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"Fear Factor": Lemann on O'Reilly

Everything you wanted to know about Bill O'Reilly, but were afraid to ask - via Nicholas Lemann at The New Yorker. Actually an appreciation – who knew that Lemann was an O'Reilly fan, despite their obvious ideological differences? [Link]

The connection between the scourge of child sex abuse and liberals whom O'Reilly doesn't like – a long list that includes George Clooney, Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman, and Alec Baldwin – may not be obvious, but, to O'Reilly's way of thinking, both are part of a national climate of permissiveness and relativism. This is manifested in the unprovable, but no doubt painful, loss of the norms that O'Reilly and his audience remember growing up with. The implied connection, anyway, gives O'Reilly a good pretext for the odd but compelling mixture of subjects on "The O'Reilly Factor," with foreign policy one minute, a lurid (one might even say titillating) sex crime the next, and the Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof's latest unfair attack on O'Reilly the next. (O'Reilly is feuding with Kristof, who has assembled from readers' pledges a notional fund to send O'Reilly on a reporting trip to Darfur. O'Reilly recently parried by saying that the Times "continues to ignore the child predator situation here in the U.S.A.") It would be useless to accuse O'Reilly of trafficking in cultural symbols and not substance, because to him cultural symbols are substance. Like every artist, he has created a territory that is distinctively his, and under anyone else's supervision would not cohere.

jon posted this at 7:10 AM
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