For a long time I watched Bill O’Reilly. He always had interesting topics, and a point-counterpoint format that allowed viewers to get some information that didn’t come out anywhere else on television. In the last year, though, he has become more like a combination of Dan Rather and Geraldo Rivera. I believe he might actually take that as a compliment.
I missed his show with Hugh Hewitt, transcript from johnny dollar’s place, and hat-tip to Glenn (of course).
Here is a man who knows nothing about blogs, and has tremendous disdain for us pseudo-journalists. And his mind is made up.
O’REILLY: So you’ve got a defamation pipeline right into Middle America.
HEWITT: But that happens in the mainstream media too. That happens at broadcast networks. Look what RatherGate did.
O’REILLY: Yes.
That “Yes” comes across as pretty condescending. Remember, Bill defended Dan against the blogosphere as a true journalist being taken down by rumor-mongers.
I think Bill is just a little sensitive, here. He spent a lot of years doing some tough assignments to get where he is (as he now tells viewers often), and there is a certain jealousy, I think, toward people like Glenn and the PowerLine Gang as johnny-come-latelys with more influence than he has.
Ah… long-distance pyschology!
Yeh, what gives? O’Reilly hasn’t been the same since the phone sex deal, and that’s only part of his problem with the blogs. Gone are the expose’s on Jessie Jackson’s payments to women, gone with lots of stuff I used to watch him for. But, he persists on deploying a million guardsmen (that we don’t have) to the Mexican border. Honestly, I think that if the Monica thing happened now, he’d give Clinton a BJ in Macy’s window just to avoid being called a conservative.
His coverage of the Swift Vets and Rather was indefensible.
Comment by Robert — January 15, 2005 @ 10:12 am
His decline started earlier…about a year ago. He has become far more like Geraldo, or even Jerry Springer at times.
Comment by Bunker — January 15, 2005 @ 2:06 pm
Yes Bill is sensitive. Bill is now a big govt liberal that used to be a small govt conservative. Name is the same but the thinking is 180 degrees out of sinc.
Comment by Rod Stanton — January 15, 2005 @ 8:30 pm
Once O’Reilly began failing to correct factual errors upon which his guests’ opinions and conclusions were predicated, and treated every idiotic ‘opinion’ as a credible difference of opinion he lost all credibility with me.
One of the reasons I started watching him was because he used to force people to back up their claims with credible facts and/or sources…. he quit doing that.
Comment by Lark — January 16, 2005 @ 2:10 pm