O'Reilly, Bill

   fake spat w/ trump? (3x w/ fox?)

:{war on xmas biggest booster

bak 621

html Carpetbagger

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exactly when how and where did he come back?

is he a zombie yet? 320; gop no longer cares about metooif it ever did?

Bill O'Reilly was a Fox News host from its 1996 launch until he was fired in 2017 following reports that he and the network's parent company 21st Century Fox paid millions of dollars in secret settlements for his sexual harassment of women who worked on his show. Before he left Fox, he was also exposed for lying about his previous reporting experience in his books,

'You need a breather': Bill O’Reilly tells Trump he needs a 'month off' to 'relax'

7 26 an

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https://www.alternet.org/oreilly-trump/

AN 8 26

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AN 2 26

'Make an example of this guy': MAGA pundit wants vengeance on De Niro

Actor Robert De Niro keeps criticizing President Donald Trump — and now pro-Trump commentator Bill O’Reilly wants Trump to “make an example” of the two-time Oscar-winning thespian.

In response to De Niro telling MS NOW’s Nicole Wallace that if Trump refuses to leave office after the end of his term “we have to make him leave,” O’Reilly insisted without evidence in his podcast that De Niro was actually threatening the president’s life.

“What do you mean by that?” O’Reilly asked. “He’s elected. Seventy-seven million people voted for him. What’s ‘we got to get rid of him’? Are you talking about impeachment? What are you talking about?”

After saying it is illegal to “knowingly and willfully” threaten the president, O’Reilly urged Trump to “make an example of this guy,” adding De Niro “better have a lawyer” because he believes the Secret Service should interrogate him.

O’Reilly anti-De Niro rant comes mere days after Trump’s own anti-De Niro rant. While criticizing two progressive Democrats who shouted “You have killed Americans!” at him during his State of the Union address, Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Trump lumped them in with De Niro and former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell (another frequent Trump critic).

“When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. After saying “they are Crooked and Corrupt Politicians” and “we should send them back from where they came — as fast as possible,” he added they “should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!”

It is unclear whether O’Reilly was aware of Trump’s previous threat against De Niro’s First Amendment rights when he called for Trump to “make an example of him.”

In his social media post, Trump added “When I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, I realized that he may be even sicker than Crazy Rosie O’Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States.”

He concluded, “The only difference between De Niro and Rosie is that she is probably somewhat smarter than him, which isn’t saying much. The good news is that America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before, and it’s driving them absolutely crazy!”

Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in France last year, De Niro said that in America “we are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted. That affects all of us here, because art is the crucible that brings people together, like tonight. Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity. That’s why art is a threat.”

He added, “That’s why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists. America’s philistine president ha[s] had himself appointed head of one of our premier cultural institutions [the Kennedy Center]," he continued while the crowd applauded. "He has cut funding and support to the arts, humanities and education.”

De Niro was similarly scathing toward Trump in 2023, telling The Guardian that he channeled Trump’s character when playing William Hale, the real-life early 20th century Oklahoma crime boss convicted of cattle rustling, contract killings and insurance fraud during the Osage Indian murders. De Niro depicted Hale in director Martin Scorsese’s award-winning epic film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The Guardian wrote that "at a press conference earlier in the day, De Niro had suggested that Hale's kind of immorality – his entitlement and greed, his racism, his disregard for anyone outside his own bloodline, all of it wrapped up in a kindly aspect – is easy to spot in contemporary politics, in what was a not-so-veiled swing at Trump and a broader swipe at members of the Republican party, accessories to the chaos."

When it comes to the question of whether the First Amendment protects speech that could be construed loosely as threatening to the president, the Supreme Court settled that matter in the 2015 Supreme Court case Elonis v. United States,which revolved around the 2007 Whitest Kids U Know sketch “It’s Illegal to Say…” In that sketch comedian Trevor Moore repeatedly said “I want to kill the President of the United States of America” in various forms before then explaining for the audience that those phrasings were all illegal. After a man named Anthony Douglas Elonis repurposed the sketch to target his wife, the constitutionality of even implying a threat regardless of the context appeared before the Supreme Court, which reversed Elonis’ conviction by 8-to-1.

“As far as making a big splash, I don’t think you can beat going to the Supreme Court,” Moore told Salon about the case in 2020.

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AN 1 26

President Donald Trump was up early Thursday morning for a Truth Social posting spree that focused largely on his 2020 election loss — but included a dash of claims about 2016's "Russiagate."

The rant included a nearly decade-long conspiracy that Trump was spied on by former President Barack Obama. Trump reposted Fox News commentary from far-right host Jesse Watters who claimed Obama personally ordered a CIA spying operation on Trump.

"ARREST OBAMA NOW," one post read.

According to the "Truths," the Obama administration manufactured evidence to undermine Trump's election in 2016, though none of the information about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia was revealed publicly until after the election. Other reports about the Russian hack of Hillary Clinton's campaign, Russian bots and content farms were reported throughout 2016, a Washington Post timeline shows.

Trump on Thursday morning also posted a series of "Truths" showing he's still focused on his 2020 election loss.

Among the posts was a flood of accusations claiming that the election was "crooked."

Trump appeared to post screenshots of random users from X who agree with his sentiment that he actually won the 2020 election.

Another video Trump posted from CNN appears to show a discussion about Trump winning Georgia in 2024, though Trump doesn't explain how that is relevant to his 2020 conspiracy theories about the election.

Trump also shared another conspiracy cited by former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly about the Chinese government funding leftist groups and the Minnesota Immigration Rights Action Committee.

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an 1 26

After the latest shooting of a Minneapolis protester, President Donald Trump's campaign to deport immigrants is quickly losing support from Republican lawmakers, loyalists and conservative publications.

On Sunday, the conservative Wall Street Journal posted an analysis calling the Trump administration out on its lies that VA ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti walked up to ICE officers with a gun, intending to “massacre law enforcement.”

"See how immigration officers escalated a fatal confrontation Saturday," the subheading of the Journal reads.

It notes at the close of the story that reporters continue to ask the administration at what point, exactly, Pretti's gun came out.

“This situation is evolving,” Customs and Border Protection official Gregory Bovino said at a press conference on Saturday. “This is under investigation. Those facts will come to light.”

He refused to answer the same questions on CNN when host Dana Bash asked them.

They've also lost far-right disgraced former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. In his Sunday column, O'Reilly, who now occasionally appears on NewsNation, tells Trump it's time he make "adjustments."

While O'Reilly spends most of the column trashing Democrats in Minnesota, he also says, "some restraint is necessary." While he pointed the criticism to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), he adds, "That point of view would help him and everybody else."

While many Democrats posted condemnations of ICE and Homeland Security as a whole, Republican lawmakers are also starting to call for accountability.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) posted on X Sunday morning, "There must be a thorough and impartial investigation into yesterday’s Minneapolis shooting, which is the basic standard that law enforcement and the American people expect following any officer-involved shooting. For this specific incident, that requires cooperation and transparency between federal, state, and local law enforcement. Any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy."

Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-Wash.)commented late Saturday, "I’m disturbed by what I’ve seen from today’s video from Minnesota. It’s critically important that the American people and Congress be given a better understanding of how immigration enforcement is being handled, including the methods federal law enforcement officers are using to prioritize, identify and arrest suspected targets, the training they are receiving, the implementation of body cameras, the threats they face in conducting operations and the challenges posed by sanctuary cities and states."

Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R‑N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has already called for a full hearing in which ICE and DHS answer questions.

Even former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) is angry over ICE's attack on a man who was lawfully carrying a gun.

"Legally carrying a firearm is not the same as brandishing a firearm," she wrote on X Sunday morning.

She closed her lengthy post by adding, "You are all being incited into civil war, yet none of it solves any of the real problems that we all face, and tragically people are dying."

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mma 12 24 war on xmas BS

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mma 12 23

...

• • In 2014, then-Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who began Fox’s obsession with the “War on Christmas,” claimed Muslims requesting school holidays had “wiped out all of our traditions” as part of a war on Christmas. Media Matters, [12/23/19]

• • On Veteran’s Day in 2013, Fox host Sean Hannity spent twice as much time discussing the so-called “War on Christmas” as the actual wars whose veterans we honor on that holiday.Then-Fox host Megyn Kelly also reacted to a Slate article on the race of Santa Claus by saying: “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.” Media Matters, [11/12/13; Fox News, The Kelly File, 12/11/13]

• • In December 2012, The O’Reilly Factorcovered the “War on Christmas” more than three times as much as wars in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and North Africa. Media Matters, [12/19/12]

• • In 2011, right-wing media began its annual “War on Christmas” coverage by fabricating claims that the Obama administration was taxing Christmas trees. In fact, the small assessment was paid by Christmas tree producers to fund a Department of Agriculture program designed to increase sales of live Christmas trees. Media Matters, [11/9/11]

• • In 2010, multiple Fox programs covered a decision by Tulsa, Oklahoma, to host a “holiday parade” instead of a “Christmas parade” as “a “topic of national controversy.” Fox & Friends also pushed a bogus story about a central Florida school banning “traditional Christmas colors.” Media Matters, [12/23/19]

• • In 2009, right-wing media attacked the Obamas’ Christmas celebrations, fabricating a controversy focused on the inclusion of three ornaments on the Christmas tree in the White House’s Blue Room. In fact those three ornaments — out of 800 on the tree — had been among hundreds donated by local organizations. Media Matters, [12/23/19]

• • In 2006, O’Reilly claimed that some retailers were “ordering their people not to say ‘Merry Christmas’” under threat of being fired, even though the stores had no such policy. Media Matters, [12/23/19]

• • In 2005, O’Reilly promised to “use all the power” he has “on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people” who “diminish and denigrate the holiday.” He baselessly suggested that former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry would have “abolished” Christmas as a federal holiday had he won the 2004 election, replacing it with “winter solstice or something.” O’Reilly also declared “Happy Holidays” and “Season’s Greetings” were offensive to Christians before taking the exact opposite position next month, saying, “‘Happy Holidays’ is fine. Just don't ban ‘Merry Christmas.’” Media Matters, [12/23/19]

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The Heritage Foundation uses fringe right-wing media to promote itself as it struggles to stave off competitors

The conservative think tank once defined conservative politics. Now Heritage is turning to the right-wing fringe in an attempt to recapture its glory days.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/03/23

The right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation has increasingly used fringe, extremist media outlets to spread its message as it struggles to maintain its central position in the conservative movement. Its staff and fellows have appeared on the conspiracy theory network Infowars, on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite, and on MAGA-aligned fringe programs defined by their nativism and commitment to spreading disinformation — all while Heritage fights to keep its spot atop the conservative policy world.

Founded in 1973, Heritage took center stage in the conservative movement in the following decade during the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Since then it has consistently been one of the most cited think tanks in the country. It also has a long history of pushing right-wing ideas, including denying the reality of climate change, opposing LGBTQ rights, and promoting for-profit prisons and harsher sentences throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.

