Bill O'Reilly (political commentator)

William James O'Reilly Jr. (born September 10, 1949) is an American conservative commentator, journalist, author, and television host.

O'Reilly was born on September 10, 1949, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan to parents William James Sr. and Winifred Angela (née Drake) O'Reilly from Brooklyn and Teaneck, New Jersey, respectively.

He is of Irish descent with a small degree of English (Colonial American) ancestry.

Some of his father's ancestors lived in County Cavan, Ireland, since the early eighteenth century, and on his mother's side he has ancestry from Northern Ireland.

The O'Reilly family lived in a small apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, when their son was born.

In 1951, his family moved to Levittown on Long Island.

O'Reilly has a sister, Janet.

O'Reilly attended St. Brigid parochial school in Westbury and Chaminade High School, a private Catholic boys high school, in Mineola.

His father wanted him to attend Chaminade, but O'Reilly wanted to attend W. Tresper Clarke High School, the public school most of his closest friends would attend.

He played Little League baseball and was the goalie on the Chaminade varsity hockey team.

During his high school years, he met future singer Billy Joel, whom O'Reilly described as a "hoodlum".

O'Reilly recollected in an interview with Michael Kay on the YES Network show CenterStage that Joel "was in the Hicksville section—the same age as me—and he was a hood. He used to slick it [his hair] back like this. And we knew him, because his guys would smoke and this and that, and we were more jocks."

After graduating from Chaminade in 1967, O'Reilly attended Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

While at Marist, he was a punter in the National Club Football Association and also wrote for the school's newspaper, The Circle.

He was an honors student who majored in history.

He spent his junior year of college abroad, attending Queen Mary College at the University of London.

O'Reilly's broadcasting career began during the late 1970s and 1980s, when he reported for local television stations in the United States and later for CBS News and ABC News.

After graduating from Marist College, O'Reilly moved to Miami where he taught English and history at Monsignor Pace High School from 1970 to 1972.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1971.

He played semi-professional baseball during this time as a pitcher for the New York Monarchs.

He returned to school in 1973 and earned a Master of Arts degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University.

While attending Boston University, he was a reporter and columnist for various local newspapers and alternative news weeklies, including the Boston Phoenix, and did an internship in the newsroom of WBZ-TV.

O'Reilly also worked for WFSB in Hartford, Connecticut from 1979 to 1980.

In 1980, O'Reilly anchored the local news-feature program 7:30 Magazine at WCBS-TV in New York.

Soon after, as a WCBS News anchor and correspondent, he won his second local Emmy, which was for an investigation of corrupt city marshals.

In 1982, he became a CBS News correspondent, covering the wars in El Salvador on location and in the Falkland Islands from his base in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

O'Reilly left CBS over a dispute concerning the uncredited use in a report by Bob Schieffer of footage of a riot in response to the military junta's surrender shot by O'Reilly's crew in Buenos Aires shortly after the conclusion of the war.

After departing CBS News in 1982, O'Reilly joined WNEV-TV (now WHDH) in Boston, as a weekday reporter, weekend anchor and later as host of the station's local news magazine New England Afternoon.

He anchored the tabloid television program Inside Edition from 1989 to 1995.

In 1995, he attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received a master of public administration degree in 1996.

Marist College had bestowed an honorary degree upon O'Reilly, which would later be revoked once the sexual abuse allegations came to light.

O'Reilly's early television news career included reporting and anchoring positions at WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he also reported the weather.

At WFAA-TV in Dallas, O'Reilly was awarded the Dallas Press Club Award for excellence in investigative reporting.

He then moved to KMGH-TV in Denver, where he won a local Emmy Award for his coverage of a skyjacking.

O'Reilly joined the Fox News Channel in 1996 and hosted The O'Reilly Factor until 2017.

The O'Reilly Factor had been the highest-rated cable news show for 16 years, and he was described by media analyst Howard Kurtz as "the biggest star in the 20-year history at Fox News" at the time of his ousting.

He is the author of numerous New York Times best selling books and hosted The Radio Factor (2002–2009).

In early 2017, The New York Times reported that he and Fox News had paid five women approximately $13 million to settle various sexual misconduct lawsuits, which led to the network terminating O'Reilly's employment and him being dropped by the United Talent Agency and literary agency WME.

Since 2020, O'Reilly has hosted a show entitled No Spin News, first airing on Newsmax, then on The First.

He also has a podcast with the same name.