I’ve added Bill O’Reilly and his “O’Reilly Factor” to my list of dangerously negative media coming out of the United States. For those who don’t follow US happenings, Bill runs a nightly show on Fox called the “O’Reilly Factor”, which he claims is spin free. It’s also hosted on Fox, which claims to be “fair and balanced”.
Listening to this guy, it’s very clear where he stands. While he reads out mails from readers around the world, some of which go against his politics, he’ll always come back with a Republican answer to the points raised. Mention the number of troops who’ve died in Iraq? He’ll talk about the reasons retrospectively given by the administration for the invasion. Talk about media coverage? He accused the BBC recently of being anti-American. And he’s fallen into the trap of believing everything that’s made in the US is of high quality. Actually that’s a worrying xenophobic viewpoint that keeps the US from innovating in the wider world.
After watching the “O’Reilly Factor” and various other content on Fox, I’ve decided that the greatest thing a US billionaire could do would be to invest in a national NPR-style television network with high quality content, mixed in with general shit about pointless crap (so the average person is interested in watching it too). Thank goodness for BBC America, ABC, NPR and a few other bastions of high quality news over there. Nevertheless, millions of people in the US have no idea what they’re missing and that is truly very shocking to me indeed.
Jon.
BBC is solidly anti-american. It’s not as hardcore as many other outlets, such as Al-Guardian, but in the same time it’s a much bigger and more powerful media empire, which also cannot ever get bancrupt! You’re desenticised to its bias, naturally. Hutton’s inquiry did very little to uncover the systemic problems.
When I just moved to the U.S. eight years ago, I listened to NPR all the time. I stopped when their transparent communist agenda became too obnoxious. Eventually, anti-american jokes appeared at Prarie Home Companion (it was before the nauseus bile of Garrison Kleinor was published by Seattle Post-Intelligencer), and places like Wait-wait, Don’t Tell Me turned into complete leftist wankfests. It went so far that Klick and Klack added anti-Republican jokes (not anti-american though, or perhaps I didn’t listen enough). Amazingly enough, Terry Gross held off the longest
Millionairs like you envision did happen before. For example, Soros did this, and Eric Schmidt did. If you are interested in the sorry state of leftist commercial radio broadcasting, you might want to avail yourself with the history of Air America. NPR is governed by the same corporation which produces PBS (and naturally, PBS’s budget dwarfs NPR’s). This allows liberal senators to raise cries of “children programming under the knife” every time the defunding of public broadcasting is discussed. Then, the NPR’s poison continues to flow freely because it’s such a minute fraction of PBS’s budget.
By the way, O’Reilly is not a very sympathetic character. Sorry, forgot to address it in the first comment. His jokes are quite low level. For example, at one time he mentioned how the liberal establishement was having a premature ejaculation at the thought about Fitzgerald’s investigation. And what do you know, like attracts like from all sides of the body politic. Next, a liberal called him and opened with “My New York Times is now ruined”. Unbelievable. Either it was just a liberal jackass who thought it was funny. Or it was a liberal who thought that such verbal excretion would play along with rednecks who listen to O’Reilly. Either way, a jackass.
Fox tolerates O’Reilly for his Howard-Sternish kind of ranking-gathering ability.