Heritage’s role in determining policy has historically extended beyond just the Republican Party. It helped to shape what became known as welfare reform under former President Bill Clinton, causing deep and extreme poverty to skyrocket. Heritage also popularized the idea of including an individual mandate in health insurance reform, first during Mitt Romney’s time as governor of Massachusetts and later during debate over the Affordable Care Act.

The think tank saw its stock rise during former President Donald Trump’s time in office, but since his loss in 2020 it has faced stiff competition from new organizations looking to define and control the messaging and policy of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Still, with revenue of at least $102 million as of 2021 — significantly more than similar organizations like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute — it's still a major force in conservative politics.

Heritage is a longtime sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and it’s organizing a massive effort to staff the next Republican administration. Its more than 115 fellows and employees are often cited as subject experts in mainstream media outlets, and they show up across as well. Heritage also acts as a publisher of faux-intellectualpolicy papers — the thrust of which are often later debunked — as well as more broadly targeted op-eds and social media content.

For as much as Heritage attempts to present itself as respectable, the presidency of Joe Biden appears to have ushered in a new era at the organization as its personnel increasingly appear on fringe, extreme right-wing programs. As Media Matters has previously reported, Tom Homan — a Heritage visiting fellow and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — appeared on a Hitler-praising antisemite’s show and pushed the racist “great replacement” theory. Media Matters also reported that Heritage research fellow Peter St Onge recently appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars network and repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that falsely claims the Department of Justice designated conservative parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.

One recent example shows how Heritage seeds radical ideas in far-right media, creating its own content to further amplify its messages. On October 18, Lora Ries, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, published an op-ed at The Daily Signal (a media outlet run by Heritage) opposing Palestinian refugee resettlement to the United States. This issue is largely a moot point, as Israel — with the help of Egypt — has maintained a complete siege of Gaza. Even if Palestinians in Gaza were allowed to leave in large numbers, many are reasonably fearful that they will never be allowed to return and would face the prospect of a second Nakba, the term for the forced dislocation of roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.

“To import a population of pro-Hamas Palestinians would be certain suicide for Americans,” Ries wrote, adding, “This population has no interest in assimilating into American culture and governance, or in expressing loyalty to America or American allies.”

Heritage then turned the piece into a for X (formerly known as Twitter), which was subsequently roundly criticized. (Heritage later removed the video from X.)

Ries has spread anti-immigrant messaging more generally on Just the News, hosted by John Solomon, a conservative writer with a history of spreading false information; One America News, a far-right Fox News competitor; and No Spin News, hosted by disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly.

The immigration center Ries runs at Heritage also lists Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, as a visiting fellow. Like Ries, Morgan has been a guest on Solomon’s show — he went on to implicitly demonize Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities by suggesting they are harboring terrorists — and fearmongered about migration levels with Sebastian Gorka. (In addition to his perch at Heritage, Morgan is also a senior fellow at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.)

Morgan has also appeared on War Room, the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and a hotbed of anti-migrant demonization and election denialism — and Heritage personnel. In addition to Morgan, Bannon has also hosted Heritage President Kevin Roberts; distinguished fellow in economics Stephen Moore (for an episode titled “Stolen Elections Have Consequences”); and research fellow E.J. Antoni, among others.

Where Bannon is the standard-bearer for Trump-style nativism, Heritage fellows have found a receptive audience among the more explicitly Christian right as well (Bannon’s occasional ecclesiastical rants notwithstanding). Roberts and Antoni have both also been guests on The Charlie Kirk Show, whose host has increasingly embraced Christian fundamentalism. Moore — the economics fellow — has been on Huckabee on TBN, and Heritage senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry has appeared on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, both of which are televangelist programs.

One of Heritage’s most active figures is Hans von Spakovsky, who manages the think tank’s election law reform initiative, which in reality means he spreads myths about voter fraud that have been debunked and discredited. He has appeared numerous times on Fox News, One America News, and streaming programs including The Dan Bongino Show, Just the News, and America First with Sebastian Gorka. On April 28, 2022, Von Spakovsky appeared on the The Jenna Ellis Show “to discuss election litigation”; on October 24, 2023, Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count for her role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Heritage no longer dominates the conservative policy world the way it once did, but its deep pockets and long history means it still wields considerable influence. Yet by all appearances, Heritage has fully embraced the far-right fringe of the movement it attempts to define, further delegitimizing itself in the process.

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grift newsletter ~ seniors

no ln 7 23

How 'gold IRA' industry ads became a 'mainstay of right-wing media': report

Fox News' Laura Ingraham In July 2022 (Gage Skidmore).

Alex Henderson July 25, 2023

For many years, right-wing media outlets have been aggressively promoting gold as a safe haven for retirees. Anyone who has spent a lot of time consuming right-wing media, be it Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV or AM talk radio, has likely come across gold commercials.

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In a report published by the Washington Post on July 25, journalists Jeremy B. Merrill and Hanna Kozlowska stress that the "gold retirement investment industry" has "become a mainstay of right-wing media."

"An analysis by The Post of political newsletters, social media, podcasts and a national database of television ads collected by the company AdImpact found that pitches to invest in gold coins are a daily presence in media that caters to a right-wing audience and often echo conservative talking points about looming economic and societal collapse," Merrill and Kozlowska explain. "The Post found no similar ads for gold retirement investments in mainstream or left-wing media sources in the databases."

READ MORE: Fox News' relationship with Turning Point USA is 'basically over': report

Lawsuits against "gold IRA" companies, according to Merrill and Kozlowska, are not uncommon. One of the companies that has been sued is Lear Capital, a Fox News advertiser that sells gold and silver coins.

The Washington Post reporters note that "over the past decade, more than 30 customers in 20 states have sued a dozen gold IRA companies."

Terry White, a disabled retiree, told the Post he invested $174,000 in gold coins with Lear and found out the company charges a 33 percent commission. White said he lost almost $80,000.

"For years," Merrill and Kozlowska report, "gold IRA industry advertising has echoed accusations against Democratic politicians commonly found in news segments on conservative outlets. The ads tout the coins as a safe haven from economic uncertainty and social upheaval. Most of the coins are manufactured by the Royal Canadian Mint, which says they're bullion — a kind of coin whose value is determined by the underlying metal. As such, they meet IRS rules for retirement investments."

READ MORE: 'They must comply': Newsmax employees subpoenaed in Smartmatic defamation lawsuit

According to Merrill and Kozlowska, an "analysis of ad data and financial records" shows that the"gold IRA" industry "spends millions of dollars a year to reach viewers of Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets."

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"Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have promoted the coins," the Post reporters observe, "while ads for Lear's competitors have appeared on a podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Newsmax broadcasts of former President Donald Trump's political rallies."

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson's Twitter viewership falling as battle with Fox News stalls: report

Find the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

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roger ailes, bill O? now tucker

https://www.alternet.org/fox-pay-ex-carlson-producer/

pretty sure i called it, he was clearly auditioning  no lnx an 6 23

Fox News has just announced it is revamping its primetime lineup in the wake of firing far-right host Tucker Carlson and as the 2024 presidential election approaches – and it’s handing the 8:00 PM hour to Jesse Watters, current co-host of its show “The Five.”

Variety reports the Watters move, and adds, “Fox News will also move Greg Gutfeld into the primetime block, giving him the 10 p.m. hour, while the current occupant, the conservative firebrand Laura Ingraham. takes up the reins of the early-evening 7 p.m. hour. Sean Hannity will keep his perch at 9 p.m., a slot he has held since 2017.”

Watters is the largely expected choice. A profile from Insider earlier this month revealed, “Jesse Watters likes picking fights. And he is fiercely loyal to Fox News, his professional home of two decades, starting when he was 24. Though best known as [Bill] O’Reilly’s attack dog until O’Reilly was pushed out of the network in 2017, Watters was also key to the launch of the right-wing Fox Nation blog. As cohost of ‘The Five’ and on his own 7 p.m. show, Watters delivers the network’s talking points with a grin and a touch of levity.”

READ MORE: ‘No Dead Bodies’: Fox News Hosts Suggest Trump Indicted for ‘Carelessness’ and ‘Where a Piece of Paper Goes’

Insider added, “Watters has found a far larger pool of libs to trigger” than just his parents, “but he continues to delight in the consternation his politics provoke in his mom. He’s known to occasionally read aloud the texts sent by his mom on ‘The Five.'”

“‘You end up presenting a lack of a moral compass honey,’ Watters quoted her saying in response to a 2018 segment on the Mueller investigation. ‘We all know you are a Trumpet — you need not scream it.'”

The same day as Insider’s profile of Watters ran, Variety reported on Watters’ week.

“Here’s a quick list. (1) He pissed on helping the homeless: ‘You can’t subsidize antisocial behavior you have to stigmatize it. These are people that have failed in life and they’re on their deathbed.’ 2. He casually explained that Donald Trump was just ‘sifting through [documents] and determining which were personal and which were presidential.’ 3. He compared not letting RFK Jr. come on his show to making a girl beg for a date. 4. He misidentified ‘The Five’ panel member Jessica Tarlov as ‘Katie.’ 5. In another episode, Watters cut off Tarlov, aka Katie, and threatened to ‘smack’ her with his copies of the Presidential Records Act.”

READ MORE: ‘Wrong and Dangerous’: Another Republican Former US Attorney General Lays Out the Case Against Trump

Responding to the news of Watters being promoted to the important 8 PM hour, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan wrote, “Watters gets the Carlson slot. No reduction in racist fearmongering or Trump adulation at 8pm then.”

NPR’s David Gura posted video from 2016 that made Watters famous. It was widely criticized at the time as racist.

Watch the Watters video below or at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Fox guest: 'Somebody is going to have to pull a trigger' to stop Trump prosecutions ›

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-putin-2656976975/

bill o defends

aha strict fr

angry white man w/ rush; al franken sez expert on rightwing megalomaniacs; trump, bill and rush?

tour empty seats, both admit vax/boost ~ c owen jnz

https://www.mediamatters.org/war-christmas/war-christmas-story-how-fox-news-built-dumbest-part-americas-culture-war

parker m

no lnx many 1 vid

On December 3, 2004, Fox News’ now-defunct The O’Reilly Factor debuted a recurring segment called “Christmas Under Siege.” Though Christmas was not and has never been “under siege” in any meaningful way, disgraced former host Bill O’Reilly and Fox were set on pushing this victimization narrative, laying the groundwork for what became known as the “War on Christmas.” In the 15 years since, onlookers watched the very concept of objective reality fracture along political lines. Consumers of conservative media drifted ever deeper into a world where a school’s nonexistent ban on red and green clothing became national news and paranoid delusions were freely floated about a future in which people may be prohibited from displaying Christmas decorations.

For 15 years, cable news Don Quixotes have battled these windmills, rejoicing in their victories and basking in their acts of bravery while warning their audiences to remain vigilant. Imaginary culture war issues like the War on Christmas make for good politics, as the people arguing that these are real issues can at any time simply dust off their hands, declare victory, and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Like Lisa Simpson and her tiger-repelling rock, the protectors of Christmas are simply saving the holiday from nonexistent threats.

