Steamin' Mad O'Reilly Overhypes Again
Oct. 27 2008, Published 7:07 a.m. ET
I'M HOLDING A LIST OF NAMES O'Reilly
Even when Bill O'Reilly has the facts on his side, the man just can't help embellishing them to make a point.
Over the past two weeks, the Fox News host has waged verbal war on William Arkin, a military affairs consultant who blogs for The Washington Post and provides on-air analysis for NBC News. The source of O'Reilly's anger is a January 30 blog entry in which Arkin argued that soldiers in America's "mercenary" army have no right to expect public support for the war.
O'Reilly has flogged the "controversy" on his show 21 times on nine different occasions since then, brandishing Arkin's overheated rhetoric as proof of liberal bias at NBC and the Post. So far, so good.
But on February 8, O'Reilly went a step further, saying he had asked NBC News for a full list of its paid contributors "to see how many conservatives and how many liberals they have. They wouldn't give it up." Fox News, he said, lists all of its contributors on its site.