Bill O'Reilly is a straight shooter. He shoots so straight, I mean, you couldn't shoot any straighter. His shots are a literal perfect theoretical line between two coplanar points: what he's shooting with, and what he's aiming at.
Yep! His straight-shooting talking points last night were fantabulously on the money, calling out think tank Project for Excellence in Journalism about their report on cable news coverage (and how it relates to Iraq) that came out May 25th. It's all hot now because filthy liberal dogs in the blogosqueer (lib blogs) have been referencing it. Dig these killer talking points, dudes:
Now we've done hundreds of Iraq reports on this program, as you know. But we don't do the carnage du jour. We don't highlight every terrorist attack because we learn nothing from that. And that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do. I mean, come on, does another bombing in Tikrit mean anything other than war is hell? No, it does not.In my opinion, CNN, and especially MSNBC, delight in showing Iraqi violence because they want Americans to think badly of President Bush. And that strategy has succeeded.
So their Iraqi coverage is more political than informational, again in my opinion. Could be wrong about CNN. I'm not wrong about the committed left wing crew over at NBC.
Fuckin OUCH, baby! He's riffing on MSNBC and their constant coverage of the Iraq war, showing dead troops, dead babies, Iraqi brain splatter patterns, and everything else. Wait, what's that? Adam Danger dot com decided to check out the actual report he's referencing? No way! Click on that bad boy to look at these figures I'm about to quote:
Overall, MSNBC and CNN were much more consumed with the war in Iraq than was Fox. MSNBC, for instance, devoted nearly a third of the time studied to the war (26% on the policy debate, 3% on events on the ground and 2% the homefront). Fox, by contrast, spent less than half that much time on the war--15% in all, (10% on the policy debate, 3% on events in Iraq and 1% on the homefront).
It's illustrative to reference the actual report. When broken down to policy stories, events on the ground, and homefront, you see that the difference between MSNBC and Fox's coverage of (O'Reilly's term) "the carnage du jour" is NONEXISTENT. The difference is a civic-minded 16% (sixteen fucking percent!!) difference in the coverage of the policy debate. Factually speaking, if you believe this report, Fox is spending equal time with its uber-evil liberal rival MSNBC in covering daily instances of violence, but underserving its viewers in the policy debate quite substantially.
Why is that? Bill?
The bottom line is this. We've reported time and again that the war in Iraq is indeed a mess. There's little news value in broadcasting daily bombings. By the way, FOX News continues to crush CNN and MSNBC in the ratings, as the folks know news when they see it. And that's the "Memo."
Fox's viewers tune out if there's a debate on whether we should stay the course in Iraq, and they lose money. Got it. Fox's viewers are therefore living in a fantasy land where they don't have the facts, but they have a virtual GPS on Anna Nicole's corpse, and can tell you the exact hour Paris Hilton will emerge from tha slamma. Cool. I'm glad I have caught this one-time error on the part of Mr. O'Reilly, so he can regain his reputation as the ultimate human perfection in shooting straight.
