Bill O’Reilly
Another easy target again today. Bill O’Reilly is the anchor of his eponymous O’Reilly Factor, a programme on far-right American news channel Fox News. Unlike in Britain, cable TV in America doesn’t have any rules about being fair and balanced, so O’Reilly takes it upon himself to be the mouthpiece of the Bush administration, slavishly defending them and attacking their rivals. And there are several hideous examples of this.
Perhaps the most famous O’Reilly moment was when he had the son of a 9/11 victim on his programme, Jeremy Glick, who was opposed to the war in Afghanistan - O’Reilly, not being able to accept this opinion, over the course of the interview shouted Glick down again and again, eventually cutting his microphone - going as far as saying he was telling him to “shut up” “out of respect for his father”. Really. In Bill’s word, if you’re anti-war, you’re insulting the memory of your dead father.
Similarly, just to pick another example, O’Reilly has on two completely separate occasions tried to defend American war atrocities, such as a massacre in Haditha, Iraq - by invoking the memory of the World War II Malmedy massacre where the SS executed 80ish American Prisoners of War. Unfortunately, Bill got a bit muddled - on both separate occasions - and claimed that it was in fact the Americans who slaughtered the SS. In other words, Bill was trying to cast the Nazis as the victims. And no, not some other Nazis - The Nazis. Rival news anchor Keith Olbermann rather took him to task about this.
He’s done much more than this that more than qualifies him as an Enemy of the People. I mean, they’ve had to dedicate an entire Wikipedia page to his wrongs, rather than just one section.
Posted on May 26th, 2008 at 01:58Categories: Media Figures |
