Oh my god. Is he still talking?
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| Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O'Reilly Oh my god. Is he still talking? |
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This page is a direct response to each day's edition of Bill OReilly's 'Talking Points', whose transcripts are posted by FoxNews on their website. I'm pretty much done here. If you've discussed politics with me lately, you've probably heard me quote the Godfather: "they're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls." I've liked this line, for its viciousness, its complete dismissal, it's sincerity and economy ever since I first heard it, and now, I finally believe it. Let them teach intelligent design. Let them underfund their schools and turn legislatures into places of worship. Let them ban books and be ashamed and drive SUVs into the suburbs and snort oxycontin and underachieve and fear for their low-skill jobs. Let them forget how to read and get paranoid about terrorists and the Japanese and scientists and queers and let them try to vote themselves into the middle class and accept self-righteous superstition rather than improving their standard of living. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls. I'm quite comfortable. I have money and the liberty and independence that it implies, and I have books, a lot of nice art, a computer and a really nice television, a wife, a few friends, and frankly, the rest of these people can go fuck themselves. No man's an island, to be sure, but that doesn't mean I have to throw in with these assholes. I didn't start this page to save anyone, except me -- i began to prevent myself from punching strangers, for those of you who remember. And I no longer have this punching urge, not about Bill. I'm at peace, because I really, genuinely don't care about how people want to misuse their legal rights. So help yourselves. Have fun. Best of luck. Act like idiots. Get fooled. Kill each other. Worship anything you want. It's not worth the cost to me of my own concern anymore -- the stress, the anger, the time spent in discussion or consideration. So go on. Hate somebody for their race or religion. Misinterpret something. Allow yourself to be led down an erroneous line of reasoning. Ignore empirical fact. Lower taxes, and then close schools to make up for it. I've done what I can: voting, donating, talking, calling people, and it doesn't seem to help. My conscience is clean. From here on out, it's not a tragedy that needs solving, it's The Human Condition, it's man's inhumanity toward man, it's a funny little piece of theater of which I'm not a part. Check please. Long days and pleasant nights. posted by henry | 10:10 AM Tuesday, March 29, 2005 Bill's writing about Terri Schiavo non-stop, and i just don't care. We're all things, of course, but that body is a fucking doorstop. How is this story any more interesting than two families arguing over the posession of an antique coffee table? I'm not getting involved -- except to point out how foolish people are when it comes to attributing human qualities to things that look anything like us. posted by henry | 9:23 PM Thursday, March 24, 2005 bill on terry schiavo. i'm putting this up just because it's so strange. --------- The root of the Schiavo case is, of course, abortion and euthanasia. The secular philosophy believes the state has a right to make life and death decisions. The Christian philosophy believes the opposite, that man should not interfere in the life cycle, ever. That is why the Schiavo case is so emotional and bitter. It is a core battle between two opposed philosophies. That battle's never going to be settled. --------- 'that man should not interfere in the life cycle'? what might this mean? surely, feeding someone through a tube is interfering in the life cycle. bill should stay away from the fake-lofty prose, because he's chosen words that are both stupid and wrong. and, of course, he's also mixed up on what the 'secular philosophy' says, or how it fits in. turns out, that the secular guy in all of this, the guy who's trying to let the woman die -- schiavo's husband -- markedly denies that the state has an interest here. in fact, he's up against the actions of congress, the president, and the governer of florida. so if anyone seems to be demonstrating the belief that the state has the right to make life and death decisions (bill's words), it's the religious half of this argument. they're very conservative, except when they're not, like right now. bill is misrepresenting the parties here -- and he doesn't even get the relationship between abortion and euthenasia right. in the case of abortion, also, the secular side says the government can't regulate -- completely the opposite of bill's assertion that "The secular philosophy believes the state has a right to make life and death decisions." i think he might be losing it. this TP doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, and is completely out of step with reality. whatever. posted by henry | 2:35 PM Tuesday, March 15, 2005 check out this amazing piece of conscious, contrived, purposeful misrepresentation of information: --------- And on that subject, a new study by the Project For Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University examined the Iraq war coverage. On cable news, it broke down like this: 38 percent of the stories FOX News ran were favorable to the war effort; 62 percent neutral, negative or not able to be classified. Over at CNN, 20 percent of the stories were positive; 80 percent neutral, negative or not classifiable. And at MSNBC, just 16 percent positive, 84 percent neutral, negative or not classifiable. So once again, you can decide which network is fair and balanced. --------- i'm not sure what bill's talking about -- but if you actually go to the source and look at how that second category, the 'neutral, negative, or mixed' actually broke down, you get a totally different picture:
now, if you look at this distribution, it's hard to miss the fact that both CNN's and MSNBC's coverage is almost perfectly symmetric: and equal % positive and negative, the rest either neutral or mixed. by comparison, Fox had almost three times as many positives as negatives. but bill sort of lumps neutral in with negative, so that you can't actually tell unless you go to the actual table. once you do, of course, the facts are clear: CNN and MSNBC are both far more balanced than Fox. keep in mind: i'm not making this up. bill actually links to the study he's going out of his way to misinterpret. of course, this is not just a lie -- though it's that, too. see, bill combines neutral and negative because Fox wants to cultivate the notion that neutral and negative, when it comes to bush's agenda, actually are indistinguishable. it's an implied parroting of that old chestnut about how you're either with us or against us. and while you're checking out this study that bill quotes, consider one of its other poigniant comparisons: Beyond topic, the most striking difference among the three shows is in the presence of the host's opinion. Nearly every story on Fox's O'Reilly Factor (97%) contained O'Reilly's opinions, even his quick news briefs. CNN's Larry King was nearly the reverse, with only 2% of segments including his opinions. And despite to his reputation for dominating the guests, Chris Matthews on Hardball offered his opinion just 24% of the time. really? bill's giving his opinion an order of magnitude more frequently than his peers, and now we've got documentary proof? thanks for the link, bill! posted by henry | 7:55 PM |
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