The recent announcement that television talk-show host Bill O'Reilly is going to be launching a new radio program on May 8 left media watchers with one burning question: What in the world is he thinking?
O'Reilly already makes a reported $4 million a year from his nightly television program, The O'Reilly Factor, on the Fox News Channel. He consistently bests CNN's suspendered colossus in the ratings. His non-fiction books have both attained almost instant New York Times bestseller status. Those Who Trespass, a novel that contains a fictionalized account of his media career, is being turned into a movie by Mel Gibson. His syndicated weekly column, though somewhat slapdash, isn't begging for customers. He has it made as is.
So what impulse could have prompted O'Reilly to launch a show opposite one Rush Limbaugh? Pride? Boredom? Masochism?
Whatever the case, the economics of it are risky but interesting. With more than 600 stations, Limbaugh has ruled the airwaves for more than a decade with his libertarian conservative Republicanism (e.g. Big Brother is bad; so were the '60s; vote for Bush) and middle-to-highbrow pretentiousness. Nobody has yet been able to mount a serious challenge. There's a lot of money to be made by the man who can break that monopoly, and with perhaps as many as 100 stations by launch time, O'Reilly is taking his best shot.
There are, however, a few reasons to suspect that he will come up short. The first is the iron law of so many hours in a day. Even O'Reilly is limited to 24 and has to sleep occasionally. To pile a two-hour radio show on top of his current schedule is almost certain to damage some aspect of his output by stretching him too thin. Either his column is going to get worse, or his television show will lose its edge, or the radio program will fail to live up to expectations.
The task O'Reilly has set for himself with the new program "is not impossible but it's going to be difficult," said television and radio producer Ed Winkle, who used to write the "Hollyweird" column for Spintech Magazine. "One is going to have to feed into the other. He's going to get to the point where he either does it really well or he can't keep juggling everything."
Early indications suggest that O'Reilly hasn't grasped the need to integrate the two programs. Rather than having multiple segments, as he does with The O'Reilly Factor, each daily radio show will be wholly devoted to a single topic. This could make for some dreadfully boring programming.
Then there's the business side of syndicated talk radio to consider. Though the audiences may be varied, the hosts who do well tend to be either strong conservatives or liberals who carve out their own non-political niches (e.g. Howard Stern, Dr. Joy Browne). Out of a list of the top 25 syndicated talk show hosts from 2001, Talkers Magazine lists only three identifiable liberals who do political shows. They are Tom Joyner (No. 16), Tom Leykis (No. 18) and Doug Stephan (No.20) -- hardly household names.
Bill O'Reilly -- and this may come as a shock to some readers -- would actually be far more liberal than the most of the hosts he's competing against for airtime. Some have argued that his independent persona is a sham, maintained for the fear of losing some viewers. It's a valid criticism up to a point, but it fails to take into account that someone can be simultaneously anti-Clinton and non-conservative (think Christopher Hitchens).
Granted, O'Reilly can't stand the previous president and his hangers-on (especially Jesse Jackson). But he's against the death penalty, for gun control, for campaign finance reform, and often favors government interventions that make the average Limbaugh listener spit nails. Though something of a fogey, he isn't a traditionalist either. Recent columns have advocated gay adoption and called down fire on his own church regarding the priest pedophile scandal. The latter is worth quoting for a window into how O'Reilly sees the world. The church, he writes,
...is a dictatorship. The pope calls the shots and any serious dissent from his point of view is not tolerated. As in all dictatorships, a tone is set from the top. When a compassionate man like Pope John XXIII was calling the shots, the Church took on a more human face. In the case of the current pope, John Paul II, a tone of authoritarian conservatism is in place and many bishops are extremely cautious in what they say and do.
This sentiment -- and I could proffer many other such examples -- disguises a moderate centrism by wrapping it in populist rhetoric. In the back-and-forth of a one-hour television program, with several segments an hour, these things tend to get glossed over by Fox's conservative-tilting viewers. But with two hours of live radio every weekday, many listeners who subscribe instinctively to what O'Reilly would call "authoritarian conservatism" would get to hear the implications of his heretical thoughts teased out for their listening pleasure, with Limbaugh only a turn of the dial away.
In his book, The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life, O'Reilly writes about his improbable successes in television. "Do not do what I did in the workplace," he advises readers. Though he has "survived and even prospered in the world of TV news," he chalks it up to a "miracle."
Given all the factors aligned against him as he ventures into talk radio, Bill O'Reilly had better hope he hasn't stretched that divine intervention to the breaking point.
