O'Reilly--The Voice of Reason

There have always been figures in the U.S. who have been a bit hard to explain--people who are prominent, make good (sometimes simply scads of) money, and are, at least in some sense or in some quarters, respected. Those on the Right might point to Michael Moore, I suppose, but then they also seem to think Noam Chomsky is some kind of a dimbulb (usually those who a) haven't read his linguistics, or perhaps even heard of it or b) have such animus toward their ideological foes that they really can't see straight (let's call such a person "David Horowitz.") On the Left, if there is a Left, one might point to Ann Coulter, or Fred Barnes (and I will admit that my list on this side is a whole lot longer). And, of course, for those of us who live on earth, we can all scratch our collective heads over Tom Cruise, or Gallagher.

Bill O'Reilly mystifies me, and I do watch his show now and then (usually when there is no basketball game, no good movie on TCM, and a commercial on The Food Network). I happened to pop by "The Factor" the other night, when Bill was having a little tete-à-tete with Peter Beinart, of The New Republic. (Don't get me started on the fortunes of that magazine, however.) I didn't see the whole segment, but Beinart was explaining why he thought relying on FOX for information was a dubious approach. O'Reilly pointed out that his show was "analysis" (and, just like Dave Barry, I am not making this up). Beinart's response, which I thought a good one, was to suggest that one needed accurate facts in order to do an analysis, and then mentioned a poll that had shown how badly informed FOX viewers were about Iraq.

The weird thing was that O'Reilly had never heard of it. I figure this itself is a fact he should be analysing. This poll was carried out by a group called "THE PIPA/KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS" and was called "Misperceptions, The Media and the Iraq War."

Now if I were to work for an organization that had been similarly trashed, and said trashing had been given wide publicity, I think it fair to expect that I would have heard of it. The question is why O'Reilly hadn't: is he himself relying solely on FOX (and thus becomes another data point of the misinformed), did no one ever mention this at FOX, is he simply clueless, or was he lying? Your guess is as good as mine.

The poll asked 3 basic questions (the details are given at the above link, with another link there outlining the methodology, statistics, etc.):

• whether the US has found “clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization”
  

• whether the US has “found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” since the war had ended

• how they think “people in the world feel about the US having gone to war with Iraq.”

The quick results?

An analysis of those who were asked all of
the key three perception questions does
reveal a remarkable level of variation in the
presence of misperceptions according to
news source. Standing out in the analysis
are Fox and NPR/PBS--but for opposite
reasons. Fox was the news source whose
viewers had the most misperceptions.
NPR/PBS are notable because their viewers
and listeners consistently held fewer
misperceptions than respondents who
obtained their information from other news
sources.

There are those on the Right who insist that Iraq had WMD, and shipped them to Syria right before the American invasion. They may be right, but their claim is, at this point, untestable, and one does have to wonder why a country being invaded would get rid of such things. Perhaps because if Sadaam Hussein had been found with WMD, bad things might happen? His reputation would be ruined? He might be deposed? One might also wonder what else he shipped out, that we may perhaps never discover--the real Maltese Falcon? Maps of Atlantis? Large crates of bladeless knives without handles?

You can read the details at the link above, but the gist is that those who rely solely on FOX for their information have more inaccurate information (you know, "facts") than those who rely on any other single news source. What is really cool is that only FOX viewers do still worse when they also describe themselves as "paying close attention" to the news. So, if this poll is right, those who rely on FOX are relatively misinformed, and those who really pay attention and rely on FOX are really misinformed relative to those who don't. In short, the more one watches FOX, the less one knows.

So, on O'Reilly's very busy and utterly sans-spin Webpage, he has this following riposte to Beinart:

The Factor challenged Beinart to back up the following, which he wrote in The New Republic: "Trying to get information about Iraq by listening to Bill O'Reilly is like trying to get information about the Soviet Union in the 1950's by listening to Joe McCarthy." Beinert defended his statement, saying "most of the time you discuss the war on terror as a partisan issue of liberals versus conservatives. I don't think you provide enough information for Americans to make good analyses as to whether we should get out of Iraq or stay." The Factor was incensed by Beinart's indictment. "Your statement is ridiculous, because our reporting on Iraq has been very tough. The picture that we've given on the war on terror is absolutely accurate, and for you to put that in your magazine is a bunch of crap."

The conclusion here seems pretty clear: at least on the basis of this poll--feel free to check it out and challenge its methodology and/or results--the information on FOX leads to systematic misperceptions about central issues leading to and/or about the war. O'Reilly then takes this misinformation and "analyses" it, and doesn't even know about a relatively well-known poll that indicates a) the picture FOX has given of the war on terror is far from "absolutely accurate," and b) given that, its analysis is at least as suspect. O'Reilly is from the school of logic that saying something is "a bunch of crap" is a winning point. I'm from a different school that tends toward evidence, reasons, and inferences.

Add to that such itty-bitty niceties such as the US flag waving in the upper-left hand corner throughout its broadcasts (in contrast to, say al-Jazeera), and that one of its "stars"--Sean Hannity--appears at a fund raiser for Rick Santorum, and one might really want to step back and ask if it might be a good idea to balance FOX's version of things with an alternate view.