O'Reilly Factor

If you listen to the Obama administration, Democrats, and the mainstream media, Fox News is just an echo chamber for Republican talking points as well as a proud defender of former President George W. Bush.

Fox fans counter that this is the only television network where liberals and conservatives regularly are allowed to voice their views while getting challenged by hosts and anchors.

Thursday's "O'Reilly Factor" was a perfect example of this premise.

The host's guest was Karl Rove, and the former Bush adviser was certainly NOT treated with kid gloves by the very contentious and argumentative host.

As you watch the following clip, try to imagine a member of the Obama administration being so forcefully grilled on any mainstream television station (video follows with transcript): 

Bill O'Reilly on Wednesday said the Obama administration has started a new war with Fox News.

"As you may remember, the President and his team harshly criticized Fox News last fall for not being fair. And that led to a vigorous back and forth between the FNC troop and the White House, which of course jazzed our ratings up a bit. Then things kind of died down." 

After White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' childish attack on FNC's Wendell Goler Tuesday, O'Reilly thinks the ceasefire has officially ended.

"The lingering issue is that Fox News is by far the toughest media outlet on President Obama, and he doesn't like it" (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

There's a cynical theme growing in the media that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square Saturday, was driven to violence by the loss of his job, the loss of his house, and his anger towards former President George W. Bush.

In all of this theorizing -- or what some might call psychobabble -- those making the assertion have yet to ponder if six years of Bush Derangement Syndrome might also be involved.

For over a year, Americans have been warned that so-called "hate speech" directed at Barack Obama and Democrats by conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, as well as others at Fox News, is going to manifest itself in violent acts against elected officials and/or our nation.

With this in mind mightn't years of "hate speech" directed at Bush and Republicans by liberal talk radio hosts and MSNBC in particular have incited Shahzad's anger to such an extent that he decided to become a domestic terrorist?

Consider what the Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday (h/t Jennifer Rubin, photo courtesy AP):

On Friday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, substitute anchor Juan Williams devoted a segment to the recent inclusion of Iran on the United Nations Commission on the Status for Women, despite the draconian treatment of women by government authorities in the nation. The FNC host was reminded of Libya's leadership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 2003. Williams:

Another outrage courtesy of our friends at the U.N. Iran has just been selected to sit on the United Nations commission on human, on women's rights. Iran, which requires that women who don't dress modestly enough get stoned or lashed. Iran, which threatens to arrest women with suntans. I guess we shouldn't be shocked. In 2003, Libya was selected to head up the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Williams brought aboard author Brigitte Gabriel for further discussion of the issue. Below is a complete transcript of the segment from the Friday, April 30, The O'Reilly Factor on FNC:

Conservative author Ann Coulter Friday said she's never seen the press lie about any issue as much as they have about the new anti-illegal immigration law in Arizona.

"Everyone is blatantly lying about what this law does," she told Juan Williams who was filling in for the regular host of Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor."

"I've never seen anything, a law lied about, any public issue lied about so much," she continued.

"And I don't mean commentators on other stations. I mean, they are delivering the news, claiming that this is going to be racial profiling. The cops can stop anyone. It's like Nazi Germany. Just blatant, blatant lying" (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t The Right Scoop): 

On Monday's Joy Behar Show on HLN, as host Behar discussed controversial political commentators with guests Phil Donahue and Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Donahue praised the success of far-left MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann, and lamented not having included a "Worst Person" segment in his short-lived MSNBC show. Donahue: "Worse, worser, worsest, I wish I thought of that. Maybe I would still be on the air. But I`m watching this. I see, first of all, I`m crazy about Ed Schultz, although he`s come a long way without my support. Why he didn`t have a show earlier I don`t know."

Behar played an unusual part as she argued against Donahue from a conservative point-of-view, suggesting that Schultz and Olbermann are "radical," and defending FNC from charges by Donahue that liberal voices who praise President Obama are not included on the news network.

