Lindsay Perigo : The O'Lielly Factor

In a world where "journalism" has come to mean left-wing advocacy as practised by the mainstream pseudo-media (MSPM henceforth), Fox News stands out. It is openly engaged in right-wing advocacy. While it sports some daily news programmes that are genuinely ideologically neutral (which cannot be said for the MSPM), its star hosts and commentators unashamedly nail their colours to the mast, even as they invite ideological opponents onto their shows (which again cannot be said for the MSPM). Sean Hannity is a self-described "Reagan conservative"; Megyn Kelly is clearly a conservative of some sort; Greta—well, hard to tell through all that quacking, but I suspect ditto; Stossell and Judge Napolitano are libertarians (libertarians are strictly not "right-wing" but that's another issue); etc. I have no problem with any of that; these guys don't pretend they don't have a bias, and much of the time it's one I, as a libertarian, agree with! I do, however, have a problem with Fox's Star of Stars, Bill O'Reilly, who claims to be none of the above, but simply a political "Independent" purveying a "no-spin zone." The one thing we can turn to him for, he keeps telling us, is unvarnished "facts" and the apogee of "fair and balanced" (Fox's mantra) commentary and coverage.

If this were true, I'd be among his biggest fans. He is a talented broadcaster, no doubt—and to find unvarnished facts and fair and balanced commentary from any broadcaster nowadays, let alone a talented one, is as rare as a human female who doesn't quack like Greta. But it isn'ttrue. I've long thought of Bill O'Reilly as a bloviating blowhard (one of his own favourite expressions) who vaingloriously imagines everything is about him; who consequently never lets his guests speak (since they are supposed to be all about him too) and spends far too much time promoting his products, such as pop-fiction books about the killings of various historical figures written by someone else. I believe recent events have validated my opinion, in a way that Fox News needs to take very seriously and take action on. Not to do so would hand the pseudo-media a formidable weapon to use against Fox, thus helping such fetid MSPM causes as Obamarxism, Islam, Hillary Clinton, etc.

Weeks ago, when NBC's main anchor, Brian Williams, was exposed as a self-aggrandising liar in his reportage on the Iraq War, and suspended from his position, O'Reilly was strangely ambivalent. On the one hand he acknowledged that Williams' lies were unconscionable; on the other he insisted that punters shouldn't be too hard on Williams since "it's always a tragedy when a human being is brought down." Initially I was puzzled by this. Then I remembered that O'Reilly himself had been accused of making up stories in pursuit of self-glorification. Might the accusation be true, and might it be the reason the purveyor of the "no-spin zone" was so muted in his condemnation of a rival arch-spinner masquerading as a journalist?

In one of the aforementioned pop-fiction books, Killing Kennedy (which should be called Re-Hashing the Warren Commission's Whitewash of the Killing of Kennedy) and on Fox TV when promoting the book, O'Reilly claimed to have been on the porch of a friend (and possible CIA mentor) of Lee Harvey Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt, when the latter, inside the house, shot himself. This was in 1977, in Florida. O'Reilly was a cub TV reporter based in Dallas, anxious to make a name for himself, at that time. De Mohrenschildt had been summoned to appear before the House Assassinations Committee which had reopened investigations into the killing of President Kennedy. Now, CNN has produced irrefutable evidence that O'Reilly was working where he usually did, in Texas, not Florida, when the "suicide" occurred, and didn't go to Florida till the next day.

CNN have a horse in this race, of course; they are scandalously biased while pretending to be neutral. They hate O'Reilly for pointing this out, over and over, and for drubbing them in the ratings and rubbing their left-skewed noses in it. But the evidence they have put forward—tapes of telephone conversations between O'Reilly and the late Gaeton Fonzi, one of the most respected JFK investigators in the business—is unimpeachable.

O'Reilly has made no effort to rebut this evidence or in any way address the matter. He has ignored it.

O'Reilly lied.

He has, moreover, attempted to spin other lies by him that have come out in the wash, mainly pertaining to his coverage of the conflict in El Salvador and the Falklands War (making his ambivalence over Brian Williams even less puzzling). His spin has consisted of outlandish semantics of a sort that would make Bill Clinton blush, and has been supremely embarrassing.

A broader deceit that O'Reilly has engaged in ever since signing with Fox is that the Warren Commission was telling the truth. Pre-Fox, O'Reilly had always maintained that there was something highly fishy about the official version of events, saying there was "CIA stuff" involved. As host of The O'Reilly Factor, however, he has dismissed conspiracy theorists as kooks and given them zero coverage. Given the plenitude of reputable people who are demonstrably not kooks who believe there was a conspiracy, this scarcely represents "the apogee of fair and balanced."

The even broader and most important point is: no TV channel can with impunity tout a programme as a "no-spin zone" when its host is not just a spinner but a liar. If Fox News doesn't at least suspend O'Lielly, as NBC did Brian Williams, its claim to be any different from the tawdry pseudo-media against whom it is competing so successfully, will be in tatters. Good causes will be set back, and integrity-based journalism will come even closer to extinction.

ENDS

© Scoop Media