Deep down, they must know that there’s no actual “war” on Christmas, but it makes for good politics. Rather than having to address issues actually facing Americans -- such as health care, the economy, and climate change -- the fake battles in the fake War on Christmas give right-wing media a convenient way to manufacture divisions between the left and the right. The bombardment of misinformation playing up imaginary (or wildly overblown) examples of political correctness run amok are intended to scare and create a seeming sense of partisanship even on issues that are agreed upon nearly universally.

Of the many impacts of the War on Christmas, Donald Trump’s decision to run for president seems the most consequential.

In a 2016 interview, Eric Trump explained why his father ran for president (emphasis added):

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He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran, or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck. Or, he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed “holiday tree” instead of “Christmas tree.” I could go on and on for hours.Those are the very things that made my father run, and those are the very things he cares about.

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Each of those claims is dubious at best, but the idea that the White House Christmas tree was renamed the “holiday tree” is flat-out false. 

Claims that Christmas traditions are being threatened date back nearly 100 years, and it’s remarkable how little the arguments have changed.

In 1921, industrialist and notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford published a piece decrying the secularization of Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter:

Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find.

Ford’s sentiment is quite similar to that of O’Reilly in 2004:

All over the country, Christmas is taking flak. In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the holiday tree and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores, [that's] Macy's, have done away with the Christmas greeting, “Merry Christmas.”

And to the claims in this piece from conservative columnist Jay Nordlinger in 2010:

Some have said, “You just can't find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China (for who's to say whether they come from laogai, the gulag?). I gave up on the China front long ago. Shameful, I know. But have you ever tried to buy an umbrella not made in China? Also, globalization has done wonders for the average Chinese, gulag or no gulag. Kind of a thorny, upsetting issue.

I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin' on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life's too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”

While O’Reilly’s frustrations were aired during an episode of The O’Reilly Factor and Nordlinger’s were published in the National Review, Ford’s came in the second volume of a collection titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, hammering home what the War on Christmas was actually about for Ford: antisemitism and Christian supremacy.

In 1959, the right-wing John Birch Society published a pamphlet titled There Goes Christmas?! in which its authors argued that the United Nations and communists were trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.” In 2000, white nationalist blog VDare published what’s thought to be the first online mention of the “War Against Christmas,” warning that Amazon’s use of the phrase “Happy Holidays” in an email was symbolic of “the struggle to abolish America.”

an 621

trump's tour with Bill O'Reilly conflicts with August reinstatement theory — driving QAnons bonkers

Aldous Pennyfarthing DailyKos

June 21, 2021

Seeing QAnon adherents puzzle their way through reality is a bit like watching Donald Trump try to sound out a raw vegan menu. Eventually he orders the portobello mushroom steak—and then we sit back...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/bill-oreilly-compares-joe-biden-pontius-pilate

aha: fox is a corp, and like all psychopathic robots, its function is maximize profit which means max ratings [instant quant fdbk]  which means max activation of trumpistas via red meat; this is in conflict w/ mission/function of jrnlism, straight news provides cover/fig leaf; successful red meat hypes fear and anger, and includes energizes the RW trump story/schemas of victimization. murdoch war crimes on AGW amd covid? was UK Aus coverage better? fires?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/media-critic-fox-news-is-bigger-than-trump-if-he-fights-the-network-hell-lose

do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.

Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.

In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.

Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?

It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does,which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.

Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?

Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.

That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.

You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?

There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.

That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?

Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.

One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out. 

I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.

You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?

I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.

And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.

I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.

It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.

This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.

The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?

Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.

As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.

Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.

In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?

They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?

Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.

But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.

He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.

Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it? ...[much more]

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-oreilly-many-people-who-are-dying-both-here-and-around-world-were-their

tag https://www.mediamatters.org/bill-oreilly

Bill O'Reilly was a Fox News host from its 1996 launch until he was fired in 2017 following reports that he and the network's parent company 21st Century Fox paid millions of dollars in secret settlements for his sexual harassment of women who worked on his show. Before he left Fox, he was also exposed for lying about his previous reporting experience in his books, and now he has his own subscription-based website and podcast where he opines on current events.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-the-data-that-proves-americans-who-rage-against-political-correctness-are-the-most-xenophobic-and-most-likely-to-vote-trump-in-2020

no lnx

Here’s the data that shows Americans who rage against political correctness are the most xenophobic — and most likely to vote Trump

Written by Samuel L. Perry / Religion Dispatches March 24, 2020

Admittedly, Trump’s initial references to “the Chinese Virus” earlier in March seemed rather ad-hoc. Though clearly xenophobic in context and implication, it seemed that Trump was casually parroting the language of other far-Right commentators like Charlie Kirk. Within the past week, however, Trump has ramped up his labeling campaign, often going out of his way to refer to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus” in Twitter storms and White House press briefings.

Two key strategies likely drive Trump’s efforts here. Both involve distracting Americans from his own administration’s failings at dealing with the coronavirus earlier on. The first is simply to blame China, laying responsibility for America’s situation solely at their feet. The fact that a Chinese propaganda director recently suggested the virus may have originated with American soldiers who brought it to China provided the perfect (and tacitly justifiable) motivation for Trump to remind the world forcefully and repeatedly where the virus originated.

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The second factor also involves distraction from Trump’s failings, but one in which “China” is only incidental. They are merely a stand-in for all “dangerous outsiders.” By repeatedly and brazenly referring to “the Chinese Virus,” and provoking a media backlash against the xenophobic implications of his language, Trump wishes to remind his base who our internal threats are: politically correct liberals who care more about defending foreigners than they do the American people.

Though Trump has previously raged against political correctness explicitly, and indeed, campaigned on it in 2016, when it comes to this recent COVID-19 labeling campaign, other far-Right thought-leaders have been doing this for him. For example, in a March 14th interview on Fox News, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Anyone who complains that it’s racist or xenophobic to call this virus the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan virus is a politically correct fool, and they ought not to be listened to about anything.”

And March 20th, Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Glenn Beck: “The worst thing in this pandemic virus outside of the actual illness itself of course is the political [sic] correct media still, still peddling garbage that hurts the American people.” Quoting an ABC News reporter, O’Reilly said in a whiny, mocking voice, “A lot of people think it’s racist if you call it the Chinese Virus. …It’s sickening.”

But survey data confirm that white Americans—like President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, Bill O’Reilly, or their followers—who attack politically correct language as the enemy are in fact the most likely to hold racist or xenophobic views. In a nationally representative survey fielded in February 2020, we asked Americans to indicate how much they agreed with statements about using politically correct language. We also asked Americans for their views on refugees from the Middle East and America’s control over its Southern border.

In the first figure [left], we see that, as Americans’ agreement with the statement “Too many people are easily offended these days over language” increases, the more likely they are to believe that the federal government should do more to secure the Southern border and that Middle Eastern refugees pose a terrorist threat.

In the second figure [below, right], we see a similar trend, but in the opposite direction. The more strongly Americans disagree with the statement “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” the more likely they are to hold xenophobic views about refugees from the Middle East and to want stricter border control.

In sum: both figures show that white Americans who voice the strongest opinions against politically correct language also hold the strongest anti-immigrant attitudes.

Just as important, they are also the group most likely to plan on voting Trump in 2020.

[no graf]

The last figure [left] shows the percentage of white Americans who indicate they plan on voting Trump in 2020 by their level of agreement with our two statements regarding politically correct language. Nearly 80% of white Americans who strongly disagree that “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” or who strongly agree that “Too many people are easily offended these days over language,” intend to vote for Trump in November.

Seen in light of these data, Trump’s dual strategy is clear. By unapologetically referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus,” Trump is first able to signal to his white base that he too is disdainful of scheming, disease-ridden outsiders. But he can also intentionally provoke a backlash against his hurtful and xenophobic language, which he and his followers can dismiss as leftist “political correctness.”  Trump shores up support against both a perceived external threat (immigrants) and an internal threat (liberals) with a single dangerous and offensive swipe.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-horrendous-last-ditch-gambit-to-win-re-election-is-scary-as-hell/

no lnx

Trump’s horrendous last-ditch gambit to win re-election is scary as hell

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 10, 2020

Thursday night, the access journalism team at the Washington Post published a piece declaring that Donald Trump intends to “reopen much of the U.S.” in May.

“The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month,” Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Jose A. Del Real and William Wan report, noting that Trump, behind “closed doors,” has “sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1.”

This is, needless to say, scary as hell. We’re nowhere near conquering the coronavirus epidemic and, thanks to Trump’s deliberate negligence — born from his desire to conceal the spread of the virus — we have nothing close to the testing capacity necessary to start letting people congregate safely again. Unsurprisingly, the article caused a lot of panic and anger, and reasonably so: There is nothing but downside to “reopening” the economy without a plan to control the spread of the virus.

But not to get too 11th-level chess about it, Trump — or at least his allies — probably aren’t serious about this. Instead, the chatter about “reopening” the economy is very likely more of a political gambit than a serious suggestion.

Trump and his allies know he needs to come up with some argument why the economic devastation we’re facing is not his fault. (It is his fault.) More importantly, they’ll need someone else to blame. This chatter about “reopening” is about laying the groundwork for that. Come fall, Trump will argue that he wanted to save the economy and get everybody back to work, but the “deep state” wouldn’t let him. He’ll try to use this ruined economy as evidence that he should be re-elected to take on this supposed conspiracy of embedded liberal-socialist traitors.

There are a couple of reasons to believe this is more a political gambit than a serious suggestion. For one thing, Trump doesn’t actually have the power to “reopen” the economy, as national security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed out on Twitter. State governments control those, and while at least some red states will no doubt go along with any loony plan Trump rolls out, states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts — which are critical to the economic well-being of the rest of the country — will not play along with a harebrained scheme that causes the already devastating pandemic roaring back to life.

There’s also the coronavirus itself. Even if Trump could wave his magic wand and “reopen” the economy, the rapid spread of COVID-19 would probably do as much, if not more, to wreck the economy as the weeks of quarantine did. Piles of bodies and overwhelmed hospitals are not good for the economy, generally speaking! And it’s not like people will suddenly revert to their previously normal lives when a dangerous disease is still spreading all around them.

Maybe Trump is dumb enough to believe that the economy is like a light you can just switch back on, and everything will then go back to the way it was before. But there are people around him — like Attorney General Bill Barr, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — who, evil as they may be, understand that there’s no straightforward path “back to normal.” The millions of Americans who’ve become unemployed over the last three weeks won’t magically find new jobs, and recovery from the current economic devastation will be long and difficult.

Yet Mnuchin has been backing Trump up, saying that he believes the economy can be “reopened” as soon as next month. Barr, too, recently declared that current lockdown orders are “draconian” and suggested that some modified form of “social distancing” can be accomplished without telling “people to go home and hide under their bed.”

Barr’s wild caricature of the current state of affairs — no one’s under the bed, and we’re all allowed to leave home for grocery shopping and exercise — hints at the fact that this rhetoric is more political than serious. So is his disingenuous proposal for a version of “social distancing” that is somehow different than what people are currently doing. There is, of course, no such thing and Barr is, of course, blowing piping hot air.

