The blogosphere has been masticating last week's "showdown" between Bill O'Reilly and David Letterman, with most of the attention focusing on Letterman's statement that about 60 percent of what O'Reilly says is "crap."
Most observers see this statement as a putdown, but I see it as a pretty accurate assessment and as fairly high praise. Few broadcast pundits manage to hit the coveted 40 percent standard of non-crap. Limbaugh runs in the 75-80 percent crap range, and Hannity has bursts of up to 90 percent crap. On many days, Michael Savage never dips below 100 percent crap. I don't listen to the liberal pundits, but anecdotal evidence suggests they don't score much better.
How many bloggers manage to keep the level of crap below 60 percent, especially when comments are unmoderated? Black Jack has made comments on this blog that have been up to 175 percent crap, a percentage obtainable only by writing comments so bad that they actually multiply in toxicity upon prolonged exposure.
Under Sturgeon's Law, 90 percent of everything is crap. Even if one applies Sturgeon's Law to Stugeon's Law, then the percentage of non-crap in the world can rarely exceed the low 20s. O'Reilly beats the average because he is thoroughly nonpartisan, occasionally funny and actually willing on occasion to change his mind in the face of contrary evidence.
On the other hand, he also is remarkably thin-skinned for a guy in his position, and he has a wildly exaggerated sense of his own importance (a common enough failing) and journalistic acumen. Letterman may be giving him a bit more credit than he deserves.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
At last! Someone has done a systematic content analyis on newspapers.
David:
Who was it at the Billings Gazette that got arrested for a “prolonged exposure” awhile back? I can’t remember his name. Does he still work there?
But hey thanks for ranking me above all the TV shows you watch. I don’t watch it myself, but I know journalists spend most of their time watching TV, so I take your word on it.
I’ll be commenting on your latest “torture” post tonight or tomorrow—just trying to boost my score over 200 percent.
I never watch either one of them.
Topic like this make me wonder why there isn't a conservative blog in Billings, so I started one.
It's called DOWNTOWN BILLINGS, and is at
www.downtownbillings.blogspot.com
David,
O'Reilly is conservative, no doubt about it, but he isn't consistently pro-Republican in the sense that Hannity and Limbaugh are. He opposes the death penalty, for instance, and he appears to be pro-choice, although he seems to think that abortion is morally wrong. He's consistently more favorable toward the environment than Republicans. He's very much a fiscal and social conservative, but he doesn't follow the party line. That's what I mean by nonpartisan.
Eric,
Good for you. I'll add it to my blogroll as soon as I get time.
James J.,
You're right, and one mistake people consistently make about O'Reilly is lumping him in with the Limbaugh-Hannity crowd without ever really listening to him. He can be arrogant and annoying, but he also can be funny and self-deprecating, and he is definitely his own man.
O’Reilly’s all right, especially after he’s had a few. Of course, he says he doesn’t drink, but all Irishmen say that.
But he has several problems that I’ve noticed.
O’Reilly tends to harp and whine and get fixated on some subjects. For example, the Natalee Holloway story. Give it a week and forget it! (O’Reilly might have got stuck on that one because Greta “The Face” Van Susteren beat him in the viewer polls a couple times while covering the story.) Another example would be all these phony “sex abuse” cases. O’Reilly demands the most absurd punishments for so-called sex offenders. It’s like he can’t stop himself. Maybe he was a choirboy once. Who knows.
O’Reilly thinks he has more power over people than he actually does, which causes him to start all these mini-crusades. Then nobody shows up, so he drops the subject and moves on to the next one. The truth is, no other cable TV news show comes close to him in the ratings, but that doesn’t give him godlike powers over the masses. Besides, the liberal media has been whipping up the masses with so many ridiculous fears for so many years people have hysteria fatigue.
O’Reilly doesn’t know squat about business. Usually, he avoids talking about business, but when he does, he really puts his foot in his mouth and comes across as a typically brain-dead leveler. For example, during last fall’s price run-up in energy, he declared all the major oil companies should donate 20% of their profits to the Katrina “victims.” Every economist he interviewed ripped him apart, and he was deluged with e-mails about his stupidity.
O’Reilly is afraid of the extreme right wing and won’t put any of them on his show. He’s always going on about the extreme left wing and very often trots out some lunatic lefty for an interview to prove his point, but I’ve never seen him give any air time to a real whacko righty. I think that’s because O’Reilly knows he's often characterized as being far right and is afraid to confirm that characterization in his choice of guests. On the other hand, like Geraldo Rivera, maybe O’Reilly is just afraid of getting his nose rearranged.
PS: David Letterman’s just a clown. No comment is necessary.
The O'Reilly argument is fatuous ... the best news show on TV is Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Comedy Central. "Daily Show" viewers know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey. (Pop quiz)
Dannagal Young, a senior research analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said "Daily Show" viewers came out on top "even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age and gender are taken into consideration."
He was reporting the results of a quiz was given to 19,013 adults between July 15 and September 19.
Says Stewart, everyone should watch FOX News - as every country needs its own Al Jazeera. For myself, I get all the news I need from The Daily Show.
O'Reilly is definitely conservative on most issues. He's liberal on a few others. So what. So am I. Let the first of you whom is not partisan in some way speak up now.
David,
I'm using "partisan" in the sense of "a person who takes the part of or strongly supports one side, party or person" (Webster's New World College Dictionary). Which side, party or person does O'Reilly strongly support (other than O'Reilly)?
O'Reilly's attempts to grab the middle might be a manifestation of his vanity. Does anyone doubt that his first impulse is to back Bush, his war, his tax cuts, his attacks on the environment, his all-powerful executive? O'Reilly of the "middle" reminds me of all the journalists and pundits who recently called Ariel Sharon a moderate - I suppose on some planet somewhere that is true. Not this one.
Most radio punditry is vapid crap as is most blogging. It has the substance of a dry phart. To analyze it you only have to sniff the breaking wind. Then move away from it quickly.
What are these blogs all about anyway? I was surfing looking for as seen tv foam when I ended up here. Back to the relentless searching for as seen tv foam.
Post a Comment