Wimpy Wimpy Wimpy Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly's favorite word is defamation. Anyone who has anything negative to say about O'Reilly is defaming him. Yesterday on Fresh Air, an NPR show hosted by Terry Gross, O'Reilly accused Al Franken and at least two book reviewers of defaming him. Why was O'Reilly giving an interview to NPR, whom he had previously blasted as a bastion of the liberal media ever since they revealed that, contrary to his claims of being a registered independent, he was actually a registered republican? You be the judge.
Attempting to be fair and balanced, Gross invited O'Reilly to appear on Fresh Air once his new book was published. She had interviewed Al Franken the month before about his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Franken was highly critical of O'Reilly in the book and on the show. In the past O'Reilly has complained more than once that NPR had never interviewed him regarding one of his books, calling it an "outrage." NPR points out, that O'Reilly did appear on NPR and was invited several times to appear again but did not respond.
Gross prefaces the pre-recorded O'Reilly interview with a clip of O'Reilly lambasting her on his FOX show. In the clip, O'Reilly boasts about how he "told Gross off" and walked out on the interview. He whines that Gross asked him tougher questions than she had asked Franken, and claims the interview was a setup, saying, "I knew these people were not going to be fair."
To be fair, O'Reilly had a point. In her introduction, Gross referred to him as 'controversial,' a term with negative connotations. Conversely, she merely referred to Franken as a satirist.
The first question Gross asks O'Reilly is whether he regrets suing Franken. He points out that FOX sued Franken and disavows any involvement in pressing for the suit. He told a New York Times reporter the same thing in September, yet when the suit was dismissed, O'Reilly stated "we never thought we were going to win the lawsuit. We wanted to expose the vicious tactics being used by the far left." This contradicts the notion that he had nothing to do with the lawsuit. In a September article, Ben McGrath of the New Yorker pegged O'Reilly as the instigator for FOX's lawsuit, quoting an unnamed FOX employee.
O'Reilly tells Gross he considered suing Franken but because O'Reilly has the number one book, the number one show, and a radio show on 400 stations, he can't prove he's suffered damage, but he adds that "there's no question it was defamation and that's what this guy traffics in."
Next Gross mentions the Book Expo incident (fast forward 41 minutes). At the Book Expo, Franken accused O'Reilly of lying for claiming that Inside Edition, a show O'Reilly once hosted, had won a Peabody award, and O'Reilly screamed at Franken to "shut up." Gross asks whether Franken's assessment of O'Reilly as a bully is fair. O'Reilly, once again defensive, retorts that his success proves Franken wrong, because if Franken were correct, nobody would watch O'Reilly's show. "Americans are fair people, by and large," he says. But then he makes the stunning assertion that "there are people who enjoy reading and listening to people who attack other people with whom they disagree personally." Does this include fans of his show who watched him tell Ann Coulter that Al Franken was a "vile human being" or enjoyed his rants against Bill Moyers? Backstage, O'Reilly threatened Franken with a lawsuit from Fox regarding unauthorized use of his picture: "Fox lawyers will handle this," he said.
Gross follows up this question with one about O'Reilly's infamous interview with Jeremy Glick, the son of a man killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center whom O'Reilly told to "shut up" and kicked out of the FOX studio. She asks "how much is theater and showmanship?" to which O'Reilly replies "none." Then he tells her to read the complete transcript, which he says shows that Glick "...said that the attack at 9/11 was alleged and then proceeded to blame President Bush and his father for orchestrating the attack on their own country."
What Glick actually said was:
Our current president now inherited a legacy from his father and inherited a political legacy that's responsible for training militarily, economically, and situating geopolitically the parties involved in the alleged assassination and the murder of my father and countless of thousands of others.
It's unclear to what Glick meant by alleged assassination. It clearly doesn't refer to the 9/11 deaths since in the same sentence he called those "murders." Did it refer to the untrue White House claim that one of the hijacked planes was targeting Air Force One and the president? O'Reilly never asked Glick to clarify but instead accused him of calling America a "terrorist nation." Glick calmly replied:
What I'm saying is...starting in the Carter administration and continuing and escalating while Bush's father was head of the CIA, we recruited a hundred thousand radical mujahadeens to combat a democratic government in Afghanistan, the Turaki government.
O'Reilly said he didn't want to discuss world politics with Glick and added "I don't really care what you think." Later they had this exchange:
O'REILLY: All right. You didn't support the action against Afghanistan to remove the Taliban. You were against it, OK.
GLICK: Why would I want to brutalize and further punish the people in Afghanistan...
O'REILLY: Who killed your father!
GLICK: The people in Afghanistan...
O'REILLY: Who killed your father.
GLICK: ... didn't kill my father.
O'REILLY: Sure they did. The al Qaeda people were trained there.
GLICK: The al Qaeda people? What about the Afghan people?
O'REILLY: See, I'm more angry about it than you are!
Indeed, O'Reilly was angry about it. On a previous program he had commented this about the situation in Afghanistan:
taking out their [Afghans] ability to exist day-to-day will not be hard. Remember the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler, the Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians but if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.
