Risky Bets, Family Values, And The Politics Of Tebowing: A Chat With Fox’s Eric Bolling
“What would you define as the most liberal view you have?”
A second passes in dead silence, and, being a worrywart, I wonder whether he was perhaps offended by the question. I do eventually get an answer. “Um, I don’t have those,” Bolling laughs, after a brief period of trying to come up with one. He is being sincere when he says he has no liberal views, and what often rankles his opponents is his genuinely conservative point of view. Given his background in television and on Wall Street, I note that viewers– particularly liberal ones– could find his bootstraps hyper-capitalism hypocritical, given his particularly cushy socioeconomic status. Bolling clarifies that when he discusses what is best for the children of the country or, say, Pam in Kansas (who, he notes, is a real person he discusses on the show often), he does so because his childhood was modest enough to understand the struggles of the average American. “I grew up Chicago absolutely on the other side of the tracks. We were very poor. We were not just slightly poor, we were very poor. My father was a traveling salesman, my mom worked two jobs. I grew up in inner-city Chicago, in a very working class family.” He recalls the first moment he understood the value of money, and the importance of class in society, was the first time his mother didn’t have the money to buy him the pair of sneakers he wanted (a pair of Pro-Keds). “I said, ‘Hey, you better figure out how to get out of this class and move up to middle class,'” he notes. “God has been very good to me. My career after baseball happened to be very successful but, again, those weren’t government jobs, they weren’t handouts, they were taking risks on my own in a very capitalist way.”
“I could only have the opinions I do because of where I came from. I’d be an elitist jerk if I didn’t start from where I did and had these opinions. I wouldn’t like what I was saying if that were the case. But I’m also not the type– I can’t sit there once a show or once a week or once a month and say, ‘Hey, by the way, I came from a poor background.'”
“I could only have the opinions I do because of where I came from. I’d be an elitist jerk if I didn’t start from where I did and had these opinions.”
Bolling is a broadcaster with no separate “broadcaster” persona. As a commentator, his job is to entertain as much as it is to inform and Bolling’s chosen method of doing so is to project himself as he genuinely is, to speak to viewers as if they were friends sitting across from him at a bar or a tailgate. The consistency in his delivery, he tells me, is something that comes naturally to the job. “My persona on television is what I am at home, it doesn’t change… it doesn’t matter if you host O’Reilly or Cavuto or Fox & Friends, or sit on an ensemble on The Five… if you look at all the hosting gigs I do, it’s the same person. I’ll roll around in a survival suit with [Brian] Kilmeade at 8:58 in the morning and there will be an opportunity at 8:01 PM to interview Gov. Sarah Palin. That’s the beauty and most amazing part about working at Fox.” He credits Roger Ailes for the “blessing” of having such a varied menu of things to do at work, and for “taking a chance on someone with no background in journalism.”
Needless to say, his ability to make the audience forget he isn’t actually in their living rooms makes him a natural for The Five—where friendships and character development are the soul of the show— and it doubles as both his strongest and weakest suits. It means we get to live out personal moments with him on live television, like his son’s hospitalization and his personal loss on 9/11. It means he isn’t ashamed to tell the tale of the day Bob Beckel mistakenly hit on his wife or to wear or do just about anything on camera. It also means we get to watch every off-color joke or offensive comment that pops up in his brain create a spectacular public mess, as there appears to be no mechanism to stop it. “I probably do about 600 hours of television between The Five, Follow the Money, I fill in for O’Reilly, I fill in on Fox & Friends—I probably do 600 hours of TV a year and people focus on one or two times where I say something that riles people up.”
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