O’Reilly is a grade A asshole. Everyone is beneath him. You can’t go into “his” studio, he screams at you for whatever little transgression that might be factual or not. Remember the famous “we’ll do it live” bit from his days at inside edition? That’s basically Tuesday. It was not an anomaly. It was the only show there I refused to work on. Most crew people got hazard pay to work on that show because so few people were willing to work on it.
Had an aide of Roger Ailes come into the studio while the show was live on the air to have a small coffee table removed from the interview set because it was blocking the view of the female anchor’s legs. Never saw a table there again. This was on direct orders from Ailes.
Female anchors would do quarterly dress fittings. They are all super short. Worked with one female on-air who is not blonde half-joke that she’ll never move up there because she isn’t blonde, long legs and willing to sex it up. She’s brilliant, very beautiful and one of the nicest people but she doesn’t fit the Fox stereotype. She was right but she still does a bunch of work there.
I took the company-mandated sexual harassment class with half the on-air personalities. It was basically a how-to Class of harassment. NONE of us took it seriously. But you can’t be PC in this line of work. I worked behind the camera. Part of our jobs is to make sure the anchors looked good. Makeup right, clothes not out of place. You have to adjust a mic on them? It’s clipped to their bra with a wire running under their shirt.
Summer is “intern season” great for us that we’re mid-20s guys working in TV. Tons of really good looking 20-something college girls looking to get a start in TV. Usually connected. ALL good looking mostly dumb as rocks because a) daddy got them the job and b) this was a stepping stone to on-air stuff or jobs in the Republican Party. The good ones we loved because they worked hard. The dumb ones didn’t last long because while they were nice to look at they got in the way of us doing our jobs.
Look, half the harassment is genuine. The other half is scorned women (and men) who didn’t get the on-air gigs they were promised as a condition of hooking up with the people. Like any other situation the VAST majority of people are good, work hard and aren’t creeps. Some of them are. O’Reilly was the worst.