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Hot Heir

(Continued...)

Do you ever feel awkward putting a story on Countdown that involves you?
Not if it's relevant. If the O'Reilly standard is, I breathed, that's tonight's lead story, mine is, This story interestingly—albeit tangentially—touched my life, and here's what I can tell you about it that you didn't know because I was there. If it's an eyewitness account then I think it's okay.

But there is one story you've never addressed, the Page Six item about your alleged lack of manners in the bedroom. Why not take that one head on?
Well, first off, I stick to truth. Secondly, I rarely do anonymous stories about myself or about other people if I can avoid it. If you make all sorts of accusations, and it's a story off of a website, and there's nobody's name connected to it, what is it? What is the journalistic process that allows you to do that? Could I not start a blog that says the New York Post is funded by the Communist Party and somebody else could quote that? Just because it's legally true doesn't mean that it's journalistically even approaching something that's valid.

What's the Post's motivation in printing that item?
I've called out the New York Post about the FBI thing and obviously Fox about the O'Reilly stuff. There have been repeated calls from O'Reilly's people—he's never done it himself—repeated calls to NBC management and MSNBC management pleading with us to stop. And basically the answer has been that we're only reacting to what they're doing, so if they stop we'll be happy to stop, because there won't be a story there and nobody will care.


THE OLBERMANN FACTOR Putting Bill-O through the ringer
On which "FBI thing" did you call the Post out?
After the fake anthrax letter got to my house, and I reluctantly called 911 and went through the whole 12-hour process of being decontaminated and filled up with Cipro and being kept overnight at the hospital and observed and all this other pain-in-the-ass kind of stuff, they wrote a piece. The FBI guys had said, and they were fantastic in this, but they said, "We know you're a reporter.... We know now we've got a guy who's sending letters to a lot of people and nobody knows about him. We will give you any detail you want about this story once we get this guy. But if you don't report this right now, he doesn't know you got it, and that gives us much more time." And the Post not only wrote a mocking article but by doing so they were interfering in a terrorism investigation. They were on the side of the terrorists. And I called them on it that night, because I'd just come home and that's what I had to read the next morning. You know, for a newspaper that actually had anthrax in its offices, they certainly showed a very callous attitude toward the subject of terrorism in this country. Maybe Homeland Security should visit them and see what they know about this. The Post never called anyone to get any of this verified; they just went with their story, which was full of factual mistakes. And if they had called the FBI, the FBI would have said, "Please, if you run this you are providing a terrorist with a return receipt." They went ahead with it anyway. Basically it's drunk driving with a newspaper. I've seen them do it a thousand times before, and they'll do it again. And I think this is one where they really looked like the idiots that they are.

One last O'Reilly bit: He has railed against a planned book by O.J. Simpson and a subsequent interview with him on Fox, a division of the same company that signs O'Reilly's checks. Today, as we speak, Fox has canceled the interview and HarperCollins has pulled the book. How will O'Reilly take credit?
My assumption will be that he will say, in addition to what he so reluctantly said about his employers Friday night: [In O'Reilly's voice] "In many conversations within the Fox family—these are good and reasonable people—and although Fox News and Fox Broadcasting are not as interconnected as the secular, mainstream progressive criminals believe, we were able to reach a meeting of minds, and they said, 'O'Reilly, you're right,' and that's when they decided to put this horrible incident behind them.... You're welcome."

[To compare Olbermann's prediction with the actual O'Reilly comments, click here.]

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