Who

The confrontational conservative TV host, sometime suspense novelist, and alleged sexual harasser appears weeknights on Fox News.

Backstory

A Long Island native and son of an accountant, O'Reilly attended a Catholic high school in Mineola and studied history at Marist College. His dreams of becoming a professional baseball player were dashed when he tried out for the Mets and didn't make the cut. But he soon found his second calling. After teaching high school in Florida for a couple of years and interning at a newspaper, he moved to Boston to pick up his master's in broadcasting, and commenced his TV career with an on-air job in Scranton, Penn. Gigs in Dallas, Denver, Boston, Portland, and Hartford followed, and in 1980 O'Reilly landed in New York at WCBS. Two years later, he moved into the national spotlight as a CBS correspondent.

O'Reilly's stint at CBS didn't go very smoothly. Less than two years in, the network canned him after he blew up at his bosses back in New York while covering the Falklands Islands conflict. O'Reilly settled in at ABC News, then in 1989 changed gears completely, turning to tabloid journalism as host of the tawdry Inside Edition. Five years later, when the show's producers decided they wanted a sexier face for ratings-challenged show, they swapped O'Reilly for Deborah Norville.

Bill sought refuge in the liberal bastions of academia, of all places—he enrolled in a master's program at Harvard. After nursing his career wounds in Cambridge for a couple of years, he returned to New York and in 1996 linked up with Roger Ailes, who was preparing to launch Fox News. Bill was handed his own show on the fledgling network: The O'Reilly Report. (It became the Factor in 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.) His morning radio call-in show, The Radio Factor, followed a few years later.

Of note

O'Reilly has carved out an extraordinarily successful career—and made millions of dollars—portraying himself as a working-class Irish-American stiff just standing up for the common man. That's hardly the truth, of course. He was raised in a comfortable middle-class family in Westbury, attended a prestigious parochial high school (fellow alums: former NBC chair Bob Wright and former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner), and went on to earn two graduate degrees. But his populist shtick plays well with viewers and his blowhard conservatism and unbridled arrogance pull in big ratings, which is all that really matters to him.

Nowadays, Bill oversees a mini-empire that earns him an estimated $10 million a year, his radio program is syndicated on 400 stations, he makes some $50,000 per speaking engagement, and he's the author of a handful of bestselling books. And if you've ever spent any time watching his show, you know that he happily hawks t-shirts, coasters, mugs and bumper stickers on his website, the address for which he repeats nearly as frequently as the word "pinhead" (which, incidentally, is also something you can find printed on a cotton tee). People close to him say he really is the angry white male he comes off as on TV. Maybe so. But all that chest-puffing is also puffing up his wallet quite nicely, too.

Drama

Over the years O'Reilly has had countless spats with politicians, celebs, and journalists. Taking on his "enemies" is great for ratings, of course (and the people who feud with him are often out for the same sort of exposure). He memorably tussled with Al Franken and ended up in a shouting match with the comedian at a BookExpo luncheon. He's had longstanding beefs with the Times' Nick Kristof and uber-lesbian Rosie O'Donnell. These days, "Bill-o" saves his deepest hatred for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, whose show airs during the same time slot and who's made a habit of poking at O'Reilly on an almost nightly basis.

Scandal

In 2004, Fox News producer Andrea Mackris slapped O'Reilly with a $10 million sexual harassment lawsuit. Her complaint contained some hilariously lurid details of O'Reilly's alleged serial harassment, including discussions of threesomes and vibrators; at one point O'Reilly talked about getting Mackris drunk and taking a shower with her but ended up mixing up the words "falafel" and "loofah," thus providing a season's worth of material to comedians all over the country. O'Reilly settled the case out of court for an undisclosed sum.

In print

O'Reilly penned a thriller in 1998 called Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Murder and Television. Filled with violence and raunchy sex, the novel bizarrely mirrored O'Reilly's own career: The plot concerns an ex-reporter from Levittown who gets sidelined by his television bosses and then exacts revenge, killing off everyone at the station who double-crossed him (while also having plenty of sex with young female fellow journalists). Mel Gibson purchased the movie rights.

O'Reilly is better known, though, for his non-fiction, which is essentially one book that's cleverly repackaged every two years with slightly fresher facts and examples. There's Culture Warrior, The O'Reilly Factor, The No Spin Zone, and Who's Looking Out For You? and—for tiny conservatives—The O'Reilly Factor for Kids, which was published in 2005.

Personal

O'Reilly got married to PR exec Maureen McPhilmy in 1995 when he was 46; they have two children, Madeline (born in 1998) and Spencer (born in 2003). Bill's always been very private about his family, citing "security concerns," although that hasn't stopped the anti-O'Reilly contingent from turning up at his Manhasset home to protest on several occasions. The home, which was appraised at $2.1 million in 2006, is just steps from the beach. You'll find O'Reilly's Cadillac Seville—with official New York State press plates, no less—parked in the driveway.