Showing posts with label Bill O'Reilly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill O'Reilly. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

It's like Tabasco, right? Everybody likes Tabasco


When fascists get their own cable network, hilarity is sure to follow.

And what's funnier than Bill O'Reilly and some Fox News Channel legal analyst looking for ways to justify spraying peaceful protesters -- college kids who were just sitting there -- point-blank in the face with pepper spray, sending two to the hospital?

OK, I lied. It's not funny at all. It makes me want to throw up for one important reason . . . or rather one frightening thought that occurred to me. What if Bill O'Reilly had been a prominent national TV commentator in 1963?


What if O'Reilly had been on television every night convincing just enough Americans that they couldn't believe their eyes, not when it came to what they just plainly saw on the TV news. That the horrors being inflicted on blacks in the segregated South weren't nearly so bad as they appeared.

Move along. No injustice to see here. No need to do anything about it.

Can you hear him in your mind's ear, telling a nightly audience of about 4.5 million that it was just water coming out of the fire hoses blasting young civil-rights protesters in Birmingham, Ala.?

C'mon, everybody drinks water. You need water to live, right? It's the stuff of life -- listen, your body is, what, 80 percent water anyway.

And the police dogs being turned loose on those black kids? Who doesn't love dogs? C'mon, it's
Fido, for God's sake! If you make nice with the doggie, he'll be nice to you.

Besides, "I don't think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police." Especially a longtime public servant like Bull Conner.

Right, Bill?

Thursday, July 10, 2008

'The man is Ted Baxter.' And was that a threat?


We held back some of this conversation... we didn't feel it had any relevance to the conversation this evening. We are not out to get Jesse Jackson. We are not out to embarrass him and we are not out to make him look bad. If we were, we would have used what we had, which is more damaging than what you have heard. . . .

-- Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly,
airing an off-air, on-mic private remark
by Jesse Jackson on Barack Obama


* * *

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then some courageous soul with a small budget might be able to do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done--and are still doing--to the Indians in this country. But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizens from anything that is unpleasant.

-- Edward R. Murrow, in an October 1958
speech to radio and TV news directors


* * *

No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper.

-- Mike Rokyo, 1984, upon leaving
Rupert Murdoch's Chicago Sun-Times