The gist of the story is that Bill O'Reilly's wife cheated on him with a cop, so naturally O'Reilly did what anyone would do in that situation. He called the cop's boss and tried to destroy the man's career. There's a lot more to the story, so feel free to read it at the link above.
For me, as a media watchdog/critic, the most interesting thing about this story isn't O'Reilly's bullying, or his wife's indiscretion, it's the way Fox News handled this story.
Fox News knew this story was coming because Gawker called them for comment. Instead of commenting, or simply ignoring the story, or better yet calling the report a "private matter" or "personal attack" once it came out, they did something quite different. They had shows (and their website) report the non-story that Gawker's page views were down before the O'Reilly story became public. The only possible reason for doing that non story (and a highly distorted one at that) was to "pretaliate" against Gawker for reporting a true story about one of their personalities.
That's the very definition of abusing the power of the media.
UPDATE: I looked all over for the other side of this story to see if there was something I was missing (like was the Gawker "traffic down 75%" story actually being reported as a story elsewhere), and it wasn't reported by anyone else I could find until after Fox made a big deal out of it. (And most of that reporting was that Fox didn't quite have the story correct.) Fox News did try to justify themselves to Adweek, so I include "their side" of the story here just to be fair. It doesn't pass the smell test, but at least now you have their talking points.
