Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly and CBS talkshow host David Letterman had a well-publicized showdown on Letterman’s program in January 2006, so it came as no surprise that their next face-to-face on October 27 would be similarly heated. After the interview aired, O’Reilly accused Letterman of dishonesty for saying O’Reilly had lied on his show, and challenged Letterman to produce the evidence.

O’Reilly took exception to Letterman’s crack about him (Late Night, 10/26/06): “The last time he was on the show, I caught him lying.” As O’Reilly retorted on his October 30 broadcast:



Since O’Reilly seems to need assistance finding his own deceptions, we’ll offer some.

In his January 3, 2006 Late Night appearance, O’Reilly made several false claims regarding his repeatedly voiced concern about the “war on Christmas”—what he called the “movement in this country by politically correct people to erode traditions, and the Christmas tradition is the most cherished in the country.”

Toward the end of the recent midterm elections, voters in closely contested districts across the country reported getting automated calls that began, “Hi, I’m calling with information about [name of Democratic candidate].” If they listened to the rest of the message, they heard a litany of negative claims about the candidate. If they hung up—as many voters did, overwhelmed by so-called robocalls this election season—they were left with the impression that the call came from the Democrat’s campaign. And unless they listened to the entire call, the machine called them back again and again, giving them the impression that the Democrat’s campaign was harassing them (Talking Points Memo, 11/6/06).

Only at the very end of the calls—contrary to federal regulations (AP, 11/1/06)—did they reveal that they were organized and paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which coordinated the GOP’s unsuccessful campaign to keep control of the House of Representatives. The NRCC’s head of opposition research is Terry Nelson, who in 2002 was deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee. At that time, Nelson was the supervisor of Jim Tobin, the RNC’s New England political director, who was convicted of illegally jamming Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire (AlterNet, 11/6/06).

“People from the Old Media, like me, instinctively prefer a centrist style of civilized debate,” the Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote in a pre-election column (10/18/06). It’s a revealing admission of the media’s reigning ideology, though it might more accurately be described as center-rightism: While centrism implies an evenhanded rejection of the “extremes” on both sides of the political spectrum, in practice establishment pundits, comfortable with a center-to-right spectrum of debate, almost always focus their disapproval on the real or invented excesses of the left.

Prior to the 2006 midterm elections, which long promised to move the country significantly to the left, commentators were particularly vocal about warning the Democrats away from progressive temptations. After complaining that Democratic online activists “fanned anti-incumbent and antiwar flames” and “relentlessly derided Sen. Hillary Clinton as calculating, overly cautious and lacking true liberal bona fides,” Time magazine (9/24/06) declared: “Moderate Democrats say it with remorse, conservatives with glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan: Progressive bloggers are pushing the Democratic Party so far to the left that it will have no chance of capturing the presidency in 2008.

For Issues, Go Elsewhere
“In this Internet age, there’s no shortage of places to go if you want to read position papers or hear what candidates are holding forth about the economy, education, the environment, anything like that. But our job, especially in the last four or five days, is to take everything that’s coming in and crystallize it through a filter of what is popping, what seems to be the most of—I guess, what you’d call man biting dog, what’s out of the ordinary.”
—CBS reporter Jim Axelrod (CNN’s Reliable Sources, 11/5/06)

Some Hell Still Unresearched
A glowing Baltimore Sun profile (10/30/06) of MSNBC host Tim Russert lauded his “simple method” of interviewing: “research the hell out of his guests and let them hang themselves.” That sounds good, but it’s hard to apply that description to one of the interviews Sun reporter Stephen Kiehl focused on, a show featuring Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele (10/29/06). After playing a TV spot for his election opponent Benjamin Cardin in which Michael J. Fox states that “Michael Steele will put limits on the most promising stem cell research”—meaning embryonic stem cell research—Steele claimed the commercial lied about him by saying he opposes all stem cell research, when he actually supports research on stem cells not taken from embryos. That Russert allowed Steele to get away with this distortion suggests that Russert isn’t really as prepared as the Baltimore Sun writer says he is.

Nothing Is True