Poking the (Poppa) Bear: Taking on O'Reilly AND his Detractors

O'Reilly says everything that the leftists hate.  Well, DUH!  He works for Fox News--that's his job.  He also exercises his first amendment rights, guaranteed under the Constitution, a pursuit I wholeheartedly support.  That isn't something we grant only to people who agree with us, it's something that needs to be in place for everyone.

There's a lot good to say about O'Reilly.  When the generationally self-aggrandizing media refused to criticize the many sins of President Clinton, O'Reilly became the lone voice in the wilderness, crusading against Slick Willie's excesses.  I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes as the media seemed to be working overtime to untangle their man from the web of his own libidinous deceit.  I don't care that Monica Lewinsky performed sexual favors for him;  I don't care about the cigar or the stained blue dress; I don't even care that his wife had to be humiliated in front of the nation because the President wouldn't come clean (insert joke here).  It came down to one simple word: perjury.  And the President's army of apologists in the punditry could claim that it didn't matter, that no one had ever gone to jail for lying about sex, that he'd done nothing wrong.  But they couldn't say he didn't do it, and O'Reilly was among that small cadre of individuals that refused to let him off the hook, just because all the other kids were doing it.

Messengers have a time and a place.  Sometimes, after delivering the all-important, earth-shattering message, the messenger comes to be thought of as a prophet--even a messiah.  He was right about x; he must be right about a lot of things.  Audiences adopt his philosphy as their own and before long, they stop questioning anything he says, even when it stops making sense.  He becomes entrenched, not for his insights that won him audiences, but for his dogma that reassures, even as it incites them. 

Becoming the embattled establishment he once fought against doesn't remove his right to speak opine or convey information as he sees it.  But O'Reilly, the consumate critic of anything and everything, seems to have forgotten that the same rules that protect his verbal attacks on others also protect his detractors when they choose to level attacks against him.

The Fox News Boycott reports that O'Reilly has taken exception to being called a race-baiter by Syracuse professor, Boyce Watkins.  Having failed to compel the University Chancellor, Nancy Cantor, to issue an apology for Watkins, O'Reilly claimed tha Syacuse University didn't have any academic standards.  This apparently resulted in Professor Watkins being denied tenure.

Perhaps you noticed the same thing I did: The Fox News Boycott--in name, if nothing else--seeks to silence those (namely, Fox News) who have the temerity to disagree with them.  Might it not just as well say, "Silence the dissidents?"  I don't understand why it is that audiences obediently tune in to watch and/or listen, hanging on every word of someone that has ceased to be relevant many years ago.  I don't have to understand it: caveat emptor--let the buyer beware--says it all.  His rightness or wrongness isn't a matter of moral or legal debate.  His right to speak is sacrosanct, and rather than O'Reilly trying to silence his critics or other movements trying to return the favor, perhaps the debate needs to end with, "Oh, I hate that guy."

I am not one of O'Reilly's "folks."  He does not speak for me.  But electronic messengers are a lot like vampires: if you don't want to be at their mercy, don't invite them into your home.

Or at least show them the door, once their message has been delivered.

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