Spoiling the Myth:The "Biased" Lies of a Culture Warrior

Corporate media's journalist-driven "Liberal Bias" -- as so many right-leaning, corporate-media megastars are so keen to remind us -- is transparently "obvious" to anyone with half a brain and a fourth-grade education.

Curious, then, that virtually any time these press-bashing, celebrity bloviators bother to present actual, supporting evidence for this supposedly self-evident "truth," they turn out to be... well, brazenly lying to our faces.

Witness Fox's press-bashing pundit-mascot Bill O'Reilly, whose just-released book, Culture Warrior, is not only filled with the name-calling, red-baiting, and sweeping-yet-unsupported generalizations about "secular progressives" that made the Factor famous (O'Reilly's relentless, on-air attribution of these very tactics to any and all critics of his own work notwithstanding). As O'Reilly's fact-checking archnemeses at Media Matters for America point out in their exhaustive (as ever) critique of Culture Warrior, O'Reilly (as ever) devotes page after breathless page of his latest New York Times bestseller berating the "biased," Liberal Media for its crippling lack of Fox-style Fairness and Balance -- further justifying his own, morally unjustifiable, mass-media presence in the process. And what do you know? Bill-O repeatedly lies through his teeth in doing so, distorting, or just plain inventing facts wherever reality fails to support his (and his audience's) pleasingly pre-determined conclusion.

Tellingly, Media Matters reports, "O'Reilly recently claimed to have thwarted [our] attempt... to review Culture Warrior prior to its release" (clip here):

On the September 21 edition of... The O'Reilly Factor, he noted that his publisher had refused a request to provide an advance copy to "a guy who writes for the left-wing smear site Media Matters." "Nice try," O'Reilly said, "no book."

Reading the list of brazen whoppers the ever-resourceful, "left-wing smear site" culled from O'Reilly's latest, book-length temper tantrum, it's easy to see why.

For instance...

On pages 20-21 of Culture Warrior, O'Reilly writes:

"There is no question that the vast preponderance of America's newspapers have a liberal editorial philosophy... Locally, liberal papers outnumber conservative sheets about ten to one.

O'Reilly, of course, "offers no evidence" to support this sweeping claim. Indeed, Media Matters reports, "this 'statistic' appears to have been plucked from thin air":

[I]n his list of newspapers that supposedly have "a liberal editorial philosophy," [O'Reilly] includes the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Houston Chronicle, and The Denver Post even though all three endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000, 2004, or both.

How dangerously "liberal" were the "editorial philosoph[ies]" of the Times-Picayune, the Chronicle, and the Post? So liberal they've endorsed uber-conservative George W. Bush for president -- twice, in at least one case!

Assuming, of course, that what qualifies these publications as too "liberal" isn't the fact that they carry "liberal" voices at all...

A mere three pages later, O'Reilly offers more, dubious "evidence" for the existence of Liberal Media Bias. Invoking Jesus Christ -- or, more precisely, Mel Gibson's Passion thereof -- "O'Reilly writes that reviews of Gibson's film revealed the deep 'S-P' [secular-progressive] bias of the mainstream media":

Citing NewsMax columnist James Hirsen's book, Hollywood Nation (Crown Forum, 2005), he writes that New York Times film critic A.O. Scott "found that Gibson had 'exploited' the death of Jesus" (Page 24).

Oh, those Christ-hating liberals journalists... When will they ever learn?!

Unfortunately for O'Reilly, and his presumably outrage-starved readers, by simply retrieving and reading Scott's column, Media Matters discovers -- surprise! -- that Scott had, in fact, written merely that Gibson had "exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end" [my emphasis].

The Times' reviewer had, in other words, "comment[ed] on the film's violence" -- "not its spirituality," as O'Reilly's prose explicitly claims.

And the hits just keep on coming...

According to Media Matters:

[On page 20 of Culture Warrior] O'Reilly baselessly claims that [all emphasis as it appears in book] "[i]t is fair to say that the print press desperately wanted Air America [Radio] to succeed," and as proof, asserts that "conservative talk radio is a huge success" but "[c]hances are" "you have seen" no "newspaper articles" about conservative talk radio "lately."

Surely, you say, this "truthy" tidbit about the biased, Liberal Media isn't bogus, too? Read, my friends, and be amazed:

[A] "News, all" search of the Nexis database from June 1 to September 16 found that while Air America Radio has been mentioned 76 times in various news outlets, Rush Limbaugh, the most prominent conservative radio talk show host, has been mentioned more than 1,000 times during the same time period. Even Al Franken, arguably Air America's best-known host, has been mentioned only 301 times, about a third as frequently as Limbaugh.

Oops!----

P.S. Worried the "biased," liberal folks at Media Matters might be the ones making stuff up about O'Reilly, and not vice versa? Determined to preserve the self-delusion that it's media liberals -- and not ultra-conservative pundit-superstars like O'Reilly -- who corrupt democratic discourse by polluting our precious, public airwaves with deliberate, partisan disinformation? By all means, feel free. Visit your local university library, access the Lexis Nexis database, and see for yourself. Go on, try it. It's free.

Unless, of course, you're chicken...

"Balance" in Action:"Lunatics" v. "Hypocrites"

"[P]resumably representing the 'You Decide' half of the network's specious 'We Report. You Decide' slogan," in its saturation-level, Thursday coverage of Hugo Chavez' recent, O'Reillyesque attacks on President Bush, Faux News offered the following, fair-and-balanced, question-headlines (via Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting):

7:16pm: "Pres Chavez: Narcissistic personality disorder?"

10:54am: "How dare Hugo Chavez blast the United States?"

11:02am: "Should we stop buying Chavez's gas from Citgo stations?"

11:59am: "Chavez insults U.S.: Where is the outrage?"

12:29pm: "Should U.S. continue to fund U.N. after applause for Chavez?"

12:54pm: "Will leaders pay the price for supporting Chavez?"

1:26pm: "Is President Chavez becoming a threat to U.S. national security?"

4:06pm: "Taking cheap oil from Hugo Chavez: Act of treason?"

5:34pm: "NY audience gives Chavez standing ovation... Why?"

"But my absolute favorite question of the day," TVNewswer writes, "came from DaySide," where -- "on the show's second-to-last day" -- viewers were asked to respond, by e-mail, to the following "question":

"Lunatics or Hypocrites? Where is the logic behind the U.S. bashing at the U.N.?"

Presumably, for Fox (and its loyal, show-me-no-evil viewers), the responses of those who choose hypocrites will provide sufficient "balance" for the views of those who prefer lunatics...

Test

Kindly ignore...