Gawker vs Fox News over Bill O'Reilly Corruption Story

Gawker's Piece on Bill O'Reilly Sparked Fox News Backlash

Now we know why Fox News has such a hate-on for Gawker. Turns out that Gawker was working on a piece about Bill O'Reilly that basically shoves Fox closer to the phone hacking scandal than it would like.

• Gawker: How Bill O'Reilly Tried to Get His Wife's Boyfriend Investigated by the Cops
  

The short version: According to Gawker, Bill O'Reilly suspected that Maureen McPhilmy, his wife, was having an affair with a detective from the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD). O'Reilly and McPhilmy were undergoing a trial separation at the time.

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Bill O'Reilly allegedly called in a favor with Lawrence Mulvey, who was NCPD commissioner at the time. Mulvey allegedly asked then-detective Richard harasym to put pressure on the cop to stay away from O'Reilly's wife. There's more to the story; see the Gawker link above for further details.

This explains why Fox News described Gawker as dying, saying that the site has lost 75% of its traffic this year alone. That statistic is obviously bullshit: pick an analytic, any analytic, to show otherwise. Even Compete, which Fox News cited, didn't really say what Fox said it said. See that dip? Gawker redesign.

The last thing Fox News needs is to be sucked into the sleaze quagmire in which its overseas cousins are mired, and discrediting Gawker would be an obvious (if ill-conceived) strategy to avoid such a fate.

Note that Gawker doesn't even have the name of the detective who was allegedly investigated, but has several parts of the story corroborated by independent sources, including one within Fox News, who quoted Bill O'Reilly's nephew.