As Moyer pointed out in the earlier linked article, non-governmental Afghans were mostly orphans and war widows who had suffered under years of brutal oppression. Yet O'Reilly believed they should starve for failing to oust the Taliban. Were Jews, the non-governing faction of Germany, ultimately responsible for Hitler because they didn't "rise up"? It's an absurd sentiment.
Then Glick asked:
GLICK: So what about George Bush?
O'REILLY: What about George Bush? He had nothing to do with it.
GLICK: The director -- senior as director of the CIA.
O'REILLY: He had nothing to do with it.
GLICK: So the people that trained a hundred thousand Mujahadeen who were...
O'Reilly ordered Glick's microphone cut, said he was disrespecting his dead father and wouldn't let Glick speak anymore. Glick never accused George W. Bush of being behind September 11. Nor did he accuse Bush's father of being behind September 11, although he may have been getting around to suggesting some culpability on the part of the US because they trained the mujahadeen rebels who later became the Taliban.
O'Reilly tells Gross that Glick was irrational and that he tried to solicit Glick for proof of his allegations and only aborted the interview when Glick offered none. But O'Reilly never asked Glick for proof and instead suggested Glick's parents would be ashamed of Glick and told him repeatedly to shut up before kicking him out of the studio. O'Reilly, uses his favorite word and tells Gross that Glick's remarks were "defamatory allegations."
Gross then asks O'Reilly about his unhappiness with Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Al Franken's book. Gross quotes O'Reilly as calling Maslin a "character assassin" and saying "that is why few journalists will ever criticize the Times, they know the paper will come after them in a very personal way." O'Reilly was angered when Maslin repeated Franken's now famous allegation that O'Reilly claimed his tabloid journalism show Inside Edition was awarded a Peabody. Maslin took a dig at O'Reilly for denying that he ever said such a thing and daring anyone to find a transcript of him doing so. O'Reilly said this after Franken and the Washington Post confronted him about it privately, at which point he told them he misspoke and that it was a Polk, not a Peabody.
Franken actually found three transcripts; in two of them, O'Reilly claimed Inside Edition had won two Peabodies, referring to the Peabody as "the most prestigious journalism award." Clearly O'Reilly didn't merely misspeak, since nobody defines the Polk as "the most prestigious award in journalism." He meant Peabody. But giving O'Reilly the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he believed Inside Edition really had won Peabodies. Correct it and move on, right? Not if you're Bill O'Reilly.
He never corrected the record until after Robert Reno of Newsday chastised O'Reilly for falsely claiming to have won a Peabody. O'Reilly ripped Reno on his show and insisted that no one could find a transcript anywhere of him ever saying Inside Edition had won a Peabody because he had never said it. Since Franken had privately informed O'Reilly that he had said just such a thing, O'Reilly lied and smeared Reno in the process.
Remarkably, O'Reilly repeats the lie to Gross: "I never said I won a Peabody award at any time." He insists he "mislabeled" the Pope award as a Peabody and that he corrected himself at least twice and that what he said was "the absolute truth." While he did correct himself eventually, it was only after Franken called him to the carpet. As for mislabelling the award, his elaboration of "the most prestigious award in journalism" denies that. "Who cares?" O'Reilly asks Gross. O'Reilly clearly does since he still can't bring himself to come clean about the incident. O'Reilly is not a stupid man. He knows he's dissembling.
O'Reilly then takes another swipe at Franken's book and at Gross: "If you can't tell that this book is defamation, then you can't read." Defamation requires damage to have been inflicted to his reputation or character. If O'Reilly believes it's unquestionable that he has been defamed, why doesn't he sue? Perhaps he fears another "wholly without merit" verdict.
Here are comments O'Reilly made that ambitious fact checkers should check out and report back to me!
--O'Reilly claims that he and Bob Woodward are the only authors in the past ten years to have hit the New York Times best seller list three times, with three separate books. I assume he means the hardcover non-fiction list, because all the Harry Potter books have blown O'Reilly's out of the water.
--Claims that "everybody else" (without saying who everybody else is) says the New York Times gave Moore's new book a "great review."
--Claims that his mother was a Kennedy because her mother was a Kennedy. Oddly he doesn't claim that he is therefore a Kennedy.
One falsehood O'Reilly tells Gross is that "spin" originated with the Nixon White House, a very dubious claim. Most scholars attribute the practice of spin to Ronald Reagan although some offer Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the original spinmeister. Nixon doesn't seem to get much credit for the concept. Does O'Reilly mean that the Nixon team coined the word spin? If so, he's mistaken. In a 1986 article on spin, William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, attributed its first political use to Jack Rosenthal in the New York Times, in reference to a 1984 Reagan-Mondale debate. It's been postulated that the term is derived from the old cliche "spin a yarn," which sprung from the practice of 17th century women meeting together to spin their yarn and spread gossip.
Next, O'Reilly tells Gross that our government was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and claims to have every letter ever written between Jefferson and Madison, letters he says prove that neither wanted a secularist United States. First, on the matter of Judeo-Christian ethics: the Constitution does not address any of the religious aspects of Judeo-Christian ethics, such as worshipping false idols or taking God's name in vain whereas ancient non-Judeo-Christian societies had laws against murder, rape, theft, and adultery. These are common sense morals, not Judeo-Christian ones.