On the propaganda front, we also have the folks at Fox News eagerly pushing this “reopen the economy” line. Some of them, like Sean Hannity, really are diddle-brained fools who don’t realize how bad that would be. But others, like Tucker Carlson, are probably intelligent enough to grasp that such a move would ruin both the economy and public health, and so are floating this as a cynical political ploy rather than an actual policy proposal.

Indeed, there’s no way around a deeply cynical theory of what’s happening here: Trump and his allies are exploiting access journalism, which speaks to the reader’s desire to feel like they have insider knowledge, to spread a dishonest narrative. That narrative is that Trump wants to “reopen” the economy and save everyone’s jobs, even though that’s impossible. And the goal is that when the economy continues to tank, Trump can paint himself as a victim of nefarious forces who thwarted him from making America great again.

Trump wouldn’t actually benefit from “reopening” the economy, after all, and on some level he may understand that. It wouldn’t work the way he implies it would, and it would probably lead to even more economic devastation to go along with the public health catastrophe. But he certainly might benefit from sowing a narrative about how his heroic efforts to save us all were crushed by the oppressive forces of the “deep state.”

There is no evidence that anyone at the White House or in the Republican Party in Congress is even engaging with the various proposed plans out there to reopen the economy. Their lack of interest in taking this seriously is a good sign they are not taking this seriously.

Viewed in this light, it’s likely that right-wing pundits are being deliberately provocative when they say, as Bill O’Reilly recently did, that many “people who are dying [of this virus], both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway.”

The purpose of that is, in large part, to draw the outraged reaction from liberals that can then be characterized as “political correctness.” Conservatives can then cast themselves as hard-nosed realists who are being suppressed by oversensitive liberals who are willing to tank the economy in a hapless bid to save a handful of people who were going to die anyway.

This simply can’t be stated firmly enough: That’s a horrendous lie. It’s a false dichotomy to pit saving lives against saving the economy. For one thing, you can’t do the latter without doing the former; the viral pandemic is hugely disruptive in and of itself, and not just because of the quarantine. For another, liberals appear to be the only people willing to do what it takes to save the economy, which is not some hasty “reopening,” but a major government stimulus program that pumps in as much money as needed (and then raising taxes the rich to recoup the losses).

But these provocations from O’Reilly and other conservatives who say they don’t mind letting people die to save the economy are surprisingly effective. They generate the desired outrage from liberals and, more important, they pull the focus away from the urgent discussion this country needs to have, which is about how to save lives and rebuild our economy.

This narrative about the “deep state” and “political correctness” is Donald Trump’s last-ditch re-election strategy.Perversely, his false dichotomy between saving lives and saving the economy works better if it remains hypothetical, which is to say, if the economy isn’t “reopened.” That way, Trump can spin fantasies of how great things would have been if we had just listened to him, and claim that conditions only got worse because the snowflake liberals got their way. If he actually could “reopen” the economy, the widespread devastation would speak for itself. He benefits far more from leaving that as a fantasy than from making it a reality.

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name came up 1119?

• Tucker Carlson spread disinformation about a deadly chemical attack in Syria.
• Despite network policy, Fox’s Jeanine Pirro made a “surprise” GOP fundraising appearance.
• Fox & Friends lauded Rob Schneider for “standing up for free speech” without noting he was pushing anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
• Tomi Lahren condemned the students who booed Melania Trump: “Can you imagine if this were Michelle Obama?” Yes we can!
• Sean Hannity told disgraced former host Bill O'Reilly to “go back on Fox”

fox news insider BS

no lnx

'Light on Facts': Tucker Calls Out 'Wholly Ignorant' Media For 'Dishonesty' on Caravan

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'How Foolish!' Bill O'Reilly Blasts The View's Sherri Shepherd

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FIERY O'Reilly Fights Back Against 'Race Hustler' Al Sharpton: "Your Day Is Done"

Bill O’Reilly responded to Al Sharpton and the “Grievance Industry” in tonight’s Talking Points Memo. The Factor host has previously stated that George Zimmerman profiled Trayvon Martin, based on his clothing and appearance, resulting in his tragic death.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/parkland-shooting-survivor-david-hogg-isnt-here-bill-oreillys-ridiculous

parkland shooting survivor David Hogg on Monday hit back against Bill O’Reilly after the onetime Fox News anchor claimed the boycott of host Laura Ingraham is “being directed by powerful shadowy radical groups” who want her off-air.

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Disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly could wind up in 72 percent of American households if he inks a reported deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The right-wing media conglomerate is currently in talks with O'Reilly despite the recent news that O'Reilly received a contract extension from Fox News after he paid $32 million to settle a sexual harassment allegation, according to NBC News.

Sinclair, a conservative news organization that is the largest television-station owner in the country, told NBC that the network had not completed any negotiations with the disgraced former Fox News host.

But sources told NBC that the two parties were "about midway" through their talks, and a second source "explained that Sinclair is considering putting O’Reilly on its local stations."

The former anchor's history, and the recent allegation that he had issued a massive payout for sexual harassment only to be rewarded with a contract extension, apparently didn't play a factor into Sinclair's willingness to court him.

"They took a pause but it didn't really change anything for them," a source told NBC.

O'Reilly has refused to admit any wrongdoing or misconduct and has denied all allegations. Instead, he has said the entire ordeal was a "hit job" and "politically and financially motivated."

On the latest episode of his web series, O'Reilly blamed God for his troubles.

“You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him.” O’Reilly said. “I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.”

The news of potential salvation from Sinclair comes as O'Reilly was dropped by United Talent Agency following the news of his $32 million payout. The agency informed him that he would no longer be represented by the company after his agreement with them expires at the end of the year, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

O'Reilly's representative, Mark Fabiani, said the former anchor "has already lined up new representation," THR reported.

While O'Reilly hasn't disappeared entirely, including weekly appearances on Glenn Beck's radio show, a job with Sinclair would almost certainly thrust him into the mainstream, perhaps more than ever before.

Sinclair has also had its fair share of controversy in its news segments and efforts to consolidate newsrooms under a corporate structure. The broadcaster is currently in the process of acquiring Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, largely snubbing the Federal Communication Commission in the process. If the merger goes through, both O'Reilly and Sinclair would fill television screens in 72 percent of American households.

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:{Bill O'Reilly Called Out:(style="font-weight:normal"):}:

As fabulist Bill O'Reilly releases a new book about Ronald Reagan, Ron Reagan rips O'Reilly, calling him a "snake oil salesman," a "huckster," and a "carnival barker."http://mm4a.org/1Ot2RMH

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http://www.alternet.org/media/three-apparent-whoppers-bill-oreilly-has-told-about-his-career

Bill O'Reilly is consistently the most-watched opinion news pundit. But despite bringing in enormous ratings, O'Reilly has gotten himself into a bit of trouble as it appears that he has, on several occasions, blatantly lied about his reporting history.

Here's the three big whoppers uncovered so far:

1. Bill O'Reilly Lied About How He Covered The Falklands War: O'Reilly has claimed that he “reported on the ground in active war zones [like] the Falklands...having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash.” The reality is that O'Reilly, while working for CBS News, covered a protest in Buenos Aires, over a thousand miles away from the fighting over the Falklands.

2. Bill O'Reilly Lied About Witnessing The Suicide Of A Man In The JFK Investigation: O'Reilly has on numerous occasions said he witnessed the suicide of George de Mohrenschildt, who knew the JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. It's now apparent that O'Reilly actually called a congressional investigator to confirm the suicide – meaning he didn't witness it himself.

3. Bill O'Reilly Lied About Witnessing The Murder Of Salvadoran Nuns: O'Reilly claimed he saw nuns executed in El Salvador; after being called on the claim, he now says he merely saw photographs of the execution. Additionally, O'Reilly stands accused as intentionally failing to cover massacres during the war.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/197401/did-bill-oreilly-cover-war-crime-el-salvador

Before Bill O’Reilly was, well, Bill O’Reilly, he worked for a time as a foreign correspondent for CBS Nightly News, anchored by Dan Rather. O’Reilly talks about that period of his career in two of his books, and in both mentions that in early 1982 he reported from northeastern El Salvador, just after the infamous El Mozote Massacre. “When the CBS News bureau chief asked for volunteers to check out an alleged massacre in the dangerous Morazán Territory, a mountainous region bordering Nicaragua, I willingly went.”

El Mozote is a small, hard-to-reach hamlet. The massacre took place on December 11, 1981, carried out by US-trained Atlacatl Battalion, which was not just trained but *created* by the United States as a rapid response unit to fight El Salvador’s fast-spreading FMLN insurgency. The killing was savage beyond belief: between 733 and 900 villagers were slaughtered, decapitated, impaled and burned alive.

The story of the massacre was broken on the front page ofThe New York Timesby the journalist Raymond Bonner and in *The Washington Post* by Alma Guillermoprieto; both stories were published on January 27, 1982, and accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas. Bonner and Meiselas got to El Mozote, after hearing about the massacre, by walking for days in from Honduras. Guillermoprieto wrote about seeing “countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column” poking “out of the rubble.” Bonner noted the “charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles.” Later, Mark Danner reported on the massacre in detail, first in a lengthy New Yorker essay and then in a book.

Aside from the brutality of the killing, El Mozote is distinguished by the fact that Washington moved quickly to cover it up. It was, in a way, the first massacre of the “second Cold War,” the Reagan administration’s drive to retake the third world; what My Lai was to the 1960s, El Mozote was to the 1980s (later, in 1989, Atlacatl would commit another infamous crime: the execution of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter).

In addition to describing the massacre, Danner documents the cover-up in detail: the US embassy in El Salvador immediately disputed Bonner’s and Guillermoprieto’s reporting, as did New Right organizations like Accuracy in Media. Thomas Enders, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American Affairs, and Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights, denied the killing. Abrams said “it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” The Wall Street Journalcalled Bonner “overly credulous” and “out on a limb” and placed the word massacre in “scare quotes.” The Timessided with the critics, and Bonner eventually left the paper, after first being transferred to the business section.

O’Reilly doesn’t give an exact date for when he travelled to El Salvador, but he writes that it was just before the Falklands War. In other words, probably in March 1982, between the first reports of the “alleged massacre,” in late January, and Argentina’s early April invasion of the Malvinas. Here’s O’Reilly’s account, from his book, The No Spin Zone:

A few weeks after taking the CBS job I was flown to El Salvador to report on the war going on there at the time. I drew an assignment that sent me to the Morazán province in the mountainous northeastern part of that beautiful country. This was ‘Indian country,’ a place where the communist guerrillas (‘los muchachos’) operated with impunity. It was a dangerous place, and my crew—driver, producer, and cameraman—was not thrilled to be going there. It took us a full day to drive to Morazán from San Salvador, the capital city, because all the bridges had been blown up and we had to ford the rivers in our van. This was slow going, making us easy targets. Our only protection was a message painted in black letters over and over again on the sides of the van: periodistas—no dispare(Journalists—don’t shoot).

