Life Of O'reilly

Bill O'Reilly makes more than a million dollars a year, but he's damned if he'll spend $3.50 on a cup of coffee. "I will not go in a Starbucks," he says. He prefers a coffee shop in Manhasset, Long Island, where cops and firemen hang out. Chatting and jousting with the regulars there every morning, he says, he gets many of the questions he will use later that night to interrogate guests on his TV show, "The O'Reilly Factor." Blunt, sometimes obnoxious questions, the kind that most big-media talk-show hosts are too squeamish to ask. Like: Why do gay activists flaunt it? And just where does the Rev. Jesse Jackson get his money? Questions that are uncomfortable and often annoying to his guests but entertaining and dead-on to "the folks," as he calls his fans--a large and growing legion. As O'Reilly never tires of reminding anyone who'll listen, his book, "The O'Reilly Factor," was for 10 weeks the No. 1 best seller, while his show is the highest-rated cable-news program on TV.

Many of those fans voted for George W. Bush. So it was perhaps unsurprising on the eve of the Inauguration that O'Reilly was ushered into a private party to meet the president-elect's parents. Former First Lady Barbara Bush told O'Reilly she was reading his book. ("Did you buy it?" he inquired.) O'Reilly was flattered, but ill at ease. Then he went--reluctantly, he says--to a glitzy A-list dinner party at the Jockey Club given by a Buffy Cafritz, a longtime Washington social doyenne, whom O'Reilly refers to as "Buffy What's-Her-Name." O'Reilly said he could feel the socialites and bigwigs "measuring" him. "They're saying, 'What's he doing here?' One couple even got up to leave," O'Reilly later recalled, seeming to relish his shunning. He imitates a society matron crying, "Security! Security!"

O'Reilly loves to play the outsider, the scourge of the media elite. Combative and plain-spoken, he embodies the edgy, personality-driven programming formula that has allowed upstart Fox News to surpass its rivals in the cable-news ratings race. He is the working-class hero promoted by Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, the shrewd populist who has been sizing up voters and viewers for more than three decades. O'Reilly's motto is "keep it simple." Yet he is a complicated man, at once belligerent and self-effacing, ambitious and determined to remain humble. He can be a loudmouth but also companionable. He is Everyman on a barstool, mad as hell, but with a wink.

The chattering classes dismiss O'Reilly as a fake, and they accuse Fox News of shilling for the political right. Tucker Carlson, the conservative, bow-tied talking head on CNN's "The Spin Room," declared, "Only masochists would go on his show--or watch it. I hate to say it because it sounds snobby, but I don't know anyone who's read his book."

Maybe the punditry should pick up a copy--and start checking out the Fox News Channel weekday nights at 8. The book, a collection of rants, bromides and blunt advice, which O'Reilly relentlessly plugs on his show, has sold about a million copies. The show now often draws bigger ratings than the once almighty "Larry King Live" on CNN. When Fox News and MSNBC started up four years ago, few media analysts bet on Rupert Murdoch's low-rent Fox operation to best the widely heralded news channel established by NBC and Microsoft, yet Fox now draws consistently higher ratings than MSNBC. (NEWSWEEK and its parent, The Washington Post Company, are in strategic partnership with NBC, MSNBC and MSNBC.com.) As Fox News has risen with its raw, personality-driven programming, the older, more news-driven CNN has had to scramble to create its own stars. MSNBC executives argue that Fox appeals more to older news junkies, not the younger, higher-consuming audiences--preferred by advertisers--who tend to watch MSNBC. Maybe so, but Fox News is now slightly outdrawing MSNBC even among adults 25 to 54. The roughly 1.5 million households that tune in to "The O'Reilly Factor" on a typical night is small compared with the roughly 20 million who still watch the network evening-news shows--but more than the 1.1 million that click on the sober, high-minded "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS. But as Fox News reaches more and more households (it now claims about 58 million, versus CNN's 81 million and a regular TV network's 100 million), there is no question that O'Reilly is a phenomenon of the talk-show age.

O'Reilly's politics--and his followers'--are largely conservative, but not predictably. While he inveighs against Big Government and gay activists ("Dykes on a bike take a hike"), O'Reilly is anti-death- penalty and favors environmental regulation. Fox chief honcho Ailes bridles at the charge that Fox is promoting the GOP agenda. His network is not right wing, he says. It's the other networks that are liberal. Not to mention condescending. "The media elite think they're smarter than the rest of those stupid bastards, and they'll tell you what to think," says Ailes. "To a working-class guy, that's bulls--t."