Bill O’Reilly, who was fired from Fox News Channel in April, will test a half hour news program this summer. During a Q&A session on his “The Spin Stops Here” tour on Long Island, O’Reilly was asked if he’ll launch a network.
“I am starting my own operation. We are going to do that,” he said, according to Newsday. BillOReilly.com will test a half-hour news program “where we will go into a studio and here it will look like The Factor… It’s basically an experiment to see how many people are going to want this service,” he said.
That will happen before September, O’Reilly added.
Fox News Channel is ripe for a rival, said O'Reilly. “I suspect there will be another network maybe merging with us,” he said. “There will be a network that rises up because the numbers for Fox are going down.”
O’Reilly and Dennis Miller shared the stage Saturday.
O’Reilly said he would not “bad-mouth” Fox News Channel, where he hosted The O’Reilly Factor for over two decades. “They had a shift in management that coincided with a very well thought-out and financed effort to destroy me,” Newsday reports O’Reilly saying. “It worked—temporarily. It all had to do with President Trump. In the weeks to come, I’m going to lay all that out in a very public way.”
On his website, O’Reilly said he is taking his time to decide his next move. “America is changing quickly,” he said, “and I don't want to miscalculate.”
(Photo via Justin Hock's Flickr. Image taken on Jan. 10, 2017 and used per Creative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit 9x16 aspect ratio.)
