From Chicago Sun-Times:
Bill O’Reilly has been brought low by the same process that afflicted Jerry Springer. Once respected journalists, they sold their souls for higher ratings, and follow their siren song. Springer is honest about it: “I’m going to Hell for what I do, and I know it,” he’s likes to say. O’Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.
I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men. O’Reilly is not the worst offender. That would be Glenn Beck. Keith Olbermann is gaining ground. Rachel Maddow provides an admirable example for the boys of firm, passionate outrage, and is more effective for nogt shouting.
On July 6th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Both in depth research and mathamatical analysis have resulted in the findings that there is a direct correlation between a belief in religion and its Gods and substandard intelligence.
On July 6th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Those who marvel at the combative nature of today’s tv debates, as practiced by O’Reilly et al., should remember that this barbaric genre was pioneered by Morton Downey Jr. in the 1980s and early 1990s. Downey’s successful career as an abusive and explosive broadcast interviewer was cut short by cancer, and he died in 2001.
You can read more about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Downey,_Jr.
Downey’s in-your-face and relentlessly insulting “interviews” with his talkshow guests, both on tv and radio, spawned a generation of broadcast imitators who recognized entertainment gold in his startlingly uncivil approach.
The result has been a kind of Gresham’s Law in broadcast interviewing, much like the vicious and then-new dirty-tricks political strategies of Lee Atwater inevitably spawned today’s familiar imitators, such as Karl Rove et al.
George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seems truer now than ever before.
On July 6th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
You are right Jack. And for those that are too young to remember, or have forgotten about, the Morton Downey Jr. Show, here is a clip on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHB2I83_N_k