Bill O'Reilly And NBC, Shouting to Make Themselves Seen?
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 15, 2007; C01
A war of words between Bill O'Reilly and NBC has erupted into a shouting match that is overheated, mean-spirited and incredibly entertaining.
"NBC News has gone sharply to the left," the Fox News star said on his radio show in early January. "They are an activist network now. They hate Bush across the board."
Such comments prompted MSNBC's Joe Scarborough to break with his fellow conservative. "Why does Bill O'Reilly hate NBC so much?" Scarborough declared on his show.
Beyond the name-calling -- which nearly matches the mud-fight quality of the Donald Trump-and-Rosie O'Donnell smackdown -- is a serious debate about the Iraq war and the nature of media bias. But the cantankerous talking heads are also showmen who know that a bench-clearing brawl can be good for ratings.
O'Reilly, who has hosted the top-rated cable news show for five years, has long berated the mainstream media for lurching to the left, while casting Rupert Murdoch's network as one of the few balanced outlets around. O'Reilly is frequently on the offensive against liberal judges, professors and others -- he recently told an antiwar activist who appeared as a guest that she was a "lunatic" -- but his assault on NBC seems particularly personal.
"I'll admit it. I don't like you guys," O'Reilly told NBC's Andrea Mitchell during an interview 10 days ago in which he grilled her about alleged bias among her colleagues.
Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who has been trying to demonstrate his independence from the GOP, says in an interview that O'Reilly "really does toe the party line more than I ever have."
"I certainly took offense when he said there were no conservatives at the network, we were all liberal stooges and Marxist sympathizers," Scarborough says. The "final straw," he says, was when O'Reilly criticized Richard Engel, NBC's Middle East bureau chief, for "suggesting the obvious" -- that the rushed hanging of Saddam Hussein had been "a PR disaster." (President Bush told NBC's Brian Williams last week that the execution video ranked just below Abu Ghraib in terms of the war's mistakes.)
O'Reilly declined to be interviewed for this column, but Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti says he "has exposed media bias for the last 10 years. This is nothing new. We don't know why NBC finds the label 'liberal' so insulting."
Scarborough says O'Reilly is being driven by animosity toward Keith Olbermann, whose MSNBC show "Countdown" has been gaining in the ratings. "He's allowed his anger toward Keith Olbermann to damage his credibility," Scarborough says.
Olbermann, who faces off with O'Reilly at 8 p.m., has been denouncing his rival for years. He positions his program as an increasingly liberal alternative to the "O'Reilly Factor" and frequently bestows on "Bill-O" his "Worst Person in the World" award. "Countdown" was up 60 percent in the fourth quarter over a year earlier, to 656,000 viewers. But "Factor," despite a 21 percent decline during the same period, still dwarfs the competition with 2.049 million viewers.
Several times over the last year, according to three sources who asked not to be identified because they were describing private conversations, O'Reilly's agent called Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC's television group, urging him to tell his MSNBC commentators to back off. O'Reilly also posted an online petition demanding that NBC dump Olbermann.
In an interview, Olbermann says O'Reilly's latest offensive "reeks a little bit of an attempt to get some attention," though the former sportscaster admits he started the feud as a way of raising his profile.
Olbermann has, for once, limited his on-air comments about O'Reilly. "Something sent him over the edge, I don't know what. Other than the sandbagging and bullying of Andrea Mitchell, it's kind of laughable. . . . There's no point in having a fight with someone who looks like an idiot."
O'Reilly stepped up his criticism of NBC as trying to "woo left-wing viewers" in late November, after the network said it would start describing the Iraq conflict as a civil war.
But O'Reilly's jabs against media coverage are hardly limited to one network. "Bush can't win no matter what he does," O'Reilly said recently. "NBC News, the New York Times, The Washington Post, they're going to say he's an idiot." O'Reilly also chided former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw for his comments about the mishandling of Saddam Hussein's hanging. (Brokaw also called Hussein a "godawful man.")
On Thursday, O'Reilly called MSNBC's coverage of Bush's prime-time address "incredibly negative" and chided "Hardball" host Chris Matthews for saying, during a discussion about Iraq, that Vice President Cheney "always wants to kill."
O'Reilly refuses to mention Olbermann by name, but complained earlier that "an NBC commentator" had said that "President Bush is allowing Americans to be killed in Iraq for money and other insane stuff. Unbelievable."
Olbermann had said that one of the president's accomplishments has been "to take money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers."
Adding an extra layer of farce, O'Reilly now regularly features a body-language expert, who said that Mitchell displayed "high level of uncomfortability" during her appearance on the show.
All but drowned out in the trash-talking is the serious question of whether the war coverage has been unfair. The media issue surrounding Hussein's hanging was not whether he deserved to die but whether the last-minute taunts and release of cellphone video made the execution look like a revenge killing.
The violence in Iraq may have been overemphasized at times, given the media's preference for dramatic pictures and the difficulties of reporting in a country where journalists are often targeted. But now that even Bush has acknowledged a failure to control the sectarian violence, administration officials have largely dropped their complaints that news organizations are distorting the situation in Iraq. Some conservatives, such as National Review Editor Rich Lowry, say their side must accept that the media turned out to be right about Iraq.
The cable pundits, for their part, thrive on finger-in-the-eye argument, not nuance. Fox analyst Geraldo Rivera defended O'Reilly in a radio interview, calling Olbermann a coward and saying he was ready to fight him. "I would make a pizza out of him," Rivera said.
Maybe they could put it on pay-per-view.
Speaking to AmericaIt's no secret that Larry Sabato is one of the most quoted experts on the planet. Governing magazine's Josh Goodman has discovered that the University of Virginia political scientist was quoted last year in at least 46 states. "Over-stretched journalists tap Sabato as an easy source because they lack the time or wherewithal to cultivate relationship with insiders," the former U-Va. student writes.
Says Sabato, who believes the 46-state figure is inflated by interviews reprinted from wire services: "Why do they have to call people like me to draw obvious conclusions? Sometimes I see what I'm quoted as saying and I cringe -- because anyone off the street could have said it." The problem with reporters: "If they call and you don't return the call, they get mad. If you return the call, they accuse you of cozying up to the press."
Rave Review"A sweeping chronicle . . . admirable clarity . . . skillful narrative" -- New Republic owner Martin Peretz in the Wall Street Journal, reviewing Michael Oren's "Power, Faith and Fantasy."
"I have been blessed with numerous friends who have backed me throughout this project and offered greatly valued comments on the text. Thanks go to . . . Martin Peretz" and many others -- Michael Oren, "Power, Faith and Fantasy."
Nice to Meet You, Too"Within the first 45 seconds or so of our first interview, he called me a [bleeping] idiot." -- Ryan Lizza, profiling Rep. Rahm Emanuel in GQ.
