Goldberg Calls Out Fox News Hosts ‘Pretending To Be Journalists’…On Fox News
What could Goldberg be referring to? Well the quick answer, and names mentioned by O’Reilly in the segment while defending their shows, is Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Beck was the main force behind the D.C. 9/12 tea party movement, and Hannity has been a major backer of the supposed grassroots outpouring as well. Also, when Goldberg mentions “cheerlead,” there’s also that video of a Fox News producer actually doing some cheerleading at the rally.
The 9/12 rallies highlight something we’ve said here before – when Fox News claims other networks didn’t cover the tea parties, what they’re really saying is they didn’t cover the tea parties like us. Which was, by and large, from a position of ‘we are the tea parties.’ The opinion hosts like Beck and Hannity (but mainly Beck) can be held out as examples of this, but criticism could easily extend to Fox & Friends as well, the weekday morning show, which has not come at the tea party/town hall story from a “fair and balanced” perspective.
And the opinions of the opinion hosts can lead to misrepresentation by the hosts when it comes time for the ‘facts’ portion of their shows. And there absolutely are certain times when O’Reilly himself could fall under the same criticism Goldberg leveled at other hosts.
Goldberg’s criticism is especially interesting not just because it happened on Fox News (and on its most-watched program), but because of who Goldberg is. The former CBS newsman has been a frequent critic of the mainstream media as a whole for their liberal bias (he wrote a well-known book about it) and consistently hammered the media for propping up Pres. Barack Obama during the campaign. He is a critic of the media – and before last night, very rarely a critic of the media organization he appears once a week.
But here’s another side to the story. Sometime in the middle of the interview, just as Goldberg started getting riled up, O’Reilly said, “This is a good discussion.”
This is what separates Bill O’Reilly from others on his own network, and other prime time opinion shows on MSNBC.
NEXT: Why this only could have happened on The Factor, and video.
