Bill O'Reilly clobbered CNN tonight over the ludicrous allegation, spread around by CNN's Rick Sanchez --who shouldn't be throwing stones, as Cable Gamers know (see posting earlier on Tuesday night), along with those professional lefties at Media Matters that Bill, in arguing against racism, was somehow a himself a racist.
The accusation is absurd, not made more true by turning up the volume. But Media Matters has a quota of Fox-bashing flapjacks to make every day, so this item was just another Foxberry pancake for them to flip.
And as for CNN, well, I'll Bill explain their motivation, making use of his usual incisiveness, as he did in his "Talking Points" tonight:
Failure leads to desperation. The Factor has been number one for six consecutive years and defeats our cable news competition combined. The other cable news outlets are ratings disasters. Last night, The Factor had six times as many viewers as CNN at 8pm. But that is no excuse for being dishonest.
And Juan Williams, always a stand-up guy, stood up for O'Reilly here--brought to you c/o Johnny Dollar.
Actually, the whole of Bill's "Talking Points" is worth reiterating. So I will, from the top:
“Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. CNN goes over to the dark side. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo.
Every weekday we do three hours of commentary -- two on the radio, one on TV. And, everyday, the far-left smear website Media Matters takes that commentary out-of-context and feeds defamation out to the public.
Media Matters, which acts in concert with the now notorious MoveOn, has labeled me anti-black, anti-Hispanic, homophobic and anti-Semitic. I'm sure I'll be a member of the Manson family shortly.
Of course, this is all non-sense and we usually ignore it until it is picked up by the so-called mainstream media. Elements at NBC News have made a living parroting media matters garbage and now, sadly, CNN has jumped into the swamp.
Recently on the Radio Factor, I did an hour on how racism is dumb, how it is driven by fear and I even used my own late grandmother as an example. Now you can hear that radio hour on billoreilly.com. It's a very interesting discussion and we didn't hear one complaint about the program that ran on more than 400 radio stations.
Well, yesterday Media Matters distorted the entire conversation and implied I was racist for condemning racism.
Stunningly, CNN echoed the defamation on at least three of its programs. The reason CNN did this is because its ratings are abysmal. It is getting hammered by Fox News so they are desperate for attention and smearing me is one way to get it.
Unfortunately, many in CNN’s audience have no idea what I said and some believe the garbage they are hearing.
Now I talked to CNN last night before that program. It was obvious they didn’t listen to the Radio Factor so I explained the deal. They went ahead with the racist angle anyway.
This is dishonest and dangerous. If a slime machine like Media Matters can get its far-left propaganda on CNN and NBC News, the nation is in trouble.
Talking Points has said many times on this broadcast that we respect CNN. We have not attacked them in any way and in the past, they have been responsible. But this is absurd. The Media Matters defamation was also picked up by the local ABC affiliate here in New York City -- again, totally irresponsible.
Finally, CNN did a documentary a few weeks ago by Christiane Amanpour. In that documentary, Ms. Amanpour put forth that religion has caused a lot of pain in the world. Now, some considered her presentation anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. We could have easily hammered CNN and Ms. Amanpour. It would have been simple to do that. But we did not. They reported -- the audience is smart enough to decide if anti-religion bias was present.
Failure leads to desperation. The Factor has been number one for six consecutive years and defeats our cable news competition combined. The other cable news outlets are ratings disasters. Last night, The Factor had six times as many viewers as CNN at 8pm. But that is no excuse for being dishonest.
And that's the memo.
