I have had to adopt a mantra from time to time, when the hands of fate guide my television to Fox news. Bill O’Reilly is not a journalist. Bill O’Reilly is not a journalist. He comments on the news. His show is for entertainment purposes–it’s an unfunny Daily Show.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, journalists convey facts. They present events to the world with the least bias possible. Any journalist who fails to do this loses credibility, and begins to slide the slippery slope to the basement of our culture, where Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly have found themselves kings of trash, knighted each other with dead salmon, and fashioned robes from old playboys and dried dog’s vomit. One might as well start a blog.
Anybody who thinks Bill O’Reilly is unbiased should take a very hard look at his September 4th interview of Barack Obama.
Well first of all thanks for being a man of your word.
These were the first words of the interview, and the point at which I feel it stopped being one. From word one, O’Reilly tries to make Obama look unreliable. I have to say, this isn’t appreciated by me, and shouldn’t be tolerated in an interview. What kind of person starts a conversation, much less a professional interview, by acting surprised they even turned up?
Bill then keeps Obama on the defensive.
Do you believe we’re in the middle of a war on terror.
Then…
Who’s the enemy?
What does Bill expect Obama to say? Is he hoping the man will start screaming “whitey’s to blame,” and dash out of the room? These are not hard hitting questions. These are barely interview questions. They are a patronizing quiz, implying that Obama doesn’t know who terrorists are.
We’re roughly twenty seconds into the interview at this point, and O’Reilly’s pattern of unprofessional and unintelligent behavior has been set. At one point O’Reilly requests that Obama admits he was wrong about Iraq. Which, aside from being horrendously offensive, is a blatantly loaded request.
The interview was clumsy. It was unprofessional. It was unintelligent. Watching Obama keep his cool and out-talk one of the worst voices of our age was encouraging, admirable, and makes me look forward to the presidential debates, when our candidate will be up against McCain, who seems to me an honorable man.