But she ended up agreeing with his claim that primetime shows on FNC -- which he referred to as "shout shows" presumably referring to The O'Reilly Factor and the Hannity show -- do not feature liberal voices, ignoring the regular inclusion of liberals like Juan Williams and Alan Colmes on The O'Reilly Factor, while even on the Hannity show at least one liberal commentator is usually present during the show's nightly "Great American Panel" segment:

On Monday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, substitute host Laura Ingraham and FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg discussed the mainstream media's double standard in handwringing over whether peaceful Tea Party protesters will inspire violence while actual violence perpetrated at left-leaning rallies is ignored. After playing a clip of police officers in Phoenix being hit by bottles thrown by protesters who oppose Arizona's planned crackdown on illegal immigration, Ingraham set up Goldberg: "Why are we surprised when we have some thugs out there in Phoenix over the weekend causing trouble? And we don't know who is responsible, but there was thuggish behavior. Meanwhile, still hearing about the Tea Parties that were largely peaceful, of course."

Goldberg summed up the double standard:

Fox News contributor Bernie Goldberg hit back at Jon Stewart today, saying the "Daily Show" host was "throwing spitballs at a battleship" by attacking the Fox News Channel.

The back-and-forth between Stewart and Goldberg began when the former leveled accusations of hypocrisy, claiming Goldberg criticized others for generalizing while doing so himself. Stewart responded to Goldberg's retort with a musical number presumably titled "Go F--k Yourself."

Goldberg said he had "no problem with what [Stewart] did last night," and was "flattered" that he "devoted half of his show last night to me." But Goldberg went on to call a group of Stewart's most devoted fans "sewer rats" for trolling his site with vulgarity during the past couple days, and told Stewart to "man up."

Comedian Jon Stewart Tuesday responded to Bernie Goldberg's criticism of "The Daily Show" host by performing a Gospel tune with the lyrics "Go f--k yourselves."

As a little background, Stewart last week went after Fox News and Goldberg ending the segment, "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Go f--k yourselves."

This prompted a response from Goldberg on Monday's "O'Reilly Factor" wherein he accused Stewart of being "Jay Leno with a much smaller audience, but you get to say the f-bomb."

After a lengthy segment Tuesday addressing Goldberg's admonition -- which included the comedian actually admitting that there is liberal bias in the media!!! -- Stewart led a choir in vulgarity-laden song (video follows with partial transcript and commentary, song begins at 9:10, h/t Mediaite):

Bernie Goldberg on Monday accused Jon Stewart of being a gutless comedian that is much harder on Tea Partiers and Fox News personalities than liberal media members.

Appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor," Goldberg admitted that "The Daily Show" host was right when he said last week that FNC anchors and hosts often make generalizations about liberals. 

But "when you had [New York Times columnist] Frank Rich on your show, who generalizes all the time about conservatives and Republicans being bigots," Goldberg said as if speaking directly to Stewart, "you didn't ask him a single tough question." 

"You gave him a lap dance. You practically had your tongue down his throat."

The former CBS Newser continued, "You are just a safe, Jay Leno with a much smaller audience, but you get to say the f-bomb, which gives your incredibly unsophisticated audience the illusion, the illusion that you're courageous and that you're a renegade" (video follows with partial transcript, h/t The Right Scoop):

Bill O'Reilly challenged Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) Tuesday for bashing Fox News at a town hall meeting in early April.

"The intention is not to put anybody in jail," the Senator told an attendee who asked a question about penalties for folks who don't purchase health insurance once ObamaCare kicks in.

"That makes for good TV news on FOX, but that isn't the intention."

O'Reilly challenged Coburn for this slight (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

NBC host Norah O'Donnell is taking it from all angles for pulling the race card on Newt Gingrich last Friday.

Speaking at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Gingrich said "shooting three-point shots may be clever, but it doesn’t put anybody to work,” referring to President Obama's basketball skills. Norah O'Donnell embarrassed herself Friday by claiming the comment had racial undertones.

Since then, commentators on the left and right have criticized O'Donnell's race-baiting. Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams have both condemned her remark, and Gingrich himself has repudiated the accusation.

"The left is becoming a parody of itself," Gingrich said Tuesday morning. He added that "it's relatively hard to go from 'we need someone who is a good president more than we need three point shots' to" racism.

On Wednesday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, substitute host Laura Ingraham and FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg discussed the mainstream media's double standard in highlighting bad behavior by extreme and atypical members of the Tea Party movement while ignoring bad behavior by left-wing protesters. After showing a clip of anti-war protesters burning an American flag and shouting incendiary accusations about the CIA and the war on terrorism, Ingraham observed: "That video was striking. And the sentiment expressed, the vile comments. But you've got to search for the coverage of that. I mean, you had to, you had to hunt, with those little metal detectors, to find that coverage anywhere."

