The media is in a state of chaos after Donald Trump’s win.
News outlets are facing a reckoning over lying to their viewers for the last eight years.
And Bill O’Reilly made this bad prediction about The View’s future.
Bill O’Reilly argues the media needs to moderate
O’Reilly told podcaster and former The Biggest Loser trainer Jillian Michaels that media outlets that peddled hate and misinformation were going to pay a massive price in the coming years.
O’Reilly argued that Comcast – which owned NBC and MSNBC – recognized this when it spun off MSNBC into a separate company arguing that MSNBC “peddling hate” damaged the brand of NBC News.
“Now, I think Fox, FNC, because I know everybody over there, has learned its lesson. A billion dollars might do that, but the others, I mean, they are peddling hate on MSNBC. I can’t figure it out because that’s Comcast. They’re killing their own brand. I know Lester Holt,” O’Reilly stated. “He’s a solid guy. But he’s being tainted by Rachel Maddow.”
O’Reilly claimed that CNN tried to move back to the middle after eight years of hair-on-fire coverage of Donald Trump as evidenced by the fact that the network booked him on the air.
“I mean, and you can’t see that? Why are they permitting it? CNN went so far left, they’re trying to come back now. They even actually booked me for confronting the president. That shocked me and my people,” O’Reilly continued.
O’Reilly explained that in the media business the model was to own a niche audience and monetize it.
“But it’s easy to peddle hate. The haters get attention. They can get a small audience and they can make money. That’s why it’s happening,” O’Reilly told Michaels.
Michaels then asked O’Reilly about ABC – and specifically The View saying the show was full of “vitriol.”
O’Reilly said The View – in its current form – was doomed.
O’Reilly said he’d been on the show 20 times, but that was in the old days when legendary broadcaster Barbara Walters controlled the show.
“That has hurt ABC News because ABC News controls The View. So I’ve been on The View 20 times, but that was when Barbara Walters was there. That hatred didn’t exist. You still had Behar and Whoopi. You had them, but they were kind of not censored, but there was a different feel to it,” O’Reilly stated.
O’Reilly said the show drove its audience down to barely 2,000,000 viewers and that Disney – ABC’s corporate owners – would take over The View – and remake it into something that once again had broad appeal.
“Now it’s like, your head’s going to blow off. They only have two million people watching them. Why does ABC News want to ruin their brand by this? So Disney is going to have to take The View over. That’ll happen pretty soon,” O’Reilly predicted.
