aaron keeps coming up with some good links over the past few days. Check out the links in this post and watch the video of Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly at BookExpo.
I will say one thing though, unless Al Franken has some more supporting arguments for why Bill O’Reilly is a right-wing condescending prick (and I have no doubts that he is), I feel he does “the left” a disservice by harping over and over on one item. Yes, as “a journalist”, O’Reilly should know the difference between and Peabody and a Poke (isn’t that a fish dish in Hawaii?), but we have to come up with multiple examples not just one.
And I’m going to be extremeley pissed if Al’s new book ends up just hitting one or two minor points on lots of people, and if his facts are at all wrong. I still can’t stomach Michael Moore anymore for the extreme exagerations he printed in Stupid White Men without any supporting evidence (things which were easy to disprove with minimal Googling).
If “the left” continues to let political satirists be their primary pop culture spokespersons, then they better hold them to as high a standard as they want to hold the right too.
So back to O’Reilly, here’s another good one. Read through this article for the transcript at the end where O’Reilly berated a son of a 9/11 casualty. I would love to see actual tape of that.
About Bill, he’s completely balanced
Re:this post on blog^2. I agree, bill o’reilly is full of shit. but don’t misread the guy like a lot of people do. He’s not a politician, he’s an entertainer. he’s on TV, doing entertainment, it’s just that his show…
Well, I recently finished the book. Yes, it does contain a wealth of additional well-researched evidence. It indicates poor journalistic ethics that are sloppy and misleading on their face. I think there is a good case for intentional deception in intentional misrepresentations like these, summarized in a FAIR Report on O’Reilly
O’Reilly’s Roots
In March, Slate.com editor Michael Kinsley infuriated O’Reilly by suggesting the Fox host’s background was less proletarian than he lets on (Washington Post, 3/1/01). O’Reilly makes much of his “working class” upbringing in Levittown, Long Island. His book’s dust-jacket bio begins: “Bill O’Reilly rose from humble beginnings to become a nationally known broadcast journalist,” and O’Reilly says his father, who retired in 1978, “never earned more than $35,000 a year in his life.”
But O’Reilly’s mother told a reporter her son actually grew up in Westbury, Long Island, a “middle-class suburb a few miles from Levittown,” where he attended a private school (Washington Post, 12/13/00). His father’s $35,000 income in 1978 is equivalent to over $90,000 today in inflation-adjusted dollars.
In February, O’Reilly gave a speech seemingly taking credit for winning a coveted Peabody award while an anchor at the tabloid TV show Inside Edition. After comedian Al Franken pointed out that the show never won a Peabody, O’Reilly retorted, in Mamet-esque syntax (O’Reilly Factor, 3/13/01): “Guy says about me, couple of weeks ago, ‘O’Reilly said he won a Peabody Award.’ Never said it. You can’t find a transcript where I said it.”
But on his May 19, 2000 broadcast, he repeatedly told a guest who brought up his tabloid past: “We won Peabody Awards. . . . We won Peabody awards. . . . A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you’re going to denigrate it?” (Inside Edition won a Polk Award, not the better-known Peabody, for reporting that was done after O’Reilly left the show –Washington Post, 3/1/01.)