bad behavior than by the behavior itself.
And that is the biggest hypocrisy of all.