Bill O'Reilly, the loud and combative anchor of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, the loud and combative anchor of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, refers to himself as "a forlorn and misunderstood journalist." Not that you'd know it from his book sales: The print The O'Reilly Factor spent ten weeks as the nation's number one bestseller. You also wouldn't know it from O'Reilly's ratings. With 1.5 million viewers per night, his show regularly surpasses CNN's Larry King Live. O'Reilly is the new king of talk -- or perhaps, the king of shout.
And yet portraying himself as embattled is crucial to O'Reilly's carefully cultivated persona. O'Reilly claims to fight for the average American, whose struggles he intimately comprehends. He's been there; he grew up in a poor Irish-Catholic family in Levittown. The only problem is, a December Washington Post profile debunked O'Reilly's claims to a hardscrabble upbringing, noting that his father's $35,000 salary translates today into something closer to $92,000 -- more than enough to send O'Reilly to a private college without financial aid. Indeed, Slate editor and Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley recently flattened O'Reilly for "reverse snobbery" after learning that he refused to venture into that snootiest of coffeehouses, Starbucks. In a column titled "O'Reilly Among The Snobs," Kinsley mused: "Why fake a humble background? Partly for business reasons: Joe Sixpack vs. the elitists is a good posture for any talk show host, especially one on Fox."
But perhaps more insidious is O'Reilly's claim to political neutrality. O'Reilly views himself as a straight talker who asks hard questions and calls it as he sees it. At the outset of each of his shows he announces, "Caution: you are about to enter a no spin zone." This lie is roughly parallel to Fox's slogan, "We Report, You Decide." Fox slants its news rightward without admitting it; O'Reilly tees off repeatedly on the Clintons and spreads wild innuendos about Jesse Jackson while calling himself an "independent." Lest there be any doubt, several profiles of O'Reilly have remarked on his "Hillary Clinton doormat." The Washington Post noted that until last December, O'Reilly was a registered Republican.
Still, some have been snookered by his professed objectivity. Peter Jennings has called O'Reilly "an equal-opportunity provocateur." And in Newsweek, Evan Thomas described O'Reilly's politics as "largely conservative, but not predictably." What Thomas missed is that this very unpredictability is itself concocted, and thus, predictable. O'Reilly's few non-Republican stances amount to mere tokenism. Listen to O'Reilly in an interview with American Enterprise: "I'm independent. Look, I'm against the death penalty, and I also believe in big government intervention to protect the environment. I guess those two issues alone divorce me from the Right."
That's a canard. O'Reilly likely opposes the death penalty because the Pope heads his church. And when O'Reilly says he stands for environmental protection, the code words "big government" immediately betray where he's coming from. If you watch his show, you'll see O'Reilly refer to someone like Robert Reich as a "communist," but apply no political qualifier whatsoever to the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin. Nevertheless, it appears O'Reilly has spun himself so completely that he believes implicitly in the false persona he has donned: Poor and humble of birth, straight shooting and freethinking.
But unlike more wily conservative contrarians, O'Reilly's real politics are easy to pin down. Perhaps the biggest giveaway is his inability to hide a visceral hatred of some of his political foes on the left -- particularly his chosen nemesis, Jesse Jackson.
Conservatives love to pile on Jackson -- the latest to join the lynching are R. Emmett Tyrell and Jonah Goldberg. And the Reverend certainly didn't help matters with the whole "love child" affair. But no one attacks Jackson with such fanaticism, with such alarming obsession, as O'Reilly, who has written, count them, one, two, three, four Jesse Jackson columns so far this year.
O'Reilly's attacks on Jackson have varied, both in their focus and their tendentiousness. But the main tactic is always innuendo, sometimes verging on outright smear. O'Reilly rants about Jackson's financial dealings, then calls repeatedly for an IRS investigation into the "possible corruption" -- an interesting concept, if you think about it. Anyone with spare time and a television show could create the same impression of wrongdoing by going over O'Reilly's tax returns, or anyone else's. Sometimes, though, O'Reilly goes far beyond creating impressions. Although on his March 9th show he said, "I'm not accusing anybody of anything," shortly afterwards -- referring to an apparent omission in Jackson's financial statements -- O'Reilly exploded: "That was fraud! That's what that was, fraud, not an omission."
O'Reilly's attacks on Jackson get personal as well. Speaking of his young daughter, O'Reilly told Evan Thomas of Newsweek, "She's 20 months old . . . same age as Jesse Jackson's. Only she's legitimate." Ouch. Thomas reports that even at Fox, execs have been uncomfortable with O'Reilly's crusade against one of the most visible African Americans in politics.
The irony is that, though he's not self-reflective enough to see it, O'Reilly has a lot in common with the hypocritical image of Jesse Jackson he's been peddling. It's not just that their daughters are at the right age to play with each other. When Jackson came under attack -- largely from O'Reilly -- for alleged financial irregularities relating to his Citizenship Education Fund, he spoke of "right-wing extremists" out to "discredit or destroy us." That sounds strikingly like O'Reilly, who commented on a recent segment of his Fox talk show, "There is a coordinated effort on the part of some left-wing journalists to discredit me and THE FACTOR."
O'Reilly accuses Jackson of fanning conspiracy theories about the suppression of black voters during his Florida activism. Well, witness the conspiratorial O'Reilly: "I believe the powerful protect each other in America, and that includes the elite media." Of course, if you wanted a good example of the powerful protecting the powerful in the elite media, there's none better than the way Fox's other anchors shelter and coddle O'Reilly as he lacerates Jackson. Witness this moment with O'Reilly on Fox's The Edge with Paula Zahn:
ZAHN: So do you think it's impossible to ask these tough questions about Jesse Jackson without being accused of being a racist or a right-wing zealot?
O'REILLY: Well, you're going to take -- you're going to be accused of that.
ZAHN: Because you've taken some heat.
O'REILLY: Sure. Sure!
At least O'Reilly allows some criticism of himself on the air. At the end of each show, he reads critical e-mails as well as positive ones from his viewers. And it seems like virtually every night he has to defend his continuing crusade against Jackson. Recently, one viewer wrote in, "O'Reilly, I am sick and tired of you pounding on Jesse Jackson. I used to enjoy watching you but now THE FACTOR is unbearable."
Employing O'Reilly's own methods of innuendo, let's just let that speak for itself.
