Media Critiques
Bill O’Reilly, host of “The O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel, claims to operate in a “No Spin Zone.” O’Reilly says he offers the American public hard-hitting, fair news. He also says he represents the common man.
Yet O’Reilly, a millionaire, may not represent “the common man” as much as he may have convinced himself that he does and may in fact be guilty of “spinning” his audience with each show.
I spent a week watching “The O’Reilly Factor” to determine just how fair and balanced the show really is.
A look at the O’Reilly Factor’s Web site on foxnews.com reveals that the show is not driven by its guests, but by its host. He is not hesitant to remind his guests just what the show is about.
"Other interview news shows are guest-driven. O'Reilly Factor is driven by me," O'Reilly boasts. "I will not stand for 'spin.' I look for guests who will stand up and verbally battle for what they believe in."
But the battle is far from fair. O’Reilly constantly interrupts his guests. In one episode I counted 10 total interruptions.
On an Oct. 12 program, he interrupted one guest seven times, not allowing him to finish a single point. When he gave one guest the last word, the closing music started up almost immediately and O’Reilly cut him off.
The show is one hour long and usually consists of four or five segments. If commercials are excluded, each segment only gets about 10 minutes of airtime. The result is a maniac pace that I suspect is half-responsible for the interruptions. Ten minutes is not enough to scratch the surface of an important issue. A superficial exchange of canned arguments is the only thing there is time for.
Perhaps it is a conscientious tactic to lay out the complex issues in little bit at a time. I’m not sure I buy that. O’Reilly typically revisits an issue with the same over-simplistic view each time.
The other half of the interruptions is O’Reilly’s fault. He’s in charge of the show and supposedly speaks for the common man. Since the common man rarely gets a chance to speak out on major issues for himself, O’Reilly may feel its only fair to interrupt his guests before they’ve finished making their points.
When confronted with opposing statistics O’Reilly’s tactic is to deny the facts. He often tells his guests that they’ve been “sadly misinformed.” Or else O’Reilly dismisses the evidence as irrelevant. He often argues “completely different issue.”
How about spin in the “No Spin Zone”? A former Bush administrator appeared on his show October 13. While O’Reilly did question her about the safety of U.S. forces in Iraq, he sat back and allowed her to “spin” the invasion as an operation designed at “improving” the situation in Iraq.
What happened to being balanced? In his Oct. 12 show, he disagreed with Steve Smith, an advocate of Teen Safety in California, over a proposition to change California law. The law would force abortion clinics to inform teenagers’ parents before any abortion procedure is done.
O’Reilly called Smith’s arguments propaganda. Later in the same segment, O’Reilly admitted that the discussion “might not be fair.”
Is any of this a surprise to his viewers? It should not be. It’s a one-man show that glorifies the bully and his theatrical argumentative gestures. It’s not about examining the issues in depth or allowing guests to explain alternative points of view. The show is about O’Reilly.
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