O'Reilly Chides CBS Commentary Praising 'Certified Intellectual' Obama

On Monday’s The O’Reilly Factor, FNC host Bill O’Reilly seemed to pick up on a NewsBusters posting by the MRC’s Brent Baker which highlighted New Yorker magazine writer Rebecca Mead’s commentary from the January 3 CBS Sunday Morning in which Mead touted President Obama as a "certified intellectual," while accusing President Bush of giving terrorists a "partial victory" by creating "infringements of civil liberties." The FNC host took on Mead during his show’s regular "Reality Check" segment, as he introduced clips of her as evidence that network news organizations "skew left big time," and concluded that her analysis should have been "accompanied by a more conservative point of view."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Monday, January 4, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

BILL O'REILLY: "Check" three, some Americans believe the network news organizations skew left big time, and it's hard to argue with that when the CBS Sunday Morning program presents something like this:

REBECCA MEAD, THE NEW YORKER, CLIP #1: It has been suggested that the appropriate designation for this decade might be the post-9/11 era. Others argue that to give the decade such a name would be letting the terrorists win, as if the cumulative casualties of war and the infringements of civil liberties that took place under President Bush were not already evidence of at least partial victory.

MEAD, CLIP #2: The decade saw the unimaginable unfolding: the depravities of Abu Ghraib and the horrors of Hurricane Katrina and, after all this, the still more remarkable, the election of a certified intellectual as President, not to mention an African-American one.

O'REILLY: Now, that kind of analysis would be fine if it was accompanied by a more conservative point of view, but it was not. "Check" was offended.