Bill O'Reilly: Fair or Unfair

pwo · 04-21-05, 02:08 AM

In another thread, some people were calling Bill O'Reilly unfair. To me, he seems like a strongly opinionated host. Yes, he does come off as a jerk sometimes, but I think he is willing to give the other side a fair chance. He gave Micheal Moore a completly unedited interview. Yet, a lot of the liberals he invites to be on the show don't want to show up. Hmmmm.....I think because Bill O'Reilly will expose them, others say he doesn't give give him a fair shot (I don't know how)?

So, is the O'Reilly Factor, Fair or Unfair, and how many times have you watched the show?

Explain

Kyle · 04-21-05, 02:44 AM

He can be a bit of an asshole at times I suppose, but I find him entertaining to say the least. I'd say he's pretty fair, though I think he has been caught making up statistics on the spot quite a few times. But who hasn't

ShamMol · 04-21-05, 09:55 AM

He is entertaining, yes, but he is too strongly opinioned to be fair. I have watched it more than 5 times, and while I find it entertaining, it isn't fair and balnanced.

Squawker · 04-21-05, 05:38 PM

O'Reilly is a rude, jerk most of the time. When he has his mind made up there isn't anything the guests can say to change it. He is fair in that he lets them say what they want as long as they don't "bloviate", but he always tells them how wrong they are.

vauge · 04-21-05, 06:20 PM

I voted other. I have seen the show many times (much more than 5, but less than 50) as well as heard his radio numerous times.

He attempts to sound fair, but in the end he sells entertainment.
Not much different than his old 30 minute magazine shows - where he started from.

Consistancy is not his strongest point.

Mixed View · 04-27-05, 09:07 AM

I've watched the O'Reilly everyday since the beginning of the school year. I like Bill. My favorite is Mikeal Savage. Bill's fair, but yes he is sometimes a jerk. Sometimes you've got to be to get your message across.

ShamMol · 04-27-05, 08:51 PM

Even when you message isn't fair like Bill's is not fair? I don't agree with that at all...see what he did to those kids from Hamilton and tell me he is fair.

pwo · 04-28-05, 12:32 AM

Please explain ShamMol.

ShamMol · 04-28-05, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pwo

Please explain ShamMol.

Easily,

Quote:

There were reasons aplenty not to have invited Churchill and, once he was invited, to have rescinded the invitation. Hamilton would not do so. It flung around the First Amendment with abandon, as if Churchill was a faculty member whose job was at stake. Then Bill O'Reilly struck. The Fox TV commentator went to town on the controversy, finding the usual liberal idiocy at the usual liberal college perpetrated by the usual liberal morons. Having rounded up his usual suspects, O'Reilly ended a segment about Hamilton by providing the name of the college's president, Joan Hinde Stewart, her e-mail address and the school's phone number. Then, blood dripping from his evil heart, he asked his deranged viewers to "keep your comments respectable."

The school caved. Stewart reported getting 6,000 or so messages, and I know, because I get them all the time, that many of them were vile and obscene and even threatening. But this is the true cost of free speech. It is not some rarefied principle, not some slogan, not some trivial right for professors to abuse in comfortable distance from the targets of their ideas, but the most powerful and dangerous right of them all. And because O'Reilly had, in effect, organized an Internet lynch mob, a collection of cyber-goons -- one of whom threatened to bring a gun -- the school simply junked the program. It chickened out. Source-WashPost

Quote:

Am I being unfair to this Churchill guy?

PAUL CAMPOS, UNIV. OF COLORADO PROFESSOR: No, I don't think so. I think it would be very difficult to be unfair to him actually.

O'REILLY: But what is his agenda? What is he trying to do? I mean, it's so over the top and so hateful, it's hard to believe.

CAMPOS: Well, it is incredibly over the top. And I would encourage everybody who's interested in this debate to actually read his essay, which is widely available on the Internet so you can decide for yourself whether these characterizations of it are accurate or not.

Once I actually went and read the entire thing, I was so appalled, that I wrote a column about it, decrying and denouncing the idea that the University of Colorado would have as a tenured member of its faculty somebody who could be spewing this kind of disgusting nonsense in the context of a supposedly academic environment.

O'REILLY: But then you go over to the — you know, I want to tell everybody you do write a column for "The Rocky Mountain News." But then you go into the freedom of speech area. And that's where all these academics are hiding.

They're basically saying OK, we all deplore what Professor Churchill says, but it's freedom of speech. He has a right to do it and all of that. How do you answer?

CAMPOS: Well, yes, he does have a right to do it in the sense that the government does not have the right to stop him from publishing what he wants to publish. And in that sense, yes, he has a First Amendment right, like all other Americans do, to say what he wants to say.

That does not mean that if he engages in conduct, including publishing things that bring into question his professional competence that the University of Colorado, his employer, cannot sanction him for behaving in that fashion.

