When O’Reilly has a book to promote, however, bygones are bygones. On Monday, Hannity announced that O’Reilly would be appearing on his program on Tuesday night, a development first reported by Yashar Ali at HuffPost. Topics for the chat, said Hannity, would be the “news of the day” and “Killing England,” the umpteenth in the series of deadly books that O’Reilly has produced with co-author Martin Dugard. O’Reilly previously appeared on Hannity’s radio show, on which Hannity mused about bringing his former prime-time peer back to the network.

Guest bookings on cable news usually don’t rate a mention. This one is different, because of what happened in April. After a blockbuster article in the New York Times disclosing that O’Reilly and Fox News had reached settlements with women who had allegedly been sexually harassed or mistreated by the longtime, ratings-killing host, an assault on O’Reilly’s advertisers got underway. Though Fox News had recently renewed O’Reilly’s contract, it parted ways with him.

AD

AD

Since then, O’Reilly has hinted in a number of venues that he has more to reveal about his firing. “In the weeks to come, there will be a bunch of news stories that will explain what happened and why it happened,” said O’Reilly in June. In another interview in June, he said, “We’re going to drop it in the next few weeks, and it’s really, really stunning how organized that was and what these people did.”

Still waiting!

In a stunning interview last week with Matt Lauer of “Today,” O’Reilly did his best to distort the circumstances surrounding his departure. “If you look in totality, this was a hit job — a political and financial hit job,” he said. Also: “There are billions of dollars of stake in business deals and they made a business decision that they could possibly prosper more without me. It was as simple as that. It was a business decision,” O’Reilly told Lauer in a statement clearly designed to minimize his workplace misconduct. He also said that in more than 40 years in the news business, he never had “any interaction with HR,” perhaps because, at least at Fox News, HR was a wholly owned subsidiary of Ailes, who went down in his own sexual harassment scandal. Try as he did, Lauer was no match for O’Reilly’s glib spin.

AD

AD

The rapprochement between O’Reilly and Hannity appears to serve both parties, though not equally. Pushed off his nightly platform that he shamelessly used to sell his books, O’Reilly now needs help. This blog has spotted Fox News advertisements for “Killing England,” and Hannity’s show will help as well. In addition to ruling cable news ratings, Fox News is a powerhouse when it comes to moving books. Consider that “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade can claim that he’s a New York Times bestselling author.