Goldberg complained about media treatment of Tea Party activists: "These fringe events at Tea Party rallies, whether they're nasty signs or these alleged shouting of racial slurs, which I am convinced at this point never happened, this fits into the narrative of most mainstream news reporters, that the Tea Party people are not too smart, they're bigots. So when you see a nasty sign, which I'm against and you're against, but when you see one of these signs, they report it as, if not typical, certainly not unusual."

Goldberg soon highlighted charges of racism by conservative activists recently made by Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen, and noted the irony that Cohen himself has been the target of racist and anti-Semitic attacks by fellow Democrats who want his predominantly black congressional district in Tennessee to elect a black candidate in his place. Goldberg:

"If you oppose the Obama administration, you must be demeaned and neutralized."

So said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly Monday about the state of today's media.

"Ever since the Tea Party protest began last summer, the left-wing media in America has been attacking the movement," he began his Talking Points Memo.

"From the jump, the Tea Party protesters never had a chance," O'Reilly continued. "As soon as they objected to President Obama's big government vision, the left-wing media swooped in" (video follows with transcript):

On Wednesday’s The O’Reilly Factor, FNC host Bill O’Reilly took the time to speak with an African-American Tea Party activist named Kevin Jackson about his experiences at Tea Party events and what he thinks of liberal commentators – presumably referring to a number of MSNBC hosts – who have charged that racism is common among Tea Party activists. O’Reilly asked of Jackson: "Okay, now obviously you know the controversy. There have been a number of commentators that have called the Tea Party people racists, branded them, you know, a white power organization or whatever you want to call it. So you hear that and you say what?"

Jackson defended the integrity of Tea Party activists:

Last night, Bill O'Reilly used recent instances of inflamed, occasionally violent liberal protests to give his viewers a lesson in Media Bias 101. Lefties dominate the mainstream press, and are reluctant to cover events that don't suit their agendas, he stated.

"The Mainstream media largely ignores crazy stuff generated by the far left because many media types sympathize with liberal politics." It's hard to put it more succinctly than that. NewsBusters has documented numerous instances of the same trend just in the past few days.

O'Reilly showed a number of clips of just the latest instances of leftist political outrage (video and transcript below the fold). He concluded that "One side gets scrutinized. The other side gets a pass. Awful." Indeed, while it seems one can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing about the horrible, violent racists in the Tea Party movement, there has been relatively little coverage of the left's violence and vitriol.

CNN's ratings woes continue. The cable news network trails its three competitors in every prime time slot. The Fox News Channel, meanwhile, is enjoying record ratings.

Even Joy Behar, HLN's pseudo-newscaster at the 9 pm slot, beat CNN's Larry King Live 21 times during the first quarter of 2010. King suffered the worst ratings of his CNN career.

Anderson Cooper, who used to rely on King's historically impressive viewership for a ratings boost of his own, dropped 42 percent of his viewers. All this despite his coverage of major news events this year such as the Haiti earthquake and the health care battle on the Hill.

On Monday's O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, NPR news analyst Juan Williams furthered the left's talking point about the tea party's supposed connection to militias, and even went so far to claim that the Gadsden or "Don't Tread on Me" flags used by the conservative grassroots movement is "the same imagery that was on Timothy McVeigh" [audio available here].

Williams made this preposterous claim during a panel discussion with the Weekly Standard's Mary Katharine Ham 25 minutes into the 8 pm Eastern hour. O'Reilly asked the NPR analyst about a point made by Fox News's Brit Hume in an earlier segment, that there's double-standard in the mainstream media in the amount of coverage of extremist imagery and language found at tea party rallies has been given versus equivalent imagery and language used at left-wing protests (a point raised by the MRC's Rich Noyes in an August 2009 Media Reality Check): "There's no doubt that the media will seize upon any kind of misbehavior on the right...Whereas if it happens on the left, it will, as Mary Katharine [Ham] said, be de-emphasized or ignored entirely. So that's a corrupt media system, isn't it?"