O'REILLY: Well, that will happen on Thursday. After our report on Friday, professor, all hell's breaking loose across the country, both in Boulder and in Clinton, New York, where Hamilton College is.

The board of regents for the University of Colorado are going to meet on Thursday. I fully expect they will sanction the professor, but that doesn't mean anything to him. He's an American hater.

But here's the really bad thing about this. And here's why I'm involved with this. There are people at Hamilton — and I don't know if there are any at U.C. Boulder — but at Hamilton there are, who lost loved ones on 9/11.

I mean, this guy, this is just cruel to say these people deserved it, they were little Nazis, which is what Churchill says that these people in the World Trade Center (search) and the Pentagon were little Nazis.

And you know, there's — one of their sons is at Hamilton. How brutal is this?

CAMPOS: Well, there's a real irony here, which is that Ward Churchill was acquitted a couple of weeks ago by a jury in Denver for, I believe, disturbance of the peace in regard to interfering, along with some other people, with a Columbus Day parade. And the claim of the defendants in that case, including Churchill, was that the Columbus Day marchers didn't have a First Amendment right not to have their march disrupted because Columbus Day celebrations are an incitement to genocide and are therefore hate speech.

So in other words, this is a guy who goes around claiming that a Columbus Day Parade is hate speech and can be interfered with, but at the same time, is claiming that when he writes an incredibly hateful and just basically deranged sort of rant as a scholarly paper.

O'REILLY: OK, so this guy — you know, we — it's funny, professor, because as soon as we started doing this story, then as I said, the whole country became engaged.

This just happened. It just came across the wire that Churchill has resigned his chairmanship of the Ethnic Studies Department at U.C. Boulder. So he's under enormous pressure now.

But here's the big issue. Number one, why is Boulder sanctioning a guy who hates his country the way this man does? And number two, why is Hamilton College, which is just as guilty, all right, inviting this man to come to spread the hatred? See, I'm not getting why this is happening.

CAMPOS: Well, I can't speak to why Hamilton College is doing what it's doing, but I think the University of Colorado is doing absolutely the right thing at this point to launch an investigation to ask why is this person a tenured member of the faculty?

O'REILLY: Yes, but they knew this for years. We — they're only doing this because we started reporting on it last Friday. They knew for years this guy was doing this kind of stuff. He's not a subtle guy.

CAMPOS: Well, actually, the administrators and as far as I can tell, almost all of the faculty at the university were unaware of this essay. And that that, I think, is really quite unfortunate.

O'REILLY: Yes.

CAMPOS: And I think one of the things that needs to be investigated is why were we unaware that this person was publishing this sort of thing? And what should we do in regard to making sure the procedures so we know about what something is doing?

O'REILLY: Yes. You know what this is all about? This is about political correctness once again. That's what this is about. This guy is a native American. He feels that genocide was perpetuated on his race. And therefore, he can hate his country and say anything he wants.

The people bought into this in Boulder. And yes, he's a native American, we're not going to talk about it.

And then in Hamilton College, they basically oh, yes, we want another radical in here to shake it up. We don't care what he says.

And you know, it's an epidemic across the country in college campuses. Professor, I'll give you the last word.

CAMPOS: Well, I think what you're seeing right now this week at the University of Colorado is that, in fact, standards are going to be enforced. And we're not just simply going to shrug our shoulders and say...

O'REILLY: Well, we'll see.

CAMPOS: ...First Amendment, free expression.

O'REILLY: Right.

CAMPOS: And there's nothing that we can do about it.

O'REILLY: We'll see what happens when the regents meet on Thursday. Professor, thank you.

Thats just a little excerpt from what he was saying about the subject.

What he personally did to hamilton may be irreversable. They have lost substantial donor money, have lost many student applications and this was completely overblown by him. HE caused thousands of letters, many of which were threats to be sent to the president of the school and made many on the campus (some of whom I am friends with-I almost went there but am going to Colby instead) scared for their lives with the media frenzy and the nut jobs that came onto campus to protest who they had to pass. Tell me that is fair. And just as an ironic note, at the bottom of the Fox page i took that script from, Real journalism: fair and balanced. That's why we're No. 1 — FOX News Channel was there, lol.

Squawker · 04-28-05, 05:51 PM

Quote:

What he personally did to hamilton may be irreversable. They have lost substantial donor money, have lost many student applications and this was completely overblown by him. HE caused thousands of letters, many of which were threats to be sent to the president of the school and made many on the campus (some of whom I am friends with-I almost went there but am going to Colby instead) scared for their lives with the media frenzy and the nut jobs that came onto campus to protest who they had to pass. Tell me that is fair. And just as an ironic note, at the bottom of the Fox page i took that script from, Real journalism: fair and balanced. That's why we're No. 1 — FOX News Channel was there, lol.

O'Reilly just reported a story like the rest of the press did. Churchhill did the damage to Hamilton. He should have thought of the school and students before he shot his mouth off. It was on the internet for a while before Fox picked it up, so why do you want to blame Fox?