Friday, October 10, 2003

Bill O'Reilly, Unfair and Imbalanced

I know this is not surprising either, but if you happened to be listening to the program "Fresh Air" on NPR yesterday you heard the host, Terry Gross, interview Bill O'Reilly and you heard him cut off the interview. Seems Bill wasn't happy that Terry was not limiting 100% of her questions to the topic of his new book. He got angry and hung up on her.

I listen to Fresh Air all the time and Terry Gross is one of the best interviewers around. She asks intelligent questions in a calm and rational manner. During the interview yesterday I thought she was giving O'Reilly an opportunity to answer some of the accusations thrown at him by Al Franken and others. I thought he was doing a good job of answering those accusations and he was winning some points with me. He was typically humorless and cocksure of himself but all-in-all he was proving himself to be human. Terry was doing him a favor I thought - because she had interviewed Al Franken earlier and this was O'Reilly's chance to set the record straight. I saw nothing wrong with Gross' interview but suddenly O'Reilly became quite nasty and a little abusive and then hung up. That night he went on to further derogatory statements about Gross and NPR on his TV program.

O'Reilly has a few good ideas but I gave up listening to his program because he is so mean-spirited and abusive to his guests. I just won't support that kind of programming or behavior. To her credit, Gross ran the interview with O'Reilly even though O'Reilly said she wouldn't have the guts to do so. She did. She's a class act. He's behaves like an obnoxious bully.

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