Bashir And Guests Call O’Reilly An ‘Accidental Racist’ Over His Glowing 1950s Nostalgia
The panel guests who joined MSNBC host Martin Bashir on Wednesday tore into Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly over a segment he did on Tuesday night eulogizing the late actress Annette Funicello. The panelists chided O’Reilly for asking if the country was a better place to live in the 1950s, and said his misplaced nostalgia for a period marked by segregation and racial tensions made him, in the words of LL Cool J and Brad Paisley, an “Accidental Racist.”
During O’Reilly’s Tuesday night monologue, he lamented how the country has changed for the worse in many ways since the era when Funicello was popular. The Fox News host acknowledged that minorities were not in the best position during that period, but said that behaviors like pre-marital sex and “explicit behavior” were “kept kind of quiet.”
Bashir opened the segment by asking Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson for his thoughts on O’Reilly’s comments. “These sound like the crumbling thoughts of an individual who finds the modern world simply too much to bear,” Bashir opined.
Dyson replied that the 1950s were simply not an era-worthy of nostalgia, not just for minorities but for women. He said, by way of examples, that Nat King Cole could not get a television show, but two dogs, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, and a horse, Mr. Ed, could.
Bashir turned to Democratic strategist Angela Rye, asking if O’Reilly’s statement – that white Americans were less fractious than they are today resulting in a society that functioned more effectively – was an insensitive comment.
“Bill O’Reilly should have been a cameo on LL Cool J’s latest song, ‘Accidental Racist,’” Rye replied. “Whether or not he means it or not, he’s walked right into this one.”
“White America was unified by what exactly?” Rye asked. “It’s an absolute slap in the face to 2013 and everything that we stand for in this particular America.”
The Cycle co-host Krystal Ball noted that O’Reilly forgets that the top marginal income tax rate was 90 percent in the 1950s. Bashir wondered if that was why the 1950s are regarded so highly in the first place.
Later in the discussion, Dyson hit O’Reilly for forgetting that white people were fractured along class lines, and that poor whites were as marginalized as American minorities were during that period.
Watch the segment below via MSNBC:
