Maybe he should've stuck with
Hard Copy
EDIT: Beg your pardon,
Inside Edition.
I get my tabloid TV mixed up, silly me.
http://www.fair.org/extra/0205/oh_really.html
The "Oh Really?" Factor
Bill O'Reilly spins facts and statistics
By Peter Hart
If it's spin to back up your arguments with bogus facts and statistics, and to dismiss numbers that don't fit in with your preconceptions, then Bill O'Reilly's Fox News Channel show isn't, as he repeatedly claims, a "no-spin zone"-- it's Spin City.
During an interview with National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy (O뭃eilly Factor, 2/5/02), O'Reilly claimed that "58 percent of single-mom homes are on welfare." When Gandy questioned that figure, O'Reilly held firm: "You can't say no, Miss Gandy. That's the stat. You can't just dismiss it. . . . It's 58 percent. That's what it is from the federal government."
But by the next broadcast (2/6/02), O'Reilly was revising his accounting: "At this point, we have this from Washington, and it's bad. 52 percent of families receiving public assistance are headed by a single mother, 52 percent." Not only is that a different number, it's the reverse of the statistic he offered the previous night-- not the percentage of households headed by single mothers that receive welfare, but the percentage of families receiving public assistance headed by single mothers. That's a distinction that O'Reilly did not attempt to clarify; he seemed unapologetic about emphatically putting forward an inaccurate statistic the night before.
The following night (2/7/02), O'Reilly came up with more solid figures, but they bore no resemblance to his original numbers: About 14 percent of single mothers receive federal welfare benefits, he now said-- less than one-fourth of his earlier claim. (He suggested that food stamps ought to be considered a kind of welfare, but that only gets him to 33 percent-- still 25 percentage points short.) O'Reilly explained that "it's really hard to get a stat to say how many single moms percentage-wise get government assistance," though he's found it easy enough to pull one out of the air just three nights earlier.
Suspect certainty
There's a valuable lesson here for Factor watchers: When O'Reilly is most certain, you should be most skeptical. On another show (2/26/01), O'Reilly explained to Florida state senator Kendrick Meek that, thanks to Gov. Jeb Bush's "One Florida" program, 37 percent of students at Florida universities were black: "Thirty-seven percent. That's much higher than the population, the black population, of Florida.
Bush is doing a good job for you guys and you're vilifying him." When Meek challenged those numbers, O'Reilly insisted they were "dead on." Dead wrong is more like it: Total minority enrollment for the freshman class entering in 2000 was 37 percent (Florida Times-Union, 8/30/00)-- black enrollment was about 18 percent.
Sometimes a guest who sticks to his or her guns can keep O'Reilly's audience from being misinformed. When the host claimed (5/8/01) that the United States "give[s] far and away more tax money to foreign countries than anyone else. . . . Nobody else even comes close to us," Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies was thankfully on hand to explain that U.S. contributions per capita were lower than those of any member of the European Union. "That's not true," O'Reilly inaccurately responded. Actually, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2000 the U.S. gave only 0.1 percent of its Gross National Income as official development aid-- less than Italy, the least generous EU nation. Denmark gave 10 times as much on a per capita basis. Even in real terms, Japan in 2000 gave away a third more aid, even though its economy was less than half as large.
O'Reilly rewrote diplomatic history during an interview with James Zogby of the Arab American Institute (4/2/02). After Zogby argued that Israeli settlements were an obstacle to peace between Israel and Palestine, O'Reilly countered that during the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, the offer made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak "would have given 90 percent of those settlements back"-- an idea he credited to "what every single American expert who has seen that says." In fact, O'Reilly got the proportion of settlements Barak was prepared to give up almost backwards: He promised Israelis that any deal with the Palestinians would involve "80 percent of the settlers in settlement blocks under our sovereignty" (Jerusalem Post, 9/13/00). When Zogby pointed out O'Reilly's error, the host said he would welcome any former diplomats who could prove him wrong: "I'll put them on tomorrow," he said-- but didn't.