O’Reilly continues along these lines, emphasizing the danger he and his crew faced. He recounts being given the “local war news” by a Salvadoran army colonel: “The ‘muchachos’ had wiped out a small village called Meanguera a few miles to the south because its mayor was deemed friendly to the government. The atrocity had not been confirmed, though, because nobody in his right mind would go into the guerrilla-controlled areas.”

Note that O’Reilly doesn’t mention the massacre at El Mozote. He rather focuses on a supposed killing committed by leftist insurgents in nearby Meanguera (Meanguera, a municipal town center, is nine kilometers away from the hamlet of El Mozote). It is extremely unlikely that O’Reilly would not have known about the El Mozote massacre. Not only was it reported on in all the major papers, the Reagan administration’s denials had themselves become a story (The Wall Street Journalran its attack on Bonner on February 10).

In any case, O’Reilly went to Meanguera and not El Mozote. Leigh Binford, an anthropologist who wrote a great book on the larger context of the massacre, tells me that “all of these municipal centers sustained attacks by the FMLN; they were, after all, where the repressive forces (National Guard or Treasury Police) were housed, and from which they had been making forays into the countryside over the course of at least a year to kill, harass, capture, and torture for some time.” So it is very possible that Meanguera was attacked by the rebels. But it certainly wasn’t “wiped out.” In other words, going to Meanguera in early 1982 would be as if Seymour Hersh, when he first learned of the My Lai massacre, decided to investigate events the next town over.

Here’s what O’Reilly writes in his book about his report: when he finally arrived in Meanguera, “the place was leveled to the ground and fires were still smoldering. But even though the carnage was obviously recent, we saw no one live or dead. There was absolutely nobody around who could tell us what happened. I quickly did a stand-up amid the rubble and we got the hell out of there.”

He continues to emphasize his courage (writing that a Salvadoran military official said that he had “cojones” for having travelled to Meanguera). Then, having made it back to San Salvador safely, he filed his story: “I explained that while a scorched-earth policy was clearly in effect in remote village—the evidence was right there on tape—it was impossible to say just who was doing the scorching. Could be the muchachos[that is, the guerrillas], could be the government. The ninety-second package contained great video and a fairly impressive ‘on the scene in a very bad place’ stand-up by yours truly.”

O’Reilly tells a version of this story in two different books, since it supposedly captures a key moment in his personal narrative, a moment when he stood up to the “liberal establishment”—that is, CBS News—and eventually becomes who he is today. His editor apparently didn’t broadcast the report until O’Reilly forced him to do so.

I’ve located the broadcast and there are a number of problems with how O’Reilly tells the story in his book.

"An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media"

People would often ask me about how Fox pushes a message.

And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes.

An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status. Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with “The O’Reilly Factor.” (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Sometimes the anchors were relatively weak — as was the case with a lot of weekend shows, and maybe some of the newswheel hours — and a strong senior producer or producer outranked, or at least pretended to outrank, the host. (For example, Lizzie from “The Lineup,” who was only a producer but was tough enough that she probably could have bossed around Ailes himself had she been left alone in a room with him for more than five minutes.)

The bottom line is that each show had one person — be they anchor or producer or whoever — who was directly accountable to the Second Floor. That was the brilliance of the company’s power structure. One misconception that outsiders always had about the channel is that we’d sit around all morning planning how to distort the news that day. But there was never any centralized control like that. No “marching orders,” as it were. Instead, it was more a decentralized, entrepreneurial approach. Each show was an autonomous unit. Each showrunner — who had not risen to their position by being stupid — knew exactly what was expected of them, knew what topics and guests would be acceptable.

Theoretically, each show could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, and take any angle they wanted to take, and book any guest they wanted to have on.

Realistically, there was tremendous pressure to hew closely to the company line. The Second Floor monitored the content of every show very closely. Each show was required to submit a list of all the guests and all the topics well before the fact; the list would be reviewed by one of the relevant vice presidents. Most of the time, this was just a formality — as I said, the showrunners knew their boundaries — but every once in a while, a certain guest or topic would set off alarm bells on the second floor, leading to a series of increasingly urgent and unpleasant e-mails and phone calls for the showrunner.

Even if a segment passed initial muster, the Second Floor reserved the right to pull the plug if it took a turn they didn’t like. They were always watching, and never hesitant to exercise their authority. Roger himself had a phone in his office, a hotline he could pick up and immediately be connected to the control room. Every producer knew that, and dreaded seeing his name on the caller ID. If Roger took the time to personally call the control room, in my experience it was almost never complimentary.

It was a unique, bottom-up management structure that had built-in checks and balances coming from the top down. This approach had its advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, it often led to innovative programming, with adventurous hosts and producers coming up with story ideas and segments that a more buttoned-down, dictatorial management structure might otherwise never have approved. (O’Reilly was one of the beneficiaries of this, successfully experimenting with some of his more outlandish, barely news-related segments like Body Language and the Quiz.)

One of the disadvantages was that the Second Floor often put insane, arbitrary restrictions into place, with networkwide implications.

For example, some unlucky guests were banned for life from every show on the network, a result of a diktat from the Second Floor. Comedian Bill Maher, once a semi-regular guest on “The Factor” and some other Fox shows, made too many cracks about Sarah Palin over the years, raising the ire of a powerful female VP who banned him from our air and demanded that all Fox-affiliated websites refer to him only as “Pig Maher.”

Sometimes entire organizations were given lifetime bans. The website Politico wrote something a few years back that rubbed Roger the wrong way (we were never told what exactly the transgression was) and word went out to all the shows: No more Politico reporters as guests. Also, any anchors who mentioned the site on air had to use the phrase “left-wing Politico” — an absurd designation for a publication that usually played it down the middle.

Some anchors and producers had enough juice — proportional to the size of their audience, generally — to push back against the Second Floor’s mandates, with varying levels of success, though even O’Reilly, who had more juice than anyone, could only do so much. When one of his favorite guests, a fiery, young, liberal African American college professor, was banned, agreement with the Second Floor allowing him to continue to use the guy as long as his appearances were limited to once a month. O’Reilly wasn’t happy with it, but it was better than walking away empty-handed.

There was nothing Bill hated more than management impositions on his show. These impositions almost always followed the same pattern — Stan would get a phone call in his office from one of Roger’s underlings, usually a vice president named Bill Shine. I’d hear Manskoff’s end of the conversation. “You’re killing me here, you know that, don’t you,” Stan would say. “You know he’s going to hate this.” Manskoff would hang up, shaking his head in disbelief, and make the fifteen-foot trek to Bill’s office, closing the door behind him. Through the door, we’d hear muffled talking from Stan, then muffled shouting from Bill, followed shortly by the door popping open and Stan bolting from the office like a pinball from a launcher.

“I’ll do it this time, Manskoff,” Bill would call after him, “just this once. But I’m tired of this bullshit!” He’d always slow down for the next part, hammering each phrase so there would be no mistake in the future: “I want the interference! With my show! To stop! Now!”

Relations were rocky enough between O’Reilly and the Second Floor that VP Shine was dispatched on a regular basis to smooth things over, meeting in O’Reilly’s office every Tuesday at four p.m. These meetings would sometimes last upward of forty-five minutes. Though I was never privy to what was said in the meetings, neither man ever looked particularly pleased upon completion.

It was Stan’s job to run interference between O’Reilly and management, keeping the bosses out of Bill’s hair but also insulating the suits from Bill’s fits of rage. Ninety-nine percent of all issues could be solved with Manskoff and Shine collaborating, not having to involve Ailes or O’Reilly. But every once in a while, O’Reilly would refuse to back down, and Ailes would be forced to intervene.

The most memorable instance of this was in late 2008, when Lehman Brothers went tits-up and the whole economy was teetering on the brink. President Bush prepared a massive bailout package for the banks, and conservative talk radio exploded with outrage and opposition. One prominent conservative voice in favor of the bailout?  Bill O’Reilly, who believed that the entire financial system would collapse without it. He took to his radio show that day and excoriated the radio hosts who opposed the bailout:

“Let’s get back to this talk radio stuff. These idiots. I mean, they’re misleading you. They’re lying to you. They’re rich, these guys. Big cigars. All of that. ‘Yeah, oh yeah, my private jet!’ And they’re saying, ‘Oh, no! No bailout!’ Walk away from these liars, these right-wing liars. Walk away from them! They’re not looking out for you.”

The cigar and private jet stuff was a thinly veiled swipe at Rush Limbaugh, someone O’Reilly has never liked, but also a figure who had a lot of fans at 1211 Sixth Avenue, including Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity.

When word filtered to the Second Floor that O’Reilly planned on repeating some of his radio rant on the TV show that night, the order came back quickly: Absolutely not. But O’Reilly put his foot down. Neither Stan Manskoff nor Bill Shine could dissuade him, and it took a phone call from Roger himself to put the matter to rest.

Bill took the call in his office, politely but insistently pleading his case to Ailes, but Roger held firm. Bill reluctantly agreed to toe the party line, excused himself from the call, gently hung up the receiver, then loudly yelled a string of expletives that could be heard all over the seventeenth floor. But after he got it out of his system, he spiked the Limbaugh reference from the TV show.

I said earlier that O’Reilly had more juice than anyone. That wasn’t entirely true. He had higher ratings than anyone, to be sure, but it could be argued that Hannity actually had more juice, owing to his closer affiliation and friendship with Ailes. The two of them are fellow travelers, both devoted to Republican causes. Bill is not on that train with them — he’s truly devoted only to O’Reilly-related causes. (Which just so happen to dovetail with Republican causes most of the time, but still …)

This has led to no small amount of tension between the parties. O’Reilly and Hannity, the two biggest stars at Fox News Channel, have basically no working relationship. Their shows are back-to-back, yet they’re barely on speaking terms. O’Reilly is convinced that Hannity is trying to sabatoge his show, and vice versa. The two of them fight constantly, almost entirely through intermediaries and over the pettiest of issues — mostly over guests. Both shows like to use Fox News analysts — specifically Karl Rove, Dick Morris, and Bernie Goldberg — and 90 percent of the squabbling is over which show gets which guest on which night. Roger did the situation no favors in 2011, when he spoke to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast and engaged in a bit of provocative muckraking:

“O’Reilly hates Sean [Hannity] and he hates Rush [Limbaugh] because they did better in radio than he did,” Ailes said. Bill was furious for weeks. Because it turns out there is one thing he hated even more than management meddling: someone insulting his ratings.

* * *

Bill was, if nothing else, a man of habit — to the point where he got incredibly angry if anything went awry with his schedule. For someone as pugilistic as he, he’s shockingly unable to roll with the punches. He’s like a taller, Irish version of Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man.” Even a slight delay or deviation from the plan could set off a lecture or, on occasion, a screaming match. As a result, he was tightly scheduled down to the minute.

Bill’s daily routine was really a marvel of efficiency. It wasn’t quite “The 4-Hour Workweek,” but it came pretty damn close to being the four-hour workday. Now, he would tell you he’s up early, reading the paper, communicating with his staff, etc. And this is all true. He’s a hardworking guy. I don’t want to give the impression that he isn’t. But as far as actual time spent in the building? We’re talking four and a half hours a day, tops.

Here’s how it went:

9:30 a.m.