As for his claim to possess every letter Jefferson and Madison ever exchanged, did the two keep master lists documenting every letter in and out? How does O'Reilly know he has "every letter ever written" between the two?
O'Reilly goes on to tell Gross that the ACLU is responsible for "Christmas Holiday" being removed from school calendars across the country. He mentioned this in a column entitled oddly enough "Somewhere Santa is Weeping." He relates a decision by the Covington, Georgia, school board to change Winter Break to Christmas Break (a sort of in-your-face move by the Christian element) and then ultimately to Holiday Vacation. This was done without any lawsuit filed by the ACLU. O'Reilly has a point, however, that there are schools and government groups who take the separation of church and state a little too far, such as a St. Paul courthouse that banned red poinsettias from a holiday display after one person complained they were a "Christian" symbol. But this seems like over-correcting--an extreme reaction to the continual push by Christian groups to insert Christianity into our schools and government.
After 10 minutes of questions that put O'Reilly on the defensive, Gross spends the next 20 lobbing softballs, allowing him to talk about Vietnam, his parents, where he grew up, his religious beliefs ("I don't believe in the big bang" he says and mentions that he threw in with the supreme being "just in case").
Gross then mentions his voter registration card. Some time ago, NPR discovered that O'Reilly was a registered republican and had been for some time, instead of the independent he always claimed to be. O'Reilly says he never knew he was registered as a republican and then almost as a nonsequitor launches into another tirade against Franken. O'Reilly counters Mrs. O'Reilly's claim that the O'Reilly family went to Florida every summer. He insists they only went once, by Greyhound. Then he jumps on Gross and says he hopes she was as tough on Franken as she has been on him and that he hopes "NPR is fair and balanced." He meanders back to Franken's book again and says "If you're on board with that then I don't respect you."
Gross changes the subject and inquires about O'Reilly's reaction to a negative People Magazine review of his previous book. She mentions how O'Reilly ridiculed the author on his show and asks whether any author negatively reviewing O'Reilly's book can count on getting blasted. People Magazine "reviewed me and not the book," he says and accuses other negative reviewers of the same thing. He suggests Gross read Publisher's Weekly to see how his book should be reviewed. The Publisher's Weekly review of his recent effort reads more like a description than a review. However, Publisher's Weekly did review The O'Reilly Factor very positively, commenting that "He [O'Reilly] is very entertaining and can charm with his wit..." Apparently positive reviews of O'Reilly the person are okay.
It is when Gross goes to read the People Magazine review that O'Reilly throws his tantrum. "Why? Why? Look I’m getting the feeling in this interview that this is just a hatchet job on me and I don't like it. Now there's no reason for you to read that People Magazine review of the book," he rants. "I came on this program to talk about my book...you've thrown every kind of defamation you can in my face." He becomes argumentative and confronts her over whether she challenged Franken as much as she challenged him and she acknowledges that she did not because Franken is a satirist and it was a different type of interview.
O'Reilly gets peeved any time someone calls Franken a satirist. "Satire, now was it? Distorting their faces on the book cover?" By this he is referring to the picture on Franken's book of a very splotchy O'Reilly. Franken writes that when O'Reilly saw the cover at the Book Expo, he exploded and insisted he didn't look like the picture. Slate uses the same picture in an article chronicling how often O'Reilly has told people to "shut up." The background on the Slate picture differs from Franken's, but the splotchy-faced O'Reilly is the same. While less severe than on Franken's cover, you can see a touch of splotchiness in this photo of O'Reilly giving a commencement address. Official FOX photos of O'Reilly have a rather airbrushed look, where O'Reilly's forehead appears completely unlined. Given that he's in his fifties, this is rather unbelievable unless O'Reilly had a forehead tuck.
O'Reilly's rant isn't finished. "...you're easy on Franken and you challenge me...I think we all know what this is...don't we? don't we? 50 minutes of me defending defamation against me in every possible way!" Actually it was 38 minutes into the interview, and 20 minutes of the interview consisted of easygoing 'get-to-know-you-better questions.
What set O'Reilly off? Was this a spontaneous outburst of righteous indignation or was O'Reilly merely doing what O'Reilly does best: distorting the situation to reinforce his viewers' preconceived notion of NPR as a vanguard in the evil liberal media?
On his show later that day, O'Reilly describes the interview as getting "completely out of hand" and says he "knew people were not going to be fair and that he "enjoyed telling the woman off" and exposing "the ridiculous truth about NPR and Fresh Air."
It's unfortunate that O'Reilly does his best to convince people that he and his "fair and balanced" FOX cohorts are the only valid source of news. Before O'Reilly's next tirade about how Franken is a propaganda artist and Gross is nothing but a shill for his propaganda, he should read this study, which showed viewers who claimed FOX as their main news source were, by overwhelming margins, more likely to believe erroneous information about the war in Iraq. NPR viewers were by far the least likely to believe falsehoods about the Iraq war. O'Reilly should also learn the difference between criticism and defamation because he uses the word far too loosely.
