Bill O'Reilly: Culture Warrior or Spin Artist?

At the urging of my father I read Bill O'Reilly's latest book Culture Warrior. I will admit that I read The O'Reilly Factor when it came out and was not particularly angered by his rhetoric. It seemed to be exactly what I thought it was, traditionally conservative. Conservative morals, ethics and mores with a major generation gap thrown in. I found his new book to be down right enervating. Reading him makes me tired and angry all at the same time. Although through all the rhetoric about the culture war I found Bill to be fairly straightforward and honest. I only had one big sticking point, and it was very early on. In the second chapter of the book Mr. No-Spin Zone talks about liberal media bias, and it is here that he does some pretty poor spin work to convince the reader that all mainstream media is liberally biased and not worth listening to. That;s fine, he's entitled to his opinion, unfortunately for Bill, he uses a study to back up his point, and this is where he gets himself in trouble. He references a study done by UCLA that has proven conclusively that there is a liberal media bias. Okay, so here's the skinny on the study. It did happen, it did find that the media is overwhelmingly liberal (big surprise) and that most of the outlets we think are liberally biased really are. The CBS Evening News, The New York & Los Angeles Times, are all liberally biased. Mr. O'Reilly makes sure to name those three and refers to them as the most liberal media in the country. He then goes on to talk about the New York Times editorial page and how they might as well just put a permanent headline "We HATE Bush." That's all fine and good, not a single lie in there at all. However, there is one well placed omission. First, while Mr. O'Reilly cites the study, he provides no source, so you have to go find it and read all 47 pages of it. I imagine that Mr. O'Reilly doesn't expect too many people to actually do this; I did. Here's what the study, which you can read here, actually says. The team from UCLA studied the news divisions of 20 major media outlets, including the three above as well as Fox News, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, etc. They excluded editorial and opinion pages from their study because they were obviously going be biased by their author's personal political views. They wanted to do research on bias in the news, not in editorials. Mr. O'Reilly conveniently forgets to include the actual purpose for the study. He also conveniently forgets to mention that of all the "news" sources that they included in the study, the most liberal source for "news" in the country is, wait for it, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL! That's right, that bastion of conservatism, that defender of all things Republican, has a liberal news department that makes the New York Times look like Zell Miller. Oh, and what "news" source is far and away the most moderate, wait for it, PBS' News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Yup, that's right, PBS, that bastion of far left liberals, that decidedly anti-Republican outlet, is the most "fair and balanced" of all news sources. I'm not going to bother with any pretense about where Fox News ended up, although it was one of only two outlets that ranked as "conservative" on the scale. I can't imagine why Mr. O'Reilly would want to spin the information this study has provided to leave out these findings, honestly, I can't think of a single reason. Well, okay, I can. The real question is just how long people are going to continue to believe that Mr. O'Reilly is a part of the same machine as everyone else and that when it comes to the mainstream media, everybody has an angle.