Each week the editorial board reflects on a current issue in Our View. The position taken does not reflect the opinions of everyone on the Hilltop Views staff. This week’s editorial board is composed of Viewpoints Editors Sully Lockett, Kenneth Phipps and Lauren Sanchez.

Recently, Bill O’Reilly, the longtime Fox News host of the O’Reilly Factor, came under fire after it was revealed that he has paid $13 million to five different women who accused him of sexual assault over the years.

The host and racist grandfather lookalike has denied these allegations, of course, and has taken a self-prescribed vacation (most likely in order to let the heat die down before coming back to host his show).

There have been calls for him to step down, much like the Roger Ailes incident last year. Yet, there is one significant thing standing in the way of this: O’Reilly is the most popular host on Fox News. He has the number one cable news show in the world, according to the New York Times.

Even as the allegations came to the public eye and began creating negative press towards O’Reilly, his rating increased dramatically.

Unfortunately, this may turn into yet another case of profit coming before ethics. Fox News has no real incentive to change – the culture there, as with other major corporations, favors practices that create money quickly over those that have any real moral merit, and as with the Ailes case, Fox apparently already has an endemic culture tolerating sexual harassment and assault.

It’s somewhat surprising that these settlements took so long to surface; someone as slimy and thoroughly unlovable as O’Reilly definitely had something to hide. Whether it was being mean to orphans, strangling kittens, or falsifying taxes, most people take it as a given that he’s guilty of something based on sight of him alone.

However, when the occupant of the highest office of the land is accused of sexual harassment and assault without any apparent effect on his electability for office, why shouldn’t a mere show host succeed as well? In the age of fake news, even loathsome sex offenders (alleged or otherwise), may try and find a place in society. In general, O’Reilly’s supporters like his show because he focuses on real, important issues, as one woman told the New York Times.

Even so, Fox News can do better than O’Reilly, as painful as those words are to type. There are anchors and personalities with the backbone to stand up against what they see as wrong, as the growing list of departures from the party line — or from the network — at Fox suggests.

Maybe, if more people would stand up for their actual deeply-held beliefs instead of the party line, Fox News would actually be the kind of network it professes to be, instead of being broadly mocked for its shoddy reporting and reviled for its toxic culture.