Tavis Smiley. 

When they were still on television, Tavis Smiley and Bill O’Reilly had some epic clashes that usually involved the white Fox News host pushing back against the black PBS host’s assertion that a given news event revealed racial inequality.

“Black men, so often, are viewed in this country as a menace to society,” Smiley said on O’Reilly’s show in 2013, while discussing the Trayvon Martin case.

“I don’t believe that America has contempt for black men,” O’Reilly countered. “I believe a lot of the problem is generated by blacks themselves that won’t solve the problems of their neighborhoods.”

Now that they share the experience of being pulled off the air because of sexual misconduct accusations, Smiley and O’Reilly are suddenly making the same arguments.

Each says the network that nixed his program failed to explain the decision. Here’s part of Smiley’s conversation with Tucker Carlson on Monday on Fox News:

CARLSON: So, what specifically did PBS accuse you of doing when they yanked your show off the air?

SMILEY: It’s hard to know. The clause in my contract that they originally suggested to me they were looking into — this is sort of inside baseball — it’s clause 5.1, which is the morals clause. We all have morals clauses in our contracts. The clause that they invoked when they pulled the plug on the show was clause 9.1, which is the clause that allows them simply to decide not to distribute my show anymore. In other words, they told me that they were suspending me under clause 9.1, but they told the press, basically, that I’d violated clause 5.1. So, PBS to this very moment has not told me specifically what I am being suspended for.

And here’s O’Reilly, speaking with Matt Lauer on Sept. 19, just 10 weeks before the “Today” host lost his own job because of sexual misconduct allegations:

LAUER: What was the exact reason you were given, or your representatives were given, by people at Fox News for your firing?

O’REILLY: There was no reason. There’s a contractual clause that they could pay me a certain amount of money and not put me on the air, and they exercised that.

Both Smiley and O’Reilly have claimed to possess additional, unspecified information that they can’t release because of vague legal reasons.

“Whenever something like this hits the media, there is always more to the story than meets the eye,” Smiley told Carlson. “And I don’t want to say much more than that because my attorneys are hard at work.”

“I can’t say a lot, because there’s much stuff going on right now,” O’Reilly said on his podcast in April. “But I can tell you that I’m very confident the truth will come out, and when it does, I don’t know if you’re going to be surprised, but I think you’re going to be shaken, as I am. There’s a lot of stuff involved here. Now, I can’t say any more because I just don’t want to influence the flow of the information. I don’t want the media to take what I say and misconstrue it.”

O’Reilly has complained about Media Matters’ effort to push him off TV and said in the Lauer interview that he was the victim of a “hit job.”

Smiley complained in the Carlson interview that Variety published an extensive report on his suspension just 12 minutes after Smiley was notified of the decision. “Now, you tell me whether or not there is an agenda here,” Smiley said.

Both have said men accused of sexual misconduct are unfairly presumed guilty.

“Every allegation in this area is a conviction,” O’Reilly told Lauer.

“I want to make sure we don’t lose all sense of nuance and proportionality in this conversation because, if we do, people end up being guilty simply by accusation,” Smiley said Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Smiley and O’Reilly have even slipped into the third person when defending themselves.

“The endgame: Let’s leave O’Reilly with Harvey Weinstein,” O’Reilly said on Glenn Beck’s radio show in October. “Let’s make him that . . . so we take him out of the marketplace forever. He never gets to give his opinion on issues again. We take him out because we hate him.”

“Tavis Smiley has only had consensual relationships,” Smiley said Monday on CNN.

Though they previously sparred on the air, Smiley and O’Reilly now appear to be running the same playbook.