O'Reilly frequently refuses to believe his guests-- even when they cite a source. When one Factor interviewee remarked (3/1/02) that "60 percent of all people will live in poverty for one year of their life," O'Reilly shot back: "Not in the United States. . . . No, that's bogus. I mean, that's a socialist stat. You can believe it if you want to, but it's not true." When the guest explained that the number comes from research at Cornell University, O'Reilly shot back: "Well, what more do I have to say?"-- as if any information coming from an Ivy League institution had to be wrong.
O'Reilly can be quite fond of a statistic, however, when he thinks it makes a point for him. "Here's the statistic that tells me American society and the system we have in place works for both blacks and whites," he told the NAACP's Walter Fields (5/15/01). "Eighty percent, all right, 80 percent of what whites earn, blacks earn if they stay together in a committed relationship, whether it's marriage or living together. So if a black man and woman are married and stay together, they earn 80 percent of what white couples earn. And the reason it isn't 100 percent is because more blacks live in the south where the salaries are lower. That tells me that the American system, the capitalistic system works and is fair. Where it's broken down it'll right, you may disagree with that, but that stat is rock solid."
That stat-- which O'Reilly has brought up on at least three further occasions (3/25/02, 3/27/02, 4/3/02)-- is actually out of date; the latest census figures (Current Population Reports, 1999) show that black married couples make 87 percent of what white married couples do. But O'Reilly's idea that blacks overall are poorer because they have chosen not to marry doesn't hold water; black single mothers make only 65 percent of what white single mothers do, even though they have the same family structure. And the notion that living in the South explains blacks?lower incomes is a fantasy; blacks in the South, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, actually make more money than blacks in the Northeast.
Even when O'Reilly has a source, he's prone to distorting numbers. ABC's John Stossel came on The O'Reilly Factor (1/26/01) to claim that $40,000 in government money is spent annually on anti-poverty programs for each poor family. The stat appears to derive from the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, who deceptively includes expensive programs that go to non-poor families-- like Pell grants, reduced-price school lunches and Medicare-- in his tally. A few days later (1/29/01), O'Reilly was garbling the already misleading figure: "We're paying $40,000 per person who [is] on government assistance now"--quadruple the amount of spending Stossel was claiming.
"This is personal"
O'Reilly's got something against National Public Radio-- namely, they're not interested in him. "This is personal, this is absolutely personal," he said on his January 7 show. "I've had two number-one best sellers. . . . Not one NPR invitation." He's not one to take an offense lying down, so he lets them have it, attacking the network's "left-wing point of view" (3/6/02): "I've never heard a right-wing person on NPR anywhere," he charges (1/7/02). "You never hear a pro-life person on NPR. You never hear an anti-global warming person on NPR. They don't get on there."
Conservatives, of course, appear regularly on NPR, both in commentary (e.g., Weekly Standard's David Brooks, Heritage Foundation's Joe Loconte) and as sources in news stories. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who as a global warming skeptic represents a tiny fraction of the scientific debate, was on NPR three times last year; the network quoted Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee 11 times in 2001.
You'd think O'Reilly would at least get right what people say about him. "Every time you write about me, you put a little pejorative adjective in front of my name," he remarked to a gathering of TV writers (St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1/28/02). "In the Boston Globe the other day, it was 몋he conservative hatchet man.? He also complained on his show (1/14/02) about "the Boston Globe calling me a conservative hatchet man." In fact, what the Globe actually called O'Reilly (12/7/01) was "an attack dog on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor." Perhaps what they should have called him is "unreliable."
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http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/oreilly.html
Bill O'Reilly's Sheer O'Reillyness
Don't call him conservative-- but he is
By Peter Hart and Seth Ackerman
Fox News Channel's star performer is undoubtedly Bill O'Reilly. Host of the nightly talk-show The O'Reilly Factor and author of the best-selling book of the same name, O'Reilly epitomizes Fox's in-your-face style.
A former anchor for the tabloid Inside Edition whose upcoming contract is reportedly worth $20 million (Boston Globe, 3/14/01), O'Reilly poses nightly as an outraged common man speaking out against the corruption of the liberal elites who run the country from Hollywood and Washington. "We're the only show from a working-class point of view," he once told the Washington Post (12/13/00). "I understand working-class Americans. I'm as lower-middle-class as they come."
