O'Reilly reminds me so much of Joe Pyne. A real blowhard. You think he would catch on to the fact that he is his own worst enemy.
Ridicule over award claims clearly strikes a nerve with O'Reilly
The Oregonian - Peter Ames Carlin
S o, I pick up the phone to check my messages last Wednesday morning, and the first thing I hear is this gruff, Long Island-bred voice.
"Mr. Carlin. This is Bill O'Reilly calling. I just finished reading your article."
H was speaking about the column I had written about O'Reilly's Aug. 18 appearance in the Rose Garden.
"Kind of fair," O'Reilly continued, musing on the story. "A little heavy on the conservative stuff, as usual for you guys. No offense intended."
Offense? Heck, I get accused of being a part of vast political conspiracies all the time. And besides, I know when a powerful person is trying to knock me off balance. O'Reilly was just softening me up for what was really bugging him:
"For you to write in your column that I repeatedly said I won a Peabody Award is absolutely untrue, all right?" he snapped. "I know you would want to correct something like that."
Aha.
O'Reilly was bristling at my recounting of his ongoing duel with liberal satirist Al Franken, whose coming book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," describes, among other things, O'Reilly's apparent claims that his previous show, "Inside Edition," won a big journalism award -- or perhaps two -- when he was its host. As Franken has delighted in telling the world, "Inside Edition" won no such award during O'Reilly's tenure.
And as his Wednesday morning message made very clear, the ridicule, which has spread around the media, is driving O'Reilly bats.
The TV star didn't leave his number, and the Fox News Channel spokesman he told me to contact not only went immediately off the record but also said the host would not be calling me back. O'Reilly eventually did call my editors to explain his interpretation of the affair. I remain flummoxed, both by his initial statements and by his apparent inability to see how disingenuous his response to the criticism seems.
This summer's contretemps began at a Los Angeles book publishing convention on May 31, during a panel session featuring the authors of coming political books that included Franken and O'Reilly. The session aired on C-Span, whose cameras captured a clear portrait of the two writers' mutual distaste. Franken usually cloaks his partisan gibes in the bookish wise-guy tone he mastered in his years as a writer/producer/performer on "Saturday Night Live." But when he turned his sights on O'Reilly and his Peabody claims, his gibes had a current of rage that seemed to push Franken close to tears. Finally, O'Reilly cracked.
"Hey, shut up!" he shouted. "You had your 35 minutes! Shut up!"
O'Reilly took on Franken again during his show a few days later, calling him "beneath contempt," a "propagandist" who was merely taking advantage of an innocent misstatement. "The man is a fanatic and not worth anyone's time," he snarled.
Later this summer, O'Reilly's employer, Fox News, filed a lawsuit against Franken, which the company dropped on Monday, for allegedly violating its trademarked slogan "fair and balanced" in the title of his book. And by the way, the complaint went on, Franken is "unstable" and "deranged."
Which mostly seems like a noisy diversion designed to distract people from Franken's attacks on O'Reilly.
Checking Fox's own transcripts this week, I learned that O'Reilly boasted about the "Inside Edition" awards on at least three occasions in 1999 and 2000, usually while parrying attacks on his career and the caliber of his work. For instance, here he is defending his former show against TV commentator Arthel Neville on May 19, 2000: "Should we throw the Peabody Awards back?" A year earlier he said, "I anchored a show called 'Inside Edition,' which has won a Peabody Award for investigative reporting."
Actually, the show had won a Polk Award, not a Peabody.
Called on this discrepancy by the Washington Post (which had been alerted by Franken) in March 2001, O'Reilly corrected the Peabody/Polk confusion on his show -- several times, according to the message he left on my answering machine.
What he never did correct was the implication that he had something to do with winning the award. He didn't: The story that won "Inside Edition" its Polk aired the year after O'Reilly left the show. Nevertheless, O'Reilly tended to whip out the award (whether Peabody or Polk) whenever he was being attacked personally, as in May 2000 when Neville accused him of being "a sellout."
"We won Peabody Awards!" he retorted.
"You got a lot of money, and you sold out!"
"We won Peabody Awards! We won --"
But O'Reilly's "we" doesn't actually include him. Except, as he told my editors last week, in the loose, intimate way a former collegian might say "we won" while describing the alma mater's football team, the alumni "we."
A plausible explanation? Perhaps. But a fuzzy one, particularly given the highly personal terms of the debate that had led to O'Reilly's "we won" statements.
And while it's plausible that his slips were as innocent as O'Reilly now says they are, it's harder to understand why a man who boasts that his code of ethics requires him to never "distort anything or exclude anything" would have stopped short of explaining that he had nothing to do with the award in question.
Particularly when he's insisting, as he did on my voicemail last Wednesday, that he "never claimed I won any award."
Because reasonable people might easily conclude that he did. His language was at least ambiguous, and his defense seems a lot like President Clinton's infamous parsing of the verb "is." Except in this case, it's the pronoun "we."
O'Reilly has made a career by judging others in the terms of absolutes. It's bracing to see how quickly he invokes the gray areas of language to explain his own behavior. Is he being realistic, or merely spinning?
As Fox would say, we've reported. You decide. Peter Ames Carlin: 503-221-8562; petercarlin@news.oregonian.com
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