Bill O'Reilly is a Bad Man

I had a couple minutes to kill the other day so I turned on my friend, the television. I have never watched The O'Reilly Factor before, but I certainly have heard of it, and seen my fair share of interviews with its arrogant host. The man is a legend in his own mind. Anyway, nothing exciting was on so I flipped to the first thing I recognized: The Factor. And this is what I saw.

Yes, you are seeing that correctly. That is a still photograph of two men kissing, only Bill has taken it upon himself to crop off the bottom of the image, which actually shows the contact of lips, so to spare his conservative audiences' sensitive eyes from the blasphemous sight. Could this be part of the conservative philosophy that seeing homosexual acts influences children toward homosexuality? Sounds ridiculous. For this theory to be valid then it must also be valid that seeing heterosexual acts influences children toward heterosexuality, and you would only have to look on almost any channel at any given time to find examples of that. So suck on it Bill O'Reilly.

Once I stopped laughing at O'Reilly's absurd choice of censorship, it dawned on me how destructive this choice really was. The segment was about an American Idol contestent who was gay. That's it. There was no story, just a discussion of the gay factor in his chances for first place. Every now and then O'Reilly would pause to assert that it is not his place to make judgements and that American Idol is a talent competition and talent is all that should matter. And then he airs another cropped photograph. What kind of hypocritical message does he think he is sending? Of course he is making a judgement. I think Sean Penn - who, consequently, has been boycotted by O'Reilly - said it best in his Oscar acceptance speech. One day his grandchildren are going to be ashamed of him. Although in O'Reilly's case, we may have to wait for his grandchildren's grandchildren.

Another aspect of the program that I really enjoyed is O'Reilly's tendency to offer the "last word" to his guest. This apparently fair offering lasts only until O'Reilly interjects with a final opinion on his guest's thoughts before brazenly cutting to the next topic. This is a fact of the show: O'Reilly always gets the last word, no matter how loud he must shout.

O'Reilly, and many other conservative media hosts, have attacked their liberal colleagues for being un-American or destructive to American values. Recently, O'Reilly made the mistake of singling out the Chicago Sun-Times on his Hall of Shame segment. The Chicago Sun-Times is the home of one of my great role models, Roger Ebert, and Roger had had enough of O'Reilly's hypocritical and ignorant rantings. He responded with an open letter that articulately puts Bill in his place. It is a joy to read and I am providing it for you here.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090407/COMMENTARY/904079997

Professor P