The Crap Factor - Week 2: 85% Crap
This week, Bill O'Reilly's column deals pretty much with a single issue, a response to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was critical of O'Reilly for his "War on Christmas" fiasco. According to O'Reilly, Kristof accused him of "ignoring 'real' stories like the suffering in Sudan." O'Reilly says that he wishes that he could go to Sudan to report on the suffering, but he doesn't have the time, since he has to produce "three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio." He then goes on to criticize Kristof for not covering the 60 day prison sentence given to a child molestor in Vermont.
Does O'Reilly have any idea what is going on in Darfur? He is spending all of his time focusing on a bad decision by a judge that has already been overturned. While he is wasting time on self-congratulation, hundreds of women and girls are being raped, often in public, by the Janjawid militia as an intimidation tactic, without any punishment at all for the perpetrators [link]. Even if his coverage had something to do with the 60 day sentence being overturned, does he really think that three hours a day of patting himself on the back about this one rape case is more important to cover than hundreds of rapes, and a system of government which allows them to go completely unpunished?
The only part of his column this week that is not crap is that his criticisms of the media could possibly be justified, except that he is 100 times worse for exactly the same reasons. As I have been saying for a while now, the media will only cover stories which they think are popular enough to generate ratings and therefore increase advertising revenue. Maybe the other national news stations didn't cover the story because it didn't look to be profitable, but profitability is precisely the reason O'Reilly is covering it. If he had any interest at all in bringing to light the lack of justice in rape cases, then of course hundreds of rapes with absolutely no justice for the perpetrators would rank much higher than a single case, but suffering in Darfur is not something that attracts a lot of viewers.
Rating:
85% crap - I would rate his Crap Factor this week considerably lower if his central point, an essentially valid criticism of the news media, didn't apply to him a hundred times more than to those he criticises.
Does O'Reilly have any idea what is going on in Darfur? He is spending all of his time focusing on a bad decision by a judge that has already been overturned. While he is wasting time on self-congratulation, hundreds of women and girls are being raped, often in public, by the Janjawid militia as an intimidation tactic, without any punishment at all for the perpetrators [link]. Even if his coverage had something to do with the 60 day sentence being overturned, does he really think that three hours a day of patting himself on the back about this one rape case is more important to cover than hundreds of rapes, and a system of government which allows them to go completely unpunished?
The only part of his column this week that is not crap is that his criticisms of the media could possibly be justified, except that he is 100 times worse for exactly the same reasons. As I have been saying for a while now, the media will only cover stories which they think are popular enough to generate ratings and therefore increase advertising revenue. Maybe the other national news stations didn't cover the story because it didn't look to be profitable, but profitability is precisely the reason O'Reilly is covering it. If he had any interest at all in bringing to light the lack of justice in rape cases, then of course hundreds of rapes with absolutely no justice for the perpetrators would rank much higher than a single case, but suffering in Darfur is not something that attracts a lot of viewers.
Rating:
85% crap - I would rate his Crap Factor this week considerably lower if his central point, an essentially valid criticism of the news media, didn't apply to him a hundred times more than to those he criticises.
posted by Immoral Majority at 8:30 AM
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