Bill O'Reilly can sell books. He's not Oprah, but he can sell books.
Journalists often write books. And most journalists today are liberal. So the interesting test is to see whether a given journalist will go on the O'Reilly Factor since the entrance fee is to endure a lecture by Mr. Bill. And since Fox News is a joke among the elite media, to go before O'Reilly requires an act of supreme humility. It's like the star quarterback agreeing to be seen in public with the nerd because the nerd helps him with his homework.
These authors have an interesting choice: do I sell more books by enduring an act of public mortification? It's one of the ways we can get to know who these people are. And yet it's sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. If you don't go on then it seems like you're too proud. If you do go on then you're too greedy.
The recent show with Andrea Mitchell was a classic. Bill tried to convince Andrea of NBC's liberal bias in the two-minute segment. Not gonna work. It's not quite like trying to convince Stalin that Communism wouldn't work in two-minute segment, because Mitchell seems unusually fair in her reportage, but she's obviously going to defend NBC like Americans defend the flag.
There are no Mitchell horror stories of bias as with Rather or Couric and so many others. She's also married to Alan Greenspan, a former disciple of the libertarian Ayn Rand and an appointee of many a Republican administration. But to have a conversation with Mitchell about bias was going to go nowhere. It was amusing to see O'Reilly trying to argue the obvious to the oblivious. A short recap:
BILL: The grass is green.Okay, that wasn't the real exchange. What really happened is that O'Reilly said that NBC news is biased. Andrea said NBC news is a huge organization including cable shows, TODAY show, Nightly News, etc... O'Reilly asked if she could name one conservative at NBC. Mitchell could not name one conservative or one liberal. They are Journalists! [mighty warriors of truth and justice and objectivity]. O'Reilly pointed to a study done by a nonpartisan group that showed NBC was the network that most favored Kerry over Bush in the last election. Mitchell said that that study was highly subjective, that you couldn't assign ratings to words or phrases taken out of context. O'Reilly said that then there was no reality, that words have no meaning. [We're always back to Clinton's prescient "depends on what the definition of is is".]
ANDREA: Grass comes in many forms and varieties and many types of grass are not green.
BILL: Can you name one non-green colored grass currently on the market?
ANDREA: Uh, grass is not green or brown or any other color. It isn't perceived by the viewer.
BILL: What? Then there's no reality.
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