The guest raised the militia issue at the end of his answer:

WILLIAMS: I think we're out of context here. If we're talking about- you know, somebody going after Ronald Reagan- you know, one guy who's in love with Jodie Foster, okay- if we're talking about that. You know, people who have a lot of hatred- hateful attitudes towards President Bush, and then somebody who is extremist on the fringe, yes. And if that was also to be then the case with the tea party, yes, that's too much and unfair. But, when you start to see militia groups start to associate with the tea party, when you see the flag-

(UPDATE: The Breitbart prize has been increased to $100,000.)

There is $10,000 just waiting to be picked up by Al Sharpton. That is the prize money that Andrew Breitbart has offered to anyone who can reveal a video of Tea Party protestors in Washington, D.C. on March 20 who supposedly screamed the N-word at Congressman John Lewis. This "incident" first came to light when David Kerly breathlessly reported on it for ABC's World News Tonight:

...In fact, Cleaver, Emanuel Cleaver was together with John Lewis – they were walking over to the Capitol when somebody spit on Congressman Cleaver and yelled the ‘N’ word at Congressman Lewis. Cleaver was taken to police headquarters. He did ID the man, but he is not going to press charges. He’s not speaking about it. Lewis is not going to speak about it...

Yes, Kerly reported the racial invective as an absolute fact. Only one small problem. Despite the fact that many cameras were recording this scene, not one video has yet been produced proving this despite the fact that Andrew Breitbart has now offered a $10,000  cash incentive to do so:

It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

When former New York Times editor Howell Raines decided to attack the Fox News Channel and blame the news outlet for President Barack Obama's shortcomings, there was bound to be a response.

And delivering that response was "The O'Reilly Factor" host Bill O'Reilly, who called his show "the signature broadcast" of the network. O'Reilly dismissed Raines as a lunatic. However he was also critical of The Washington Post for giving him an outlet to trot out his ranting.

"[I] think there is a more important thing in play here," O'Reilly said. "The Washington Post has given this guy Raines a big platform on Sunday, this coming Sunday, to print this nonsense and it is nonsense. If Raines were sitting here I could carve him up and he, Raines knows it."

But O'Reilly questioned why the Post had decided to give Raines the space in its upcoming March 14 issue to rip on his network. According to O'Reilly, this was an effort to rally the media for a last stand.

On Tuesday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, during the show’s regular "Pinheads and Patriots" segment, host Bill O’Reilly picked up on Dan Rather’s recent gaffe connecting "articulate" President Obama with "selling watermelons," as the FNC host gave on-screen attribution to NewsBusters as his source while a clip of Rather’s words from Sunday’s Chris Matthews Show played.

O’Reilly then observed the double standard between the likely media interest if a right-leaning personality like himself made such a statement which seems to employ racial stereotyping versus the lack of interest in such words being uttered by the left-leaning Rather.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Tuesday, March 9, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

Bill O'Reilly fired back at Tom Hanks on Friday after the Oscar-winning star mocked Fox News on MSNBC earlier in the day.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Hanks was on "Morning Joe" yesterday attacking Fox News, Ann Coulter, and Tea Partiers.

"[H]e goes to a very low rated, left-wing network, where he poses as a producer playing off a video that showed a fight in an Italian TV newsroom," said O'Reilly.

"Now, that doesn't diminish his talent, which is major, but it does make him kind of a mindless partisan" (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

According to a focus group done by pollster Frank Luntz, folks that voted for Barack Obama liked the recent attack on Sarah Palin done by the cartoon series "Family Guy."

As NewsBusters reported almost two weeks ago, the Valentine's Day episode of the Fox hit featured a Down Syndrome girl saying that her mother was the former governor of Alaska.

This sparked a nationwide debate about whether this was just harmless satire or deeply offensive on a number of levels.

With this in mind, Luntz put together a focus group of thirteen folks that voted for John McCain in November 2008, and eleven that voted for Barack Obama, to gauge reactions to this segment as well as to how Palin responded to it.

Though obviously a very small sample set, the results he shared on Friday's "O'Reilly Factor" were staggering to say the least (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Right Scoop and @Cubachi):

Chris Matthews is widely known for his hasty--and often erroneous--conclusions about the conservatives he criticizes on his show. He has wondered if Rush Limbaugh really believes what he says and supported claims that Joe Stack is somehow tied to the "radical right".

During last night's "Hardball", he did it again. Matthews quoted former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich completely out of context to make it seem as if he had called Obama a socialist without having any idea what the word means.

