O’Reilly Cites CMI Report on Media Coverage of Ft. Hood Killer

On Nov. 12, Bill O’Reilly led off “The O’Reilly Factor” by framing his “Talking Points” segment around a report from the Culture & Media Institute on the biased network coverage of the Ft. Hood Massacre.

“A new study, by the Culture and Media Institute, a conservative group, says the following: 85 percent of network evening news stories on Ft. Hood did not mention the word ‘terror,’ O’Reilly said. “In fact, in 48 reports, ABC, CBS and NBC referenced terrorism just seven times. Only 29 percent of the evening news reports even mentioned Major Hasan was a Muslim. Unbelievable. Of those mentions, 50 percent defended Islam. And before the president’s speech at Ft. Hood, 93 percent of the network evening news stories ignored any discussion about a terror connection. But after the president said that extremist views were involved, all three networks began to report a possible connection.”

“So you can see that apparently the American media’s still under the sway of the White House,” O’Reilly concluded, “and not accurately portraying things as they really are.”

CMI studied the evening news reporting of the three networks from Nov. 5, the day of the shooting, to Nov. 10, the day of the memorial service at which President Obama made what ABC’s Jake Tapper called “wa tacit acknowledgment of the Islamic extremist views investigators say were held by [Hasan].”