*from yes, daily kos:
Maybe O'Reilly actually believes his own false stories
Witnessing protesters being killed when
none were. Rescuing a photographer who
never was rescued. It's as if his entire
adventure in Argentina was concocted by
James Thurber. Except that Thurber was a humorist and O'Reilly is humorless.
O'Reilly claimed to have seen
nuns murdered in El Salvador, only to backtrack and "clarify" that he saw pictures of the murdered nuns. Which is akin to my claiming to have walked on the moon, when a small child, only to clarify that I saw Apollo astronauts walk on the moon. On TV. O'Reilly claimed to have been attacked during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which his colleagues from the time
dispute. Which seems to be part of a
recurring pattern with all of
O'Reilly's claims of daring and courage, whenever there was someone else around who witnessed or experienced the same events. Which means either there's a
conspiracy to discredit O'Reilly, among disparate professional reporters from different news organizations, from different parts of the world, from different eras. Or else O'Reilly is a habitual liar. Or else O'Reilly has told so many lies to so many people for so many years that even he can't remember what's real and what isn't. Or maybe he really needs to believe his alternate reality.
Bill O'Reilly is very popular with
the most uninformed people in America. O'Reilly has claimed to have won a prestigious TV award that
he never won for a TV show that did win an award after O'Reilly left. Which makes one wonder if it won the award for having survived O'Reilly's tenure. O'Reilly has even claimed athletic prowess that he clearly
never possessed, which may be getting us nearer to the truth of who O'Reilly is and why he has such grandiose fantasies about having lived a life he clearly never lived. One could almost get Freudian in analyzing O'Reilly's
fetish to be someone he is not and never will be, and to impose those desires on innocents to the point of
repulsiveness.
This is what O'Reilly is paid to do. Fox "News" isn't just the leading media purveyor of
climate change denialism, it has devolved to
rejecting science altogether. It so assiduously
disinforms a target audience that seeks
confirmation rather than information that a 2012 study concluded that
watching Fox makes one less informed than watching no news at all. Which makes sense, given that Fox
isn't really a news outlet at all. Indeed, a
2007 study found that viewers of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert comedy shows had "the highest knowledge of national and international affairs, while Fox News viewers rank nearly dead last." It is
no accident.
As the depth and breadth of O'Reilly's serial dishonesty continues to unfold, his critics will continue to hope that he will be held to some sort of standard, the likes of which serious newscasters and commentators would be held. But that almost certainly is a misreading of both O'Reilly's audience and his employer. We can speculate and even have fun with armchair analyses of why O'Reilly behaves the way he does, but the real story is that one man's creepy personal issues have become a lucrative income generator for a political propaganda operation disguised as a news network.
As Walsh concluded:
Still, if you dislike O’Reilly and Fox, you’re inclined to think this episode has to have repercussions. I’m just not sure it will. The network makes money off the willingness of its audience to believe the worst about the “liberal media.” Lying, exaggerating, raging at Mother Jones and threatening a Times reporter are all in a day’s work.
