|
Contributors
Cliff Kincaid- Contributor
Cliff Kincaid, serves as editor of the Accuracy
in Media (AIM)
Report. A veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff has
appeared on the Fox News programs Hannity & Colmes and
The O'Reilly Factor, where he debated O'Reilly on global
warming, the death penalty,
and the homosexual agenda. He was a guest co-host on CNN's Crossfire
(filling in for Pat Buchanan) in the 1980s, where he confronted
the then-Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. with evidence of Libyan
involvement in international terrorism. Through his America's
Survival, Inc., organization (www.usasurvival.org), he has been
an advocate on behalf of the families of victims of terrorism
and has published reports and held conferences critical of the
United Nations. His articles have appeared in the Washington
Post, Washington Times, Chronicles, Human Events, Insight, and
other publications. He served on the staff of Human Events for
several years and was an editorial writer and newsletter editor
for former National Security Council staffer Oliver North at
his Freedom Alliance educational foundation. He has written or
co-authored nine books on media and cultural affairs and foreign
policy issues. Cliff is married and has three sons.[go to
Kincaid index]
 Flip-Flopper
Bill O’Reilly
What’s happened?…
[Cliff Kincaid] 9/29/04
President
Bush has joked that John Kerry should debate himself. I’ve got a similar suggestion for
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. He should interview himself.
He has achieved financial success by appealing to conservatives,
but went on the CBS 60 Minutes show last Sunday sounding like
a liberal. He told the program that he is pro-gun control, anti-death
penalty, and pro-gay adoption “as a last resort.” O’Reilly
also offered the opinion that conservative critics of the Al
Gore theory of global warming are “idiots.”
A self-described “journalist” who dismissed Rush
Limbaugh as a mere “entertainer,” O’Reilly
told Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes that he might vote for John Kerry,
whom he described as a “patriot” he has known for
25 years. O’Reilly denounced the Swift Boat vets’ ads
against Kerry as “awful” and “terrible.”
Nine days earlier,
however, on his own “O’Reilly
Factor” show on the Fox News Channel, O’Reilly had
said that Kerry acted in a “craven” manner when he
came back to the U.S. after the Vietnam War “by besmirching
all the fine soldiers in Vietnam” when he called them war
criminals. While interviewing John O’Neill, co-author of
the anti-Kerry book, Unfit for Command, O’Reilly said, “I
enjoyed your book.”
Some observers suspect
that O’Reilly, after having secured
an interview with President Bush, is desperate to get an interview
with Kerry before the election. In fact, when Kerry advisor James
Carville appeared on his show on September 23, O’Reilly
virtually begged Carville to set up a Kerry interview for him.
O’Reilly’s curious rhetoric might be dismissed
as inconsequential were it not for the fact that he claims to
provide a “No Spin Zone” to 3-4 million people a
night. But as I discovered when I appeared on his show on February
11, 2003, to expose his flip-flops, he resorts to name-calling
and interrupting when he is put on the defensive.
O’Reilly had claimed that unnamed scientists at MIT,
which he described as “the best in the world,” believe
that “all this fossil fuel is hurting the earth” and
that global warming is occurring and must be urgently addressed.
O’Reilly says he opposes the global warming treaty but
believes the federal government has to take immediate and drastic
action to curb the use of fossil fuels. He opposes gas-guzzling
sport utility vehicles.
However, the most
prominent expert on global warming at MIT is meteorologist
Dr. Richard Lindzen, a leading critic of the
theory who has never been invited on “The Factor.”
O’Reilly took this controversy one step further on 60
Minutes, not only telling Mike Wallace that “global warming
is here” but that “all these idiots that run around
and say it isn’t here” are “ridiculous.”
Lindzen has engaged
in climate and climate-related research for over 30 years and
has testified before Congress. He is a
member of the National Academy of Sciences and the author or
co-author of over 200 papers and books. He told me that he didn’t
know of anybody at MIT who is on O’Reilly’s hysterical
side of the debate. He said that some colleagues waffle and say, “Well,
we don’t know but it could be a serious problem.”
The average temperature
over the last century has gone up between a third and two-thirds
of a degree, Lindzen said. “If you’re
not intelligent enough or sensitive enough to know that every
day of your life you see ten or twenty times that variation,
then please stop the conversation,” he added. He said that
such a minor change, which can be entirely natural, grabs the
public’s attention when it is put on a graph “and
made to look like Mount Everest.”
But Lindzen thinks
people are wising up. “People have
more sense than we give them credit for,” he said. “No
one thinks of O’Reilly—or these days almost any newscaster—as
an authority and that’s for the good. I think CBS has done
a wonderful service.”
He was referring,
of course, to the CBS “Rathergate” memo
scandal that has exposed the corrupt and deceptive nature of
journalism today. It is noteworthy that 60 Minutes, the same
program that perpetrated a fraud on the American people with
the fake Bush/National Guard memos, was the vehicle for O’Reilly’s
outrageous and completely indefensible comments on global warming.
O’Reilly made the offensive comments about “idiots” at
the expense of the millions of conservatives in the viewing audience
who generate the ratings that helped O’Reilly buy his wife
a gas-guzzling Mercedes-Benz. O’Reilly, the “working
class guy” who makes $10 million a year, told Wallace he
doesn’t set foot in the car and “I’m not driving” it.
He sounded like John Kerry, who, when caught riding in an SUV
to an environmental event, claimed it was really his family’s
car, not his. CRO
copyright
2004 Accuracy in Media
§
|
