Opinion: Bill O’Reilly: The gift that keeps on giving
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Fox News Channel’s no-spinmeister Bill O’Reilly continues his Diana Ross-level hissy fit over Rosa Brooks’ recent column ‘Sweet Jesus I love Bill O’Reilly!’ You’ll recall that we generously afforded Wild Bill’s producer an opportunity to respond to Brooks’ column, but the powerful elite-media insider fumed that our forum was too small to contain the kind of Rumpelstiltskin rages that have made him a superstar. Now O’Reilly puts the ad in ad nauseam by, um, raging about it again:
Most Ridiculous Item: No Fairness in L.A. Times I don’t want to belabor this L.A. Times thing. But you should all know what’s going on out there. The Times pays a columnist, Rosa Brooks, who is actually a lawyer representing George Soros’s Open Society Institute. But the L.A. Times has not told its readers that. That’s amazing. Now, Ms. Brooks, obviously a far-left person, used a bogus Indiana University study to attack me. Not fair, not good. So we contacted the L.A. Times with the facts, asking them to run a column explaining the dopey study. The Times agreed. Instead of putting it in the paper, the column wound up on their Internet site. By the way, BillOReilly.com, our web site, has that if you want to check it out. The bottom line, all we want is fairness from the L.A. Times and every other media organization. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, in L.A. it is. And it’s ridiculous. All over the country, these people, they hire people, and they don’t tell you who they are. It’s just dishonest.
I’m guessing O’Reilly read our response to his previous Ridiculous Item—even though that too only appeared on these here Interwebs—because he’s now backpedaled from his earlier, false characterization of Mitchell’s column as a ‘correction,’ and now lamely (but more accurately) refers to it as ‘a column explaining the dopey study.’ But his acquaintance with truth remains doubtful: Here’s the L.A. Times not telling its readers about Brooks’ affiliation with the Open Society Institute.
And for good measure, here’s the Karl Popper-influenced, anti-communist, pro-market, pro-democracy Soros being called not only a leftist but a rightist, a shill for President Bush’s forward strategy of freedom and a few things not fit for a family newspaper. And because not enough O’Reilly is always too much, we’ll have a response to Mitchell’s article coming up shortly, by the authors of the study that started the current round of name-calling. And of course we welcome any response from O’Reilly’s camp, confident that the readers will tire of this matter long before we do. Watch this space!
Update: Here’s the response from the professors.