Torn – Another O’Reilly Cover-Up?
Posted by Matt Cipriano | 2 Comments
I am not a big Bill O’Reilly fan… Well, technically I guess that is not true. Every now and then when nothing else is on TV I like to flip to his show to get a good laugh about some ridiculous belief he has about how people in this country actually are or his take on the evil left.
Anyway, last week when O’Reilly made some comments while dining at Sylvia’s in Harlem (“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun,”) I was ready to jump all over it, then I decided to wait a bit, analyze the fallout from what he said, see if a media storm started brewing the likes of which we haven’t seen since Don Imus (I guess that was only like March, wasn’t it?). So I waited…
I heard occasion tidbits about it on the news, newspapers touched on it and then we had a weekend and it has pretty much disappeared. WTF?!?!
So I did some checking today to see what, if any, fallout there was from his comments and this is what I found: Not much.
Juan Williams, an NPR correspondent and Fox news analyst defended O’Reilly’s comments in an article posted on the Time website. Basically the claims are that his comments (and the one listed above is just one of the things he said during his radio broadcast) were taken out of context, that the greater discussion was focused on race problems in the U.S. and race perception based on stereotypes. Even the Reverend Al Sharpton, who O’Reilly was dining with (and had not yet heard the comments when he was questioned) at Sylvia’s, didn’t comment on O’Reilly’s words.
Barely a blip on the radar screen it seems, but I have to ask why? Is this being blown out of proportion by the “left wing” media outlets (I did first read about it from the NY Post, not exactly a glowing example of left-y beliefs) or are Fox and O’Reilly’s people doing an incredible job of keeping this quiet. I am not sure if I should be outraged that O’Reilly made these comments and no one really cares or, if it is totally out of context and distorted, that this made it in to the newspapers in the first place. And how come in the NY Times this story was only listed in the NY/Region section? Does no one else in the country care about the (possibly) inflammatory remarks that O’Reilly made? Is it just the people in Harlem who might take offense to what he said? Or maybe we have already had our race/media scandal for the year with Imus and are just too burnt out to care about another one. What do other folks think about this one? One way or another I would like to see some sort of follow up on this, where is the actual bottom of the story?
Tags: CNN > NPR > NY Post > Radio
Comments
2 Responses to “Torn – Another O’Reilly Cover-Up?”
Leave a Reply
Trust us
As with Anna Karina, we prefer to remember the U.S.A as she was in the 1960s.
Seek and ye shall find
Archives
Matt Friedlander’s Tumblr Feed
Josh Friedlander’s Twitter Feed
- JoshFriedlander: RT @realrobcopeland: The indices involved declined to comment, choosing to express themselves instead as line graphs.
- JoshFriedlander: You should be reading @kanyewest right now. Is this guy Andy Kaufman back from the grave or is this sh@t serious?
- JoshFriedlander: RT @askanyone: ‘We do not talk, we bludgeon one another w/ facts & theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines & dig ...
- JoshFriedlander: RT @GerryDuggan: Of everything that went away last year I'll miss due process the most.
- JoshFriedlander: One of the best people to follow, with consistently good tumblr&twitter updates: @glendaluft http://t.co/8wKHUGfk
October 1st, 2007 @
Nobody cares because he’s known for making much more inflammatory remarks. He seems to have meant it as a backhanded/naive complement, and very likely it was taken out of context.
What worries me is the recent spate of attacks on freedom of speech in the name of not offending a particular special interest group. People should be able to say what they want and be judged accordingly.
Obviously, speech designed to cause physical harm can not be tolerated e.g. yelling fire in a crowded building or the leader of one group ordering the killing of another individual or group of people.
Outside the realm of speech that causes imminent physical harm, we should all grow a thicker skin, especially all the fucking New Yorkers out there, we are totally becoming a bunch of politically correct pansies!
Free speech works and limiting free speech just ends up creating awkward moments where no one says what they mean and the gulf between various groups grows wider not smaller.
We should promote free speech specifically because it offends us. This is how we learn to understand each other.
November 24th, 2007 @
I guess you guys don’t watch CNN that much. Or read the left wing blogs either…
I guess the real reason why the smarter left wingers didn’t care was because CNN has lost so many ratings for creating a BS story about Bill O’reilly.
What Bill was saying was how many whites don’t know what black america is really like, and that they become racist because their’s a totally different image in their head. He was saying that a black restaurant is no different from a white restaraunt, and that the ignorance, in the white society, of true black america is what causes them to think so stereotypically.
I may not agree with many of the things that O’reilly has to say, but i’m not gonna spin his words just to ruin his image. Also, America isn’t that dumb, cause, CNN is failing because of the crap they rambled. I used to like CNN too. Shame.