In Depth: O’Reilly Strikes Back at The Times…

(via J$)

O’Reilly shot back at The New York Times tonight. I’m going to talk about this a bit. As with all things O’Reilly, you have to finely examine what he says and what he doesn’t say to get the full picture. The main thrust of O’Reilly’s attack is aimed at Jacques Steinberg. Okay, Steinberg, by any impartial examination, has been writing articles that most would view as neutral to negative in nature regarding FNC. At the same time he has been writing articles that most would view as neutral to positive regarding NBC and MSNBC. And, to add another facet to this story, Steinberg has rarely written about CNN compared to either FNC or MSNBC…but when he has the articles have been neutral to positive.

One can argue about the underlying cause of Steinberg’s FNC reporting – to wit – whether they were negative or critical because Steinberg has it in for FNC or whether they took a more unbalanced tone because he wasn’t given access to FNC the way Bill Carter or others would have gotten; which might have made the stories far more even handed (to further complicate the equation one could speculate about whether anything would have changed had FNC co-operated with Steinberg…and I’ll bet my bank account that FNC is convinced nothing would have changed). But whatever the reasons and recriminations and underlying causes may be, the result is Steinberg is viewed by many as biased against FNC and towards NBC/MSNBC/CNN. Maybe that’s fair and maybe that’s not. But a lot of people think it and Steinberg has done nothing that I can see to try to counterbalance the CW. And this is one argument O’Reilly plays up. It’s a no brainer actually.

Where O’Reilly falls flat is his “bait and switch” rebuttal regarding the story Steinberg actually wrote. Steinberg’s story regarding CNN and MSNBC’s “closing the gap” were based on Demo numbers. O’Reilly resorted to numbers that had to have been Total Viewer numbers because no news network on cable is going to rank that high based on a Demo because cable news skews old. So, in effect, O’Reilly is arguing against a point Steinberg never made. And let’s not get into the “which numbers are the accurate numbers” mumbo jumbo again. It’s been argued over for years and I see no reason to rehash that again.

O’Reilly is on somewhat sturdier ground when he points out that the Times used charactures of him on a book review of “Culture Warrior”. However I don’t get the “horns” comment. I don’t see horns…just “text balloons” that one sees in comics.

And though TVNewser seems to think so, O’Reilly didn’t “go off on” David Carr’s article. He spent the majority of his time concentrating on Steinberg and the Photoshop issue, which Carr did reference in his article. But O’Reilly ignored the other 90% of Carr’s piece and didn’t even mention Carr by name. That hardly qualifies as going off on Carr’s piece in my book…

Update and Correction: Lesson number one when criticizing someone’s story…make sure you’re on solid ground before you do it. I knew Steinberg had thrown around Demo numbers in his article. However, I didn’t re-read Steinberg’s piece before I wrote this entry…until this morning because I started to get the feeling I was missing something as I lay in bed last night. And I should have re-read it, because he also mentions Total Viewer numbers to point out that FNC’s momentum “had effectively stalled”. So O’Reilly was not arguing against a point Steinberg never made by throwing out Total Viewer data. But O’Reilly was arguing against a point Steinberg never made by pointing out FNC’s ranking in the cable channel pecking order. Steinberg mentioned that FNC was the most watched cable channel but never got in to ranking compared to other channels. Still, my error in not checking Steinberg’s piece first doesn’t help my case any.