Despite assailing Hollywood liberals and Hillary Clinton night after night -- he reportedly has an image of Hillary Clinton's face on his office doormat (Washington Post, 12/13/00) -- O'Reilly is forced to maintain simultaneously that his views aren't conservative at all. He frequently proclaims his independence from all partisan agendas, as he wrote in his book: "See, I don't want to fit any of those labels, because I believe that the truth doesn't have labels." On his show, he often angrily denies accusations of a conservative bent.
There are two major reasons why O'Reilly denies holding conservative views. First, admitting his point of view would destroy the show's premise of being TV's "no-spin zone," an oasis of straight-talk where slick ideologues are held to account.
And it would make it much harder for Fox to maintain that the network's lineup has no particular ideology, since O'Reilly is regularly presented as an equal-opportunity gadfly, a populist who rails indiscriminately at the left and the right. When Fox News chief Roger Ailes told the Washington Post (2/5/01) that "our prime time is just down the middle," he cited the fact that O'Reilly "hammers everyone."
"No Spin Zone"
In practice, however, it's almost always "liberals" and their friends who get hammered:
"Now for the top story tonight: Is Al Gore running for president on a quasi-socialistic platform--in this case, socialism being defined as work and production being supervised by the government?" (6/7/00)
"Nobody should begrudge any American the right to an opinion, but, hey, Rosie [O'Donnell], come on, let's think out your flaky liberal agenda a little. Are you making sense, or are you spouting propaganda? I mean, a guy named Joseph Goebbels did the same thing on the far right during World War II." (book, p. 184)
"That's my advice to all homosexuals, whether they're in the Boy Scouts, or in the Army or in high school: Shut up, don't tell anybody what you do, your life will be a lot easier." (7/7/00)
"I don't understand why in the year 2000, with all of the media that we have, that a certain segment of the African-American community does not understand that they must aggressively pursue their child's welfare. That is they have to stop drinking, they have to stop taking drugs and boozing, and--and whites do it, too! Whites do it, too!" (1/17/00)
One person O'Reilly especially likes to "hammer" is Jesse Jackson. Since late 1998, when the Nexis news database began archiving the show's transcripts, The O'Reilly Factor has run an astounding total of 56 segments about Jesse Jackson (that is, with Jackson's name in the headline). That means that approximately one out of every 12 episodes of The O'Reilly Factor has featured a segment about Jackson -- over a period of two and a half years.
Lest anyone think O'Reilly has mixed feelings about Jackson, here is a partial sampling of O'Reilly transcript headlines: "Did Jesse Jackson Pay His Mistress With Funds Donated to Charity?" (4/2/01); "What Do Jesse Jackson's Financial Records Reveal?" (3/8/01); "Has Jesse Jackson's Tax-Exempt Status Been Clarified?" (3/14/01); "Is the IRS Avoiding Jesse Jackson?" (3/9/01); "Has Jesse Jackson Lost His Moral Authority?" (1/9/01); "How Personal Are African-Americans Taking the Moral Failures of Reverend Jesse Jackson?" (2/19/01); and, inevitably, "Jesse Jackson Lashes Out at The Factor" (3/22/01).
Soft on Bush?
It's hard to find examples of O'Reilly attacking conservatives (other than Goebbels, of course) or their favorite causes with such vigor. For a commentator who scrutinized every action of the previous administration, O'Reilly's softball treatment of the Bush White House speaks volumes: "President Bush ran on the slogan 'reformer with results.' That sounds good to me," he cheered (2/15/01) during Bush's first weeks in office.
When Bush won Senate passage of his tax cut plan, O'Reilly (5/24/01) belittled its opponents: "How on earth could 38 Democratic senators vote against it? . . . This is not a big tax cut. . . . A tax cut that puts money in the pockets of all working Americans is a good thing, period."
When Bush appointed Dick Cheney to formulate the administration's energy policy, O'Reilly (5/1/01) judged the former oil man a sound choice: "I would rather have a Cheney--even though I might disagree with him sometimes--at least trying to do something, than the hypocrites we had in [the] Clinton/Gore administration."
And once the Bush/Cheney energy plan came under attack, O'Reilly ran interference for it. When Greenpeace's John Passacantando asserted that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would only yield six to nine months of oil (5/1/01), O'Reilly was not impressed. "That's your opinion!" he retorted.
