Television: A Cable News Giant

Bill O’Reilly is both an ambassador and a moneymaker for Fox News, his television home since 1996. His show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” which airs at 8 on weeknights, is routinely the highest-ranked show on cable news. And his blend of I-know-best commentary and pointed interviews established a genre of opinion programming that has come to dominate much of television news.

With more than 5,000 episodes under his belt, Mr. O’Reilly is the jewel in the Fox News crown: His show has generated billions of dollars in revenue, including over $446 million from advertising from 2014 to 2016, according to the research firm Kantar Media.

This year, he is averaging nearly four million viewers a night, up about 40 percent from just two years ago. His audience is overwhelmingly white — roughly nine out of 10 viewers, according to Nielsen — but more or less evenly split between genders, with men making up about 54 percent of viewers. Fox News recently extended his contract, though it is not known for how long.