We’d compile and send to Bill the “Newsfax,” a ten-page document with excerpts from what we thought were the day’s most important stories, op-eds, sound bites, and so on. We called it the Newsfax because it was easier to tell Bill we were faxing it to him than it was to explain that we were remotely printing it to his home printer.

This is actually a familiar pattern with Bill. It’s often simpler to let him believe something erroneously than it is to correct him.

Case in point: In summer 2011, a story surfaced on the right-wing blogs that an auditor for the Justice Department had found out some DOJ employees attending a meeting at the Capital Hilton in Washington, DC, had been served refreshments, including muffins for which the hotel charged sixteen dollars apiece.

It’s no surprise that the story spread like wildfire on the blogs and was soon picked up by cable news. It was a great story for the right, reinforcing preexisting notions of government excess and willingness to waste taxpayer money, the incompetence of the Obama Justice Department, etc.

One problem: It wasn’t true.

A few days after the story broke, a representative from Hilton Hotels came out and said that the auditor had misread the bill, that the sixteen dollars referred to a full breakfast—coffee, tea, fruit, muffins, plus tax and gratuity. Not a bargain by any means, but also not too bad for a hotel continental breakfast.

A producer named Steiner Rudolf was line producing — assembling the stories in the rundown and making sure they all timed out correctly — on the day that Bill wanted to include the muffin anecdote in a Talking Points Memo. “Actually, Bill, the muffin thing got debunked,” Steiner started to tell him. “A guy from the hotel came out and said —”

“I don’t give a shit what the guy said,” Bill interrupted, suddenly angry. “It’s the same old thing. They come out and deny it, but the story is there. We know it’s true. We have the proof.”

Steiner tried gamely one more time to convince Bill to drop the story, explaining that he didn’t have the proof, but O’Reilly was adamant. He’d latched on to the story, and pesky things like “facts” weren’t going to convince him otherwise. The muffins went into the Talking Points. Over the next few weeks, he repeated the story several times on his own show, on Jon Stewart’s show, on David Letterman’s show, and on Good Morning America.

Unfortunately for the embarrassed Hilton Hotels and some nameless DOJ bureaucrats, the muffin story, false though it may be, perfectly coincided with Bill’s book tour.

10:00 a.m.

The morning conference was when the real work of building the day’s show began. The senior staff connected on a four-way call. From my vantage point outside Stan’s office, I could hear them on speakerphone gearing up for it like troops going into battle. “Are you ready for this?” “Yeah, are you?” “Here goes nothing.”

One of them would dial Bill’s house. He’s all business when he picks up the phone. A curt “good morning,” then Gayle begins reciting what she calls the “comp report.” Right off the bat she tells him how many e-mails came in after the previous night’s show, and what topic elicited the most messages. (“We had thirty-five hundred e-mails last night, most of them in reaction to the immigration segment …”)

Bill took the e-mails — sent by our audience to OReilly@foxnews.com — pretty seriously, regarding them (not inaccurately, I’d say) as a direct gauge of viewer interest. Each morning, two unlucky women on the staff had the unenviable job of sorting through the e-mails and printing out a representative sample of fifty to sixty. Bill, to his credit, reads these personally. He selects a handful to be read on the air. If he likes some others but doesn’t consider them airworthy, he’ll instruct our lucky mail combers to send a signed book or some “kind words” — a response e-mail reading, Thanks for the kind words. Signed, Bill O’Reilly. I’d glanced at the show’s in-box from time to time and had been blown away by the sheer incoherence and illiteracy of some of the respondents. This would sometimes present a problem, for Bill liked his e-mails to be short, pithy, and not written by a complete moron.

This was a surprisingly tall order on certain days.

On one occasion, there was an e-mail that Bill really wanted to read on the air. One of the producers noticed that the e-mail was signed with an obvious gag name: Jack MeHoff. Clearly, that’s unreadable on television. But Bill liked the text of the e-mail so much that he couldn’t bear to cut it from the mail segment. After pondering for a bit, he decided on a course of action: “Let’s just change the last name to Mehoffer.” Despite producers pleading with him that the slight name change was not much, if at all, better than the original, Bill stuck to his guns, reading the letter with the modified name on air.

Back to the conference call. After the e-mail tally, Gayle would read off the list of guests on the competing shows — whatever guests CNN and MSNBC had the night before, and whatever guests Hannity and Greta were scheduled to have that night.

Next, the call got to the real nitty-gritty: Bill started talking about what he wanted on the show that night. “The Factor” was one hour long, divided by commercial breaks into seven “blocks,” identified by letters A through G. The first six blocks all needed a topic and a guest, while the last block — the shortest one — usually contained the viewer e-mail segment, plugs for merchandise, and other “Factor” business.

“The Factor” differed from a straight news program in that all of the segments are, with a few exceptions, interview segments. The advantage of this is that interview segments are incredibly easy to produce. A single associate producer can put together an entire segment by his- or herself in about an hour, without even getting up from a desk. The associate producer (also sometimes called a segment producer, for obvious reasons) would call the guest on the phone and get them to agree to come on; conduct a pre-interview; book a car to bring the guest either to the New York studio to sit with Bill or to a remote studio with a satellite connection; do some research on the topic; cut some B-roll; plug in some graphics; and call it a day.

Contrast that with something like the nightly network news, which uses an anchor who tosses to reporters who introduce highly produced taped pieces known in the industry — somewhat suggestively — as “packages.” (As in, “Hey, did you see Jake Tapper’s package last night?” or “The local affiliate has a great package on that.”) A good package will combine B-roll, graphics, interviews, and narration from the reporter.

The advantages of the network news model is that the reporter packages are a lot more slick and tell a better story in a much more concise and visually appealing manner. The downside to the network model is that it’s very time- and labor- intensive, with each package requiring painstaking work from a reporter, producers, a cameraman, a sound technician, an editor, and so on.

Also, a pretaped package lacks some of the urgency, some of the energy and excitement that a spontaneous interview segment contains. The interview format is one of the reasons for Fox’s financial success. They churn out our product faster, for less money and with fewer staffers. It’s simple economics.

When O’Reilly picked the topics for the show, he’d usually have a specific guest in mind. Sometimes he’d give it to one of our “regulars,” guests who appear every week. (These include, in addition to the aforementioned Messrs. Rove, Morris, and Goldberg, figures like comedian Dennis Miller and Fox daytime anchor Megyn Kelly.) But sometimes he’d want a guest who was not one of the regulars but, rather, someone who would take a certain side on an issue, or an expert with certain biographical details.

Often these requests got hilariously specific: “We’re doing a gay marriage segment — get me a black lesbian civil rights attorney!” or “I want to do a segment on the Super Bowl next week — find me a funny white sports expert under forty! But he can’t be bald.”

One of the most important things the segment producer did was the pre-interview, which was exactly what it sounds like— we’d interview the guest a few hours before Bill interviewed them. We tried to think of the same questions Bill would ask, and would take notes, condensing and bullet-pointing whatever the guest said. Eventually, we’d give this “POV” to Bill, along with research on the topic.

The end result was that, barring the occasional surprise, Bill knew exactly what his guest was going to say in the interview, sometimes down to the last word. In this way, cable news somewhat resembled professional wrestling: The outcomes were predetermined, with the host not only choosing his guests based specifically on the stance he knew they were going to take, but actually getting a preview of their arguments several hours in advance so he could formulate his counterarguments.

Noon

Bill would get into his chauffered town car for the drive from his Long Island home to Fox headquarters in Manhattan. During this drive, he’d call the line producer and dictate the script for that night’s show.

Cursed with speedy typing skills, I would occasionally get roped into taking dictation on these calls. Listening to him write the entire show in his head on the fly, I realized that Bill O’Reilly is much smarter than any of his critics give him credit for. There’s not a ton of writing in a typical episode of “The O’Reilly Factor” — once you get past the Talking Points Memo, it’s only relatively short introductions (“Our next guest is a Fox News analyst coming to us from Washington, D.C. …”) and teases before the commercial break (“Coming up, Karl Rove will weigh in on the GOP primary race …”) — but the mere fact that Bill writes the whole thing himself, every word, separates him from almost every anchor in the building. And the fact that he does it all in his head, dictating it on the fly, is nothing short of astounding.

One funny point about this, though — Bill is, unsurprisingly, the ultimate back seat driver, so the dictation calls are constantly punctuated with his yelling at Carl, his poor beleaguered driver. Bill would dictate a couple of lines, then scream a bit at Carl, berating him for getting caught in traffic. Then he’d tick off a few more lines, then bark at Carl again, telling him that if he didn’t find a different route, Bill would be forced to take over driving duties.

1:30 p.m.

Bill would usually arrive about this time, traffic permitting, then head into his office and have lunch, which his long-suffering, saintly assistant, Margaret, would bring to him. He wasn’t into fancy lunches — strictly a soup-and-sandwich-at-his-desk kind of guy. But he was still as demanding with his orders as he was with everything else in his life.

A sandwich shop got his order wrong one time, and Bill called Margaret into his office.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not mad at you, Margaret. But they put the wrong cheese on this thing.”

“Do you want me to get you a new one?” Margaret asked, sounding relieved that she wasn’t going to catch the blame for once.

“No,” Bill said. “I want you to take it back to them, tell them they screwed it up, and get the money back.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Are you actually going to say that? Because I definitely want you to say that to them. ‘You screwed it up. Bill O’Reilly wants his money back.’ Are you going to say that to them?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll say that,” Margaret insisted.

I don’t know if she did end up doing it or not. She’s one of the nicest, most soft-spoken people in the world, so it’s hard for me to picture her throwing a sandwich back in the Quiznos guy’s face. But on the other hand, she’s worked for O’Reilly for more than two decades, so who the hell knows what she’s capable of?

2:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m.

On Mondays and Thursdays, we had pitch meetings during this block of time. On Tuesdays, O’Reilly had his weekly powwow with the company VP, Bill Shine. And it seemed as if the other two days of the week there were always other things clawing for his attention. But every once in a while, he got this time to himself, and we’d find him lounging on the couch in his office, shoes off, his six-foot-four frame spilling over both sides, just reading the paper. It was kind of endearing, actually.

4:30 p.m.

Bill would get anxious around this time every day, like a kid on Christmas Eve — because it was ratings time! The number crunchers e-mailed out spreadsheets at the same time every afternoon, with data about the previous day’s shows. We’d get ratings for not only all the Fox News shows but also all the shows on CNN, MSNBC, and Headline News, broken down into fifteen-minute increments and separated into total viewers as well as the coveted age twenty-five to fifty-four demographic.

As much as I’d thought my colleagues on “The Lineup” were obsessed with the ratings data, O’Reilly made them look like absolute amateurs. First, if the number crunchers were even one minute late with the data, Bill would get agitated, calling Manskoff every few minutes to impatiently ask him if the e-mail with the spreadsheets had come in yet.

When he finally did get the sheets, about fifteen pages in all, with tiny print and column after column of numbers, he’d pore over the digits as if they held the secret to finding the Holy Grail. If the number for “The Factor” was good, he’d crow about it for the rest of the day. If the number was bad, he’d panic, making phone calls until he determined what had gone wrong: “Eugene, we dropped thirty-three thousand in the demo last night in the final quarter. Remind me what we had in the back of the show last night?”