In fact, Gingrich knows exactly what the word means, and spent considerable time clarifying and qualifying his statement. These additional remarks, however, were left out of Matthews's report in his attempt to delegitimize Gingrich's argument without actually addressing it.

On Monday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, during the show’s regular "Reality Check" segment, host Bill O’Reilly highlighted video of President Obama from 2007 in which he bragged about having a close association with the recently discredited left-wing group ACORN. O’Reilly introduced the clip, which can be viewed at HotAirPundit, by crediting California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa with finding the video: "President Obama has avoided the subject of ACORN ever since that activist group got into a lot of trouble. But there is a new tape, recorded in 2007, and discovered by Republican Congressman Darrell Issa’s office. The tape is heavily edited, so keep that in mind."

The FNC host then played clips of Obama in which the then-Senator declared himself to be a "friend" of ACORN, and, as he invited the group’s "input," he promised that "You don’t have to ask me about that. I’m going to call you even if you didn’t ask me." Obama also asserted that when he ran a voter registration drive in Ilinois, "ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it," and declared that he had "been always a partner" with the liberal group while he was in the Senate.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Monday, February 22, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

On Monday's The O'Reilly Factor, FNC's Bill O'Reilly hosted a debate between global warming skeptic Joe Bastardi of Accuweather, and Bill Nye of PBS's Bill Nye the Science Guy, known for recently declaring that it was "unpatriotic" to dispute global warming. Bastardi argued that recent winter weather patterns are connected to El Nino, not global warming. He also linked sunspot activity to warming and cooling trends. Bastardi:

You want to bring up the CO2 argument. Why don’t we just look at the sunspots back here – back in 1750 – and notice that they’ve been coming up – and along with it the temperatures. Basically, it comes down to this: If you look at the strength of correlation to warming, and this is courtesy of meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, CO2 since 1895, you can see the .43, the sun .57, the oceans .85, but since 1998 CO2 has gone next to nothing because the Earth’s temperature is flatlining and CO2 is coming up.

He went to sum what he believed to be the implausiblity of the argument made by those who believe in global warming theory:

A website owned by the Washington Post on Monday accused Fox News host Bill O'Reilly of racism. O'Reilly's slight? Informing his viewers of the widespread corruption in Haiti. The accuser, meanwhile, omitted key facts undermining his charge.

O'Reilly had the audacity in a January 13 "Talking Points" segment to make the "not particularly constructive" suggestion (in The Root's words) that his viewers be wary of the intermediaries they use to send aid to Haiti given the island's notorious problem with corruption.

First of all, O'Reilly is a very "constructive" donor to the Haitian relief organization Haitian Health Foundation. The organization's founder, Dr. Jeremiah Lowney, heaped praise on O'Reilly for his generous donations to the cause in a letter read on air on January 22: "Mr. O, thank you for your latest donation. Your generosity over the years to the Haitian Health Foundation has brought improved health and hope to our poorest neighbors. God bless you!"

Not content to merely omit facts in his dubious attacks on O'Reilly, The Root author Thomas Reed attributed O'Reilly's statement that Haiti is an immensely corrupt nation to "a far too familiar trope: Black as savage, other, incomprehensible. Inhuman. Is this hyperbole? Perhaps."

Greg Gutfeld Friday said comedian Jon Stewart's opinion of Fox News is "nuttier than squirrel poop."

"Stewart's got to stop whining about Fox tilting to the right," declared the "Red Eye" host during his Greg-alogue.

This was in response to what the "Daily Show" host said about FNC during his often heated discussion with Bill O'Reilly Wednesday. 

Much of his criticism did not sit well with the outspoken Gutfeld who marvelously concluded, "Fox News only looks right because everything else is left" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Don't have the clout to get "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart on your primetime program like Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly? You can always opt for Lizz Winstead.  

Appearing on HLN's Feb. 4 "The Joy Behar Show," Winstead - co-creator Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," host of a show for the now-defunct Air America radio network and former executive producer for MSNBC's "Weekends with Maury and Connie" - took a critical shot at Fox News host Glenn Beck.

"He should be institutionalized," Winstead said. "First of all Glenn Beck, why is he even on television? I think it's somehow abusive to have Glenn Beck on TV because he seems mentally unstable."