The O’Reilly exclusivity rule was a booking condition John Kiriakou says he was offered and declined, described on the DeProgram programme in August 2025 during a conversation about how cable news programmes treat their guests.[1]
The offer
Kiriakou says the approach came from the programme’s staff and that he accepted at first: “his producer called me once to get me on the show and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll come on the show.’”[1]
The condition came afterwards. “And he said, ‘Well, you’re not allowed to go on any show three days before or three days after our show.’”[1]
The refusal
Kiriakou’s objection was arithmetical. Three days on either side of an appearance is effectively a week of unavailability, and he priced the booking accordingly: “Get out of here. I’m not going to just block off a week to be on the Bill O’Reilly show.”[1]
The programme came back with a smaller demand — “we could make it two days and two days” — and he refused that as well: “But I said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’ And I didn’t. I never went on his show.”[2]
The context he tells it in
The anecdote sits inside a longer passage about the treatment guests receive on such programmes, most of it supplied by the host from his own experience of Fox appearances in the 2000s — chairs set lower than the presenter’s, cameramen heckling under the lights, microphones cut mid-sentence.[1]
Kiriakou’s own contribution to that theme is drawn from Piers Morgan’s programme, where he says the format requires interruption and the producers told him not to be afraid of it — a habit he has to force, since “the way I was raised was to not interrupt, or to apologise for interrupting, and to try to wait my turn.”[3][4]