Eugene would tell him the name of the guest, or the topic, and Bill would decide that the show would no longer be covering that topic, or would cease inviting that guest.

Most of my fellow producers took the boss’s cue and obsessed over the numbers as much as he did, but it always felt like chicanery to me. To make changes in programming, important decisions about what stories to cover and which guests to use, based on minute changes in a system as imprecise and imperfect as the Nielsen ratings seemed irresponsible, barely better than reading chicken entrails. But Bill had lived and died by those ratings for so long that he didn’t know another way. (And to be fair, his method seemed to be working, because he’s enjoyed more than a decade at number one. So maybe I’m the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.)

4:45 p.m.

Bill heads down to a private room in the basement to get his hair and makeup done. A device that Ailes had installed in every green room in the building methodically sucks the life force out of five adorable baby puppies and deposits it into Bill’s face, keeping him fresh and youthful-looking for one more day.

5:00 p.m.

Showtime!

6:00 p.m.

Show’s over. A quick wipedown with a hot towel in the green room to get rid of the makeup and puppy tears.

6:05 p.m.

Back to the O’Reilly pod for the show’s postmortem meeting, where we’d discuss what went right and wrong that night. These were short and uneventful normally, consisting of nothing more than Bill looking at the big bulletin board, sighing, and saying, “That was okay tonight. I think we might get away with that.”

6:10 p.m.

O’Reilly gets into the town car to head home, warming up his vocal cords in case Carl the driver takes yet another wrong turn.

Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from “An Atheist in the FOXhole” by Joe Muto. Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Muto.

==

James W. Von Brunn, who murdered a black guard, Stephen Tyrone John’s, in  the Washington Holocaust museum is a long time racist/anti-Semitic anti-government fanatic, And Dr. Tiller, a gynecologist who performs abortions, was targeted by right-wing broadcasters, especially Bill O’Reilly, who routinely called him “Tiller The Baby killer” and even gave out the address of his clinic on the air.  Now we discover a murdered census taker in Kentucky, Bill Sparkman, who from all appearances was lynched, and has the word FED, for federal worker, inscribed on his chest! I believe  Sparkman’s murder was directly inspired by Glenn Beck’s incendiary attacks on the US Census!

http://commentariesonthetimes.wordpress.com/tag/glenn-beck-incites-murder/

==

same sex marriage http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/27/flashback-six-terrible-consequences-of-marriage/193285

 ===

O'REILLY: And in the "Impact Segment" tonight, a far left group threatening economic pain in order to intimidate American companies. Color of Change co-founded by former Obama green czar Van Jones waging an economic war against conservative groups and people it doesn't like. 

The latest is the McDonald's Corporation, backing away from supporting a conservative group called The American Legislative Exchange Council, which backs voter I.D. laws and Stand Your Ground statutes. McDonald's was a member of ALEC -- that's the acronym -- last year but says it made a business decision to sever ties last month under pressure from Color of Change. 

Joining us now from Washington, Laura Ingraham who has been following this situation. You know this group has been around for a while, this Color of Change business. They attack Glenn Beck. They are very, very vicious in what they do. 

But I'm wondering if it crosses into the blackmail range. 

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well I don't think it probably does -- cross into that range Bill but just to paint the picture for people. Color of Change, of course, gets huge influxes of money fromGeorge Soros; ties to SCIU, ties to MoveOn.org. You know these kind of -- there's all these tentacles that connect these organizations, staff, personnel, co-founders and so forth. 

What they're designed to do is much whatMedia Matters is designed to do, this other group, is to basically shut down conservative speechand look, they have a right to lobby these companies, it is a free country. They could lobby Coca Cola and Kraft and McDonald's and tell them, well, American Legislative Exchange Council which is basically a free market group, business interest and state legislators a couple of thousand people. It's a free market group, do a lot of different issues, a lot of different research, draft legislation. 

Hey look, if do you anything with them. If you give them any money we are going to do something. It's an intimidation campaign. 

(CROSSTALK) 

INGRAHAM: And -- and yes and let me just say -- and the bottom line is -- is Color of Change does not want free speech. They don't want any real debate on these issues, period. 

(CROSSTALK) 

O'REILLY: I don't -- I don't think there any doubt about it that the far left and we've been reporting this for -- I don't know a dozen years now. 

INGRAHAM: Years. 

O'REILLY: Not only do they not want free speech but if you dare to go against their ideology they will try to -- 

(CROSSTALK) 

INGRAHAM: Oh they'll try to destroy you. 

O'REILLY: Yes, hurt you. 

INGRAHAM: Yes. 

O'REILLY: Hurt you, hurt your family. They will do anything they can. And I don't see that on the right. There are some right-wing cranks. No doubt about it. But it isn't as organized and it isn't as brutal. 

(CROSSTALK) 

INGRAHAM: Well it's well-funded, it's extremely well-funded. And -- and what they do Bill is when conservatives seemed to be successful. Talk radio, for instance, my business, Rush Limbaugh, other people, when they are successful, you have these groups pop up that aim to not take on talk radio on issues have debates, forums and so forth. But to say we're going to cut you off at the knees. You're not going to be able to make money in this economy.

(CROSSTALK) 

O'REILLY: Yes we invited Van Jones on tonight. Even though he has a dopey new book. I don't know if it's dopey or not.

(CROSSTALK) 

INGRAHAM: Oh gee, I wonder. 

O'REILLY: And he wouldn't come on. He wouldn't come on. 

INGAHAM: Of course he's not going to come on. He doesn't want to debate you. He doesn't want to debate you.

(CROSSTALK) 

O'REILLY: Because, no and he doesn't want to have to explain thefascist tactics of Color of Change. And I say fascist because this is what the totalitarian regimes do. 

(CROSSTALK) 

INGRAHAM: Yes that's what -- 

O'REILLY: They basically say you don't talk unless you agree with us. And if you do we will punish you, varying degrees of punishment. 

INGRAHAM: Yes this is -- James Rucker the other co-founder of Color of Change Van Jones, they're used to operating Bill in places like Manhattan and L.A., and San Francisco and Washington. College campuses where -- where they pretty much talk to other people who agree with them all the time. 

They don't really interact with people who disagree with them. And so they don't want to have the discussion at all. And what I -- what I would say to McDonald's and Kraft and all of these companies is look I understand you have a shareholder return of investment to be concerned about here. So -- but you could be next. 

If Van Jones and his people have his way, I hope these corporations understand that that capitalism is on the line. Capitalism may -- may be no more.

(CROSSTALK) 

O'REILLY: Well it think -- I think the folks though, I think the folks should know the reason I'm doing this segment with you tonight is that I want the folks to know that McDonald's, Kraft, Coca Cola, Intuit, Wendy's. PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson -- no, no, those are the ones that pulled out. Here's the ones that stayed. Here's the ones that stayed. 

INGRAHAM: Johnson & Johnson stayed. Wendy's stayed. 

O'REILLY: Johnson & Johnson stayed, Wal-Mart stayed, AT&T, and State Farm. 

INGRAHAM: Yes. Support them.

O'REILLY: So I think then the good people who -- and even if they are liberal, you know the good people who don't want these kind of totalitarian brutality in the marketplace say, you know what? Those who stay and those who aren't (inaudible) who are going to buy their stuff? 

INGRAHAM: Yes and Bill that's the right way. Thepower of the purse and so -- 

O'REILLY: Yes. 

INGRAHAM: -- and so again, the companies that that made decisions to pull out of this group that does a lot of great work by the way. A lot of great legislative work and so forth. They should remember that there might not be anyone left to defend the free market and capitalism once you knock off group after group after group. 

(CROSSTALK) 

O'REILLY: Listen you've got to stand up, you know and -- but I want to -- I want to mention again, Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, State Farm Insurance. They have not caved to Color -- to Color of Change. Laura Ingraham, everybody. 

INGRAHAM: Yes. 

Last night on the O'Reilly Factor, pundit Bill O'Reilly weighed in on the national debate surrounding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In his "Impact Segment," O'Reilly defended ALEC and attacked the groups that are asking corporations to drop their ALEC membership.

As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has documented, ninety-eight percent of ALEC's funding comes from its corporate members like Johnson & Johnson and from foundations like the Koch family foundations -- and without that funding, ALEC could not advance policies like voter suppression or the Shoot to Kill/Stand Your Ground law at issue in Florida. O'Reilly focused his harshest criticism for the online civil rights group Color of Change, calling them a "far left group threatening economic pain in order to intimidate American companies" and a group "waging an economic war against conservative groups and people it doesn't like."

"This crew has been around for awhile, this 'Color of Change' business," he said, noting their successfully campaign to get Glenn Beck off the air, saying "they are very very vicious in what they do."

Right-wing talker Laura Ingraham agreed. "Color of Change does not want free speech," she said.

Calling the public pressure campaign that has convinced eight major U.S. corporations to drop ALEC in the past week "fascist," O'Reilly said, "this is what the totalitarian regimes do, they basically say: 'you don't talk unless you agree with us, and if you do, we will punish you with varying degrees of punishment.'"

"Capitalism is on the line," Ingraham said.

But according to Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson, "we are absolutely pursuing a free market campaign."

****	Learn more about corporations VOTING to rewrite our laws.

Bill O'Reilly is the host of the American cable television opinion program, The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News. He also hosts a radio program syndicated by Westwood One (called The Radio Factor), has authored five best-selling books (one of which is a novel), and writes a syndicated newspaper column.

According to a statement of claim filed by Fox News in an unsuccessful case against Al Franken and Penguin, The O'Reilly Factor is the most popular program on FNC. "The O'Reilly Factor" bills itself as a "No-Spin Zone" and the goal of the program is to present the audience with the straight facts while allowing the audience to reach its own conclusions about the news.

The O'Reilly Factor airs daily at 8.00 p.m. EST and repeats at 11:00 p.m. Bill O'Reilly also has a syndicated radio show, The Radio Factor, "which airs in 357 markets and a syndicated weekly newspaper column that is run in newspapers throughout the United States ... O'Reilly himself has become a national celebrity and one of America's most trusted sources of news and information."

Bill O'Reilly explained to Vanity Fair's Maureen Orth how covering the disappearance of Laci Peterson was good for his ratings. "We do Laci Peterson every 15 minutes and see the numbers go up. It's a story that resonates with women particularly," he said. [1]

On October 13, 2004, O'Reilly filed a lawsuit against Andrea Mackris, a female colleague, claiming that she was attempting to extort $60 million from him by threatening to sue for sexual harrasment. Mackris filed a harrasment charge hours later.

O'Reilly recants

On Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, O'Reilly stated "And I said on my program, if -- if -- the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again." [2]

On the same show, 11 months later, "I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said he was "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now". [3], [4]

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

O'Reilly spoke at the ALEC 2002 Spring Task Force Summit in Las Vegas, NV on April 13, 2002.

ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org.

