Cracks in the Populist Façade

The inane anti-Internet O'Reilly screed Matt mentioned below has by now produced a veritable avalanche of responses from bloggers. Personally, I doubt it's worth it. O'Reilly jumped the shark about a week into his career, and while I occasionally find him pitiful or entertaining in a surreal sort of way, he no longer manages to be infuriating. If Bill thinks it's a pain to get all this attention from the Net, he can take consolation in the thought that he's about 14 minutes and 53 seconds into his lifetime allocation.

Comments

[Sage]

Well said, Julian.

[Todd Fletcher]

He's just pissed because he can't shout people down on the web the way he's used to doing with his guests. The times they are a-changin' Mr Bill...

[Tim Stich]

O'Reilly isn't even remotely infuriating. He's too silly to be that. And the trick to enjoy watching him is to barely watch him at all.

[The Green Phantom]

One seldom-made point about O'Reilly is that his radio show is brokered, i.e. he has to pay the stations to run it.

[Ron Hardin]

The question about the radio show is not whether they have to pay to run it but whether it makes money. They might, for all I know. I tried listening once and it's a mess: they have no concept of how to put together the invisible things that give a show its sound and energy and character. It needed a huge amount of work. Probably it doesn't actually matter what is said there but you do need some production competence.

[Plutarck]

Hee hee hee - poor black kids might steal our hubcaps. Hee hee hee.

This is hard; on one hand there is my strenuous objection to getting all pissy over a single line ment in jest, as if one would never dare to say something offensive unknowingly (which is why I'm kind of hoping I never end up on television or in some mass sensitive public setting, as I tend to forget that I have an unusually good sense of humor on such things and others are far easier to offend than I, for reasons I find utterly illogical) - and then, on the other hand, we have the fact that O'Reilly is a hypocritical asshole who has liking for hating the first amendment and opposing the rights of individuals to choose the way they wish to live their lives.

Eh, here's to people getting what they deserve - which almost never actually happens, and that's usually a good thing...but here's hoping for an exception.

[Kalina Shari]

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DATE: 01/20/2004 02:02:32
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