O’Reilly makes the case for Dems avoiding Fox News

September 28, 2007

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino made her first visit to Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show this week, and the host suggested that White House officials shouldn’t even bother talking to news outlets they consider to be hostile.

O’REILLY: OK. Now, I told Tony Snow — I mean, I know Snow. You know him pretty well. I said, “Listen, Snow. You’re crazy,” because he gave interviews to people who were overtly hostile to him…

PERINO: He did.

O’REILLY: … and the president. Yes, he did. He went in there, and he gave it his best shot. And I said, “Why are you bothering with these people? They’re never going to give you a fair shake. They’re always going to stab you in the back.” But Snow said, “Look, it’s my job to try to convince them.” Are you of the same philosophy?

PERINO: Well, I’m no Tony Snow. But I — I will give it a shot, if I — if I’m given the opportunity.

O’REILLY: All right. So you will go into the enemy camp to try to convince?

PERINO: You have to. You have to.

O’REILLY: You know, I have to say, with all due respect, you’re wasting your time on some of these people.

PERINO: Well…

O’REILLY: They hate you. They’re always going to hate you. No matter what you do, they’ll destroy it.

Now, at first blush, I’m not quite sure what Perino is talking about. She believes the White House “has to” talk to progressive media outlets? Like Tony Snow did? I’ve been paying fairly close attention, and it seems that the Bush Bubble tends to exclude those White House critics quite well, including progressive media.

But more importantly, O’Reilly’s broader point is intriguing.

If a political figure identifies a media outlet that treats him or her unfairly, according to O’Reilly, the pol should avoid the outlet. There’s no point in “wasting your time” talking to a pseudo-journalist who won’t give you a fair shake.

Oddly enough, Democratic presidential candidates came to that exact same conclusion a few months ago, and said they would steer clear of a debate sponsored by Fox News. After all of these years, Dems know the partisan network is “always going to stab you in the back.” So, what’s the point?

And yet, O’Reilly recently said John Edwards should be “ashamed” of himself for turning down an invitation to debate on the Republican’s news channel. (Given the network’s treatment of the former senator, it was a no-brainer.)

I’m sure he didn’t mean to, but with Perino, O’Reilly was making the Dems’ case for them.

Case No. 5470: The rules for Democrats are different than the rules for Republicans.

  • To a broader point, if the country wants to truly get past the extreme partisianship that’s rampant in politics today, the right needs to drop the “enemy camp”, “they hate you” bullshit. Us vs them is the core of bi-partisanship today.

  • Watching people too stupid to know how truly stupid they are can be amusing, but knowing that these two ignoramuses owe their positions to the fact that people so fucking dumb they think these two are smart want to believe them… considering that fact takes the smile off my face real fast.

  • It’s a common ploy to frame conventional wisdom to be the opposite of reality. There’s this fun thing I do, where I take some absurd bit of “up is downism” and switch SBV and MoveOn, liberal and conservative, R and D, Clinton for Bush, etc. You almost always come up with something resembling empirical reality. What’s amazing is, all you have to do to make the following quote accurate is pretend bloggers are saying this to the DLC:

    BLOGGERS: “Why are you bothering with these people? They’re never going to give you a fair shake. They’re always going to stab you in the back.”

    DLC: “Look, it’s my job to try to convince them.”

    BLOGGERS: “With all due respect, you’re wasting your time on some of these people.”

    Does anyone know HTML well enough to make a CW washing machine that can translate MSM/Rightwing rediculousness into reality?

  • “So you will go into the enemy camp to try to convince?”

    I thought al Qaeda was the enemy? But according to Billo any fellow American with a differing opinion is “the enemy.” What a country this has become.

  • Petorado, these are people who wept at the end of the cold war because they thrive on having someone to hate, to have as an enemy. It’s a common psychological need unfortunately, the fear side of needing to feel superior. They need to feel under siege.

    I don’t think al Qaeda does it for them. You can’t have a debate with a bomb and god fearing philosophies you don’t understand. They are used to debating straw man, political ideology. The Dems are perfect and such a soft, spineless target that they feel that they can win.

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  • Maybe one of “the enemy” will ask Perino why she went on a show hosted by a bigot.

    Still you gotta love the way Shrill wants to protect the little lady from the big bad media.

  • Even broader point is that Mr. O’Reilly is painting all other news services as the enemy ‘them.’ Its the wider reaching effort to discredit all traditional news as liberal, biased and untrustworthy using the upside down logic that Fox is if Fair and Balanced.

    Destruction of faith in traditional news is an important piece of the propaganda puzzle.

  • I think CB is missing the point, too, though. It is silly for Dems to debate or do interviews at a Republican base platform DURING A PRIMARY. Those elected, however, have an obligation to try to reach and convince all their constituants. Even then, I would forgive Bush for not doing an interview with Keith Olbermann (although I do think it would be a mistake to expect KO to act as an apologist for a Dem administration), or a Dem president for not doing interviews with avoved water-carriers like Fox or Limbaugh. My question is why is Fox not a 527. What distinguished them or CNN for that matter from MoveOn.org?

  • Jen Flowers,

    Case No. 5470: The rules for Democrats are different than the rules for Republicans.

    are you using some kind of scientific notation or logarithmic scale here? ‘Cause it sure seems like its a few orders of magnitude to low as a case no. for that particular truism. 😉

  • Of course, O’Reilly would reply to this that “Fox News is not overtly hostile to Democratic political figures”…and of course, this would ignore the, I don’t know, 7 billion or so specific examples that would show that the only thing wrong with the quoted sentence is the inclusion of the word “not.”

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