FoxNews' neo-McCarthyism

The O'Reilly Factor program plays a fundamental ideological and propagandistic role. Its principal purpose is to uncritically propagate the position of the U.S. government or its right-wing ideologues, and to disparage critics of that policy/ideology. The latter involves character assassination, disparaging comments, and even calls for a person to be imprisoned, fired from their job, and for the "mob" to attack the person in question.

On February 2, 2005, O'Reilly persecuted Ward Churchill, an outspoken professor at the University of Colorado/Boulder and author of numerous books. Churchill wrote and suggested that 911 was a case of "chickens coming home to roost", and a direct consequence of US policy abroad. These comments (which were a year old), were recast as being anti-American, and this paragraph conveys the flavor of the rest of the program:

He wants us to empathize with Al Qaeda. Yet he has little empathy for his fellow countrymen who died on 9/11. He sees the USA as a racist country run by human rights violators. So, of course, any attack on America is justified in his mind. [5]

The result of this program was a coordinated campaign of intimidation against university where Ward Churchill teaches, death threats, and other vile reactions. This is what Ward Churchill had to say about this:

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

— Ward Churchill, Churchill Replies, Z Net, February 2, 2005.

As the experience of several of the victims of O'Reilly's campaigns indicates, the character assassination in The O'Reilly Factor is the culmination of a campaign that includes the following:

• Vilification in the right-wing press.
• Concerted mail/email campaigns against the institution where the victims work. The fact that such email campaigns start before the airing of the program proves that this aspect of the campaign is coordinated.
• Waves of spam and spoofed emails against the victims have been evident.
• Violent threats have been made.
• Daniel Pipes's Campus-Watch has listed and posted "dossiers" on several of the victims that are eventually disparaged by O'Reilly.

Deciding fates: judge, jury and...

If the McCartyite campaign wasn't bad enough, on February 2, 2005, O'Reilly appeared together with Daniel Pipes in a program entitled: "Deciding Churchill's fate"! Exerpts:

"The Colorado Board of Regents will decide the fate of professor Ward Churchill, who compared Americans killed on 9/11 to Nazis. Apparently the man is getting threats, and a reporter from The New York Times called me to ask if I felt responsible. I won't be surprised if The Factor audience and I are blamed in some circles for the unfortunate plight of Ward Churchill. I don't revel in the destruction of any person, even one who has said the vile things Churchill has said. I even said the man shouldn't be fired from his job because America is strong enough to tolerate even him. But all that doesn't matter to the left wing media. This isn't about Churchill, this is about power--and many on the left hate the fact that Fox has it. What do Churchill and his sympathizers expect? We're in a war on terror and he supports the enemy. That being said, Churchill should not be harmed in any way--he should instead by [sic] shunned."

— O'Reilly, Deciding Churchill's fate, February 2, 2005.

The choice of Pipes for the program is curious. Here is someone who has been smearing and baiting university professors who have been critical of Israel, and he is asked to comment on the "fate" of someone he reviles!

Other victims

On September 13, 2005, broadcast of his radio show called The Radio Factor, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed that "many of the poor in New Orleans" chose not evacuate the city in advance of Hurricane Katrina 

because "[t]hey were drug-addicted" and "weren't going to get turned off from their source." O'Reilly added, "They were thugs."^[1]

Other victims of O'Reilly's smear program are:

• Sami Al Arian – as a result of the program he lost his tenured position at his university and is currently in prison.
• Shahid Alam – this program (February 3, 2005)follows a string of acts of intimidation and smears in Campus-Watch and related organizations. Alam's account of this can be found here: Shahid Alam, "O'Reilly's Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me In Its Crosshairs", CounterPunch, February 2, 2005.

O'Reilly quotes

The following quotes are from his Fox News show unless otherwise indicated.

On poverty:

• "It's hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell 'em they're irresponsible and lazy. And who's gonna wanna do that? Because that's what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period." [6/16/04]

On Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11:

• "So who turns out for the screening of this movie [Fahrenheit 9/11] last night? You ready? Now, here are the celebrities that turn out. Here are the people who would turn out to see Josef Goebbels convince you that Poland invaded the Third Reich. It's the same thing, by the way. Propaganda is propaganda. OK?" [6/14/04]

On the ACLU:

• "Finally, the ACLU -- we talked about this yesterday and I -- and, you know, I have to pick on the ACLU because they're the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now. There's by far. There's nobody even close to that. They're, like, second next to Al Qaeda." [6/2/04]

On Bill Moyers host of the PBS show "NOW":

• "Bill Moyers on PBS, he's -- hides behind the label of objectivity. He's about as objective as Mao Zedong,all right. I mean he's a Far-Left bomb-thrower who actually runs a foundation that funds left-wing organizations. I mean the guy's a joke. Get out of the news business, Bill." [6/14/04]

On Eric Alterman The Nation's media columnist:

• "...another Fidel Castro confidant." [5/3/04] (O'Reilly later apologized on 6/15/04 after Alterman threatened to sue O'Reilly for defamation)

On Mexicans and other immigrants:

• "We'd save lives because Mexican wetbacks, whatever you want to call them, the coyotes--they're not going to do what they're doing now, all right, so people aren't going to die in the desert." [2/6/03]

On women from Muslim countries:

• "..the most unattractive women in the world are probably in the Muslim countries." - From a Stuff magazine interview in 11/02.

On Africa:

• "I've been to Africa three times. All right? You can't bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way you can't bring it into fundamental Islam" [5/6/02]

On African-Americans:

• "Will African-Americans break away from the pack thinking and reject immorality-- because that's the reason the family's breaking apart--alcohol, drugs, infidelity. You have to reject that, and it doesn't seem--and I'm broadly speaking here, but a lot of African-Americans won't reject it" [2/25/99]

Published works

O'Reilly has authored a number of books including:

• The O'Reilly Factor: The good, the bad and the completely ridiculous in American Life, Broadway Books, 2000. ISBN: 0767905288
• The no spin zone: confrontations with the powerful and famous in America, Broadway Books, October 2001. ISBN 0767908481

Contact information

Web: http://www.billoreilly.com

Resources and articles

Related SourceWatch articles

• Hillary Clinton: U.S. presidential election, 2008/threats

References

1. ↑ Media Matters O'Reilly: "Many, many, many" hurricane victims who failed to evacuate New Orleans are "drug-addicted ... thugs", September 15, 2005, accessed August23, 2010

• See how you compare to Bill O'Reilly

External articles

Series of articles

• "Bill O'Reilly", Media Matters for America.

2001

• Seth Ackerman and Peter Hart, "Bill O'Reilly's Sheer O'Reillyness: Don't Call Him Conservative--but He Is", Extra!, July/August 2001.

2003

• A copy of the Fox News complaint against Penguin and Al Franken.

2004

• "Conservative U.S. anchor now skeptical about Bush", Reuters, February 10, 2004.
• Alan Elsner, "Bush's Political Base Seems Restive, Anxious", Reuters, February 10, 2004.
• Rory O'Connor, "The Un-Reality Factor", MediaChannel.org, 1 March 2004, asserts "that O'Reilly is a thief as well, who stole an exclusive investigative story broken in the pages of the recently launched free daily amNewYork, and presented it as his own."
• Debra J. Saunders, "Hacks on Hacking", San Francisco Chronicle, August 3, 2004.
• "O'Reilly: Female Aide in $60M Extort Bid: Fox News Star Denies Sex Harassment, Claims Political Motivation", The Smoking Gun.
• "O'Reilly Hit With Sex Harass Suit: Female Fox Coworker Details Lewd Behavior of Cable TV Star", The Smoking Gun.
• "O'Reilly Sues, Is Countersued in Harassment Case", Associated Press, October 14, 2004.
• Bill Carter, "Fox News TV Host Settles Suit", New York Times, October 29, 2004.

2005

• Ward Churchill, "Lessons Not Learned and the War on Free Speech," DissidentVoice, February 3, 2005.
• Alexander Cockburn, "Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs", CounterPunch, February 5, 2005.
• Kurt Nimmo, ""A Ward Churchill Kind of Day," CounterPunch, February 5, 2005.

2006

• Dan Radmacher, "Christian bullies manufactured this 'War on Christmas," roanoke.com, December 17, 2006.

2007

• Keith Olbermann, "Olbermann Dissects Colbert vs. O’Reilly," Crooks and Liars, January 21, 2007. re Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly
• Nico Pitney, "O'Reilly Compares Nevada Debate Opponents To Nazis," Think Progress, March 12, 2007.
• Indiana University press release, "Content analysis of O'Reilly's rhetoric finds spin to be a 'factor': Commentator uses name-calling more than once every seven seconds in 'Talking Points Memo'," May 2, 2007. (Study available here.)
• Nico Pitney, "STUDY: Bill O’Reilly Uses Derogatory Names ‘More Than Once Every Seven Seconds’," Think Progress, May 2, 2007.
• "Tell Bill O'Reilly to Stop Smearing Grassroots Progressives," HillaryClinton.com, undated July 2007.
• Steve Benen, "O’Reilly smears YearlyKos, JetBlue," The Carpetbagger Report, July 17, 2007.
• Peter Daou, "Clinton Campaign to O'Reilly: Don't Smear YearlyKos," The Daily Kos, July 18, 2007.
• Steve Benen, "No Comparison," The Carpetbagger Report, July 18, 2007.
• *Blogometer*: CLINTON: Blessed Is The Peace Maker," National Journal, July 19, 2007.
• "O'Reilly again asserted that 'hate-filled' Daily Kos 'rivals the KKK and Nazi websites'," Media Matters for America, July 20, 2007.
• "*Politico*'s Smith charged Clinton 'seems to be breaching' a 'less-aggression' pact with News Corp.," Media Matters for America, July 22, 2007.
• *Blogometer*: "CLINTON: Kos Hearts Hil," National Journal, July 23, 2007.
• "Howard Wolfson, Communications Director for the Clinton Campaign Talks With Bill," The O'Reilly Factor/Fox News, July 24, 2007.
• "O'Reilly compared Daily Kos to Capone, Mussolini," Media Matters for America, July 24, 2007.
• Kagro X, "O'Reilly: 'Open forum is bull.' Except if it's mine," The Daily Kos, July 25, 2007.
• BarbinMD, "Bill O'Reilly's Hate Site," The Daily Kos, July 25, 2007.
• Taylor Marsh, "BillO'Reilly.com Threatens Clinton," TaylorMarsh.com, July 25, 2007.
• Jeralyn Merritt, "O'Reilly and Wolfson Debate About Yearly Kos," Talk Left, July 25, 2007.
• "Clinton campaign tells O’Reilly to stuff it," Democratic Convention or Bust! Blog, July 25, 2007.
• "O'Reilly continued to attack Daily Kos while ignoring objectionable comments on his own site," Media Matters for America, July 26, 2007.
• "O'Reilly accuses guest of lying -- but 'hateful' Clinton comments he claims he removed are still on website," Media Matters for America, July 27, 2007.
• John Aravosis, "Lowes pulls its advertising off O'Reilly," AMERICAblog, July 28, 2007.

Categories: ALEC Exposed | Water | Energy | Media | Scandals

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bill_O%27Reilly