This is a favorite O'Reilly debating tactic: Faced with a factual statement he's unable to rebut, he accuses his guest of stating an opinion. When a journalist mentioned Israel's "illegal settlers" (7/18/00), O'Reilly replied: "All right, that's your opinion!" When a drug-policy advocate said marijuana impairs driving less than alcohol does (1/3/00), the answer was, "Well, that's your opinion!"
Interviewing U.S. News & World Report editor Stephen Smith (7/22/99), O'Reilly outlined his view that famed journalist Ben Bradlee had been soft on President Kennedy -- and then asked Smith, who had known Bradlee, "What's your opinion?" When Smith answered that he thought Bradlee had managed to stay objective, O'Reilly interrupted: "Well, that's your opinion, though!"
When O'Reilly's claims of ideological neutrality are challenged, he tends to respond with a pre-written script. As part of his "no-spin" marketing strategy, he has cultivated a handful of pet "liberal" political positions that he can rattle off when accused of leaning to the right. But when O'Reilly actually expounds his "liberal" views, they generally turn out to be conservative views in disguise.
For example, O'Reilly often touts himself as a staunch environmentalist to prove his ideological evenhandedness. But then he rails that "the greens have strangled the California economy" (5/10/01), environmentalists are "distorting and oversimplifying some very powerful issues" (5/1/01), and his stance on climate change (3/29/01) is so qualified as to be practically a non-position: "I believe there is global warming. I mean, I know that's controversial. For every scientist who says there is, there's one that says there isn't."
His often proclaimed opposition to the death penalty quickly wanders off to the far right. O'Reilly's proposed substitute for capital punishment (World-NetDaily.com, 6/14/01): Offenders "should all be subjected to life in prison without parole in a federal work camp," which "would be run military style and be located on federal land in Alaska. It would be in effect a gulag." Convicts would be "forced to labor eight hours a day, six days a week in the harsh climate" and "if the criminal did not cooperate with the work detail, his food rations would be cut, and he would be placed in solitary confinement."
O'Reilly's Roots
In March, Slate.com editor Michael Kinsley infuriated O'Reilly by suggesting the Fox host's background was less proletarian than he lets on (Washington Post, 3/1/01). O'Reilly makes much of his "working class" upbringing in Levittown, Long Island. His book's dust-jacket bio begins: "Bill O'Reilly rose from humble beginnings to become a nationally known broadcast journalist," and O'Reilly says his father, who retired in 1978, "never earned more than $35,000 a year in his life."
But O'Reilly's mother told a reporter her son actually grew up in Westbury, Long Island, a "middle-class suburb a few miles from Levittown," where he attended a private school (Washington Post, 12/13/00). His father's $35,000 income in 1978 is equivalent to over $90,000 today in inflation-adjusted dollars.
In February, O'Reilly gave a speech seemingly taking credit for winning a coveted Peabody award while an anchor at the tabloid TV show Inside Edition. After comedian Al Franken pointed out that the show never won a Peabody, O'Reilly retorted, in Mamet-esque syntax (O'Reilly Factor, 3/13/01): "Guy says about me, couple of weeks ago, 'O'Reilly said he won a Peabody Award.' Never said it. You can't find a transcript where I said it."
But on his May 19, 2000 broadcast, he repeatedly told a guest who brought up his tabloid past: "We won Peabody Awards. . . . We won Peabody awards. . . . A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you're going to denigrate it?" (Inside Edition won a Polk Award, not the better-known Peabody, for reporting that was done after O'Reilly left the show--Washington Post, 3/1/01.)
But such gaffes don't stop O'Reilly from critiquing other journalists. In a profile in MediaWeek (2/8/01), O'Reilly declared that the Los Angeles Times was an abysmal paper, in part because "they never mentioned Juanita Broaddrick's name, ever. This whole [Los Angeles] area out here has no idea what's going on, unless you watch my show." (Broaddrick accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978.)
When former L.A. Times editor Melissa Payton pointed out that the Times archive contains 21 citations of Broaddrick's name, Catherine Seipp, who wrote the MediaWeek profile, summed up O'Reilly better than most: She chalked up her failure to check the claim to having been "mesmerized by O'Reilly's sheer O'Reillyness."
Linear Mode
