Bill O’Reilly may not have his Fox News gig anymore, but he’s still got his books. He has authored and co-authored numerous political and historical non-fiction books, including his bestselling “Killing” series (“Killing Lincoln,” “Killing Reagan,” and “Killing Kennedy” among them).
He has a new book, “Killing England,” coming out this September, so he sat down with the Associated Press to talk about his life post-Fox News. And he addressed the startling drop in ratings Fox has been experiencing following his departure and the departures of Megyn Kelly and Roger Ailes, among others. As we noted last week, Fox’s primetime ratings among the import 25-54 demographic are at a 17-year low.
“There’s always cause and effect,” [O’Reilly] said. “We were doing extraordinarily well, bringing in audiences that were competitive with the networks. You take it out and there’s going to be interesting things happening.”
AP noted that O’Reilly had been losing sponsors before his departure and that current Fox News host Sean Hannity is currently seeing a similar loss of advertising revenue. Could a Hannity departure be in the works?
“It’s the same thing, the far left going after him, trying to get him off the air,” O’Reilly said. “I think Hannity will survive because I don’t know if Fox can handle another shake-up like that.”
USAA, which had previously indicated they would pull their ads from Hannity’s show following the host’s apparent obsession with the case of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, said today that they’ve had a change of heart and will reinstate their ads. This has to be welcome news at Fox, which, if O’Reilly is correct, has a lot riding on the success of Sean Hannity.
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