Last night on "The Factor", Bill O was complaining that Oprah has too many 'secular progressives' on her show and not enough conservatives or 'traditionalists', accusing her of not being balanced. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same argument Tucker Carlson tried to make toward Jon Stewart in regards to The Daily Show 2 years back.
Of course, they both miss the difference between news and entertainment programming, as their shows blur the lines as well (although O'Reilly did have a very civil discussion on the war with Bob Woodward prior to going off the deep end regarding Oprah), only they try to hold themselves up as newsmen, while Oprah and Stewart gladly accept their roles as entertainers, not reporters. There is no onus of balance on Oprah, it's her show and she is free to invite or not invite whomever she chooses. One of his guests suggested O'Reilly was just upset that he'd never been invited on her show.
Then he went on to say that with Rosie on The View in the morning, Oprah and Ellen Degeneres in the afternoon, and Leno, Letterman, Stewart, and Kimmel at night, people are having liberal views forced on them all day, with no conservatives on the air to inspire a point-counterpoint discussion on television. Now, this is true to a point, but overstates the case.
First, the View has Elisabeth Hasselback who is not shy about espousing her conservative views, Oprah gets 'political' maybe twice a month, Ellen never does but since she's a lesbian he lumped her in, the late night guys make fun of the days news and since the Republicans are in power, they make jokes about them; as Matthew Perry's character said on Studio 60 last week, when his character was faced with similar accusations, "I'd gladly make fun of the Democrats if one of them would actually say or do something."
There are many liberal voices on television, but I wonder if it wouldn't be different or less of an issue for Bill if we were in a national situation where the majority of people weren't upset with the direction of the country and the presidential administration. Were that the case, I doubt we'd see as much dissension among the ranks, but as it stands, I see nothing wrong with a little healthy skepticism. That's skepticism, not to be confused with pessimism. Pessimism increases apathy, which could possibly make it worse than if no one said anything and we had a state-run media.
1 comment:
And what he and his guys don't talk about is that they get millions of viewers/listeners everyday anyway. Between the three radio hosts - Rush, Hannity and Dr. Laura - that's something like 60m people in combined audience. That's 20% of this country. Then throw in the tv guys... do all the people Bill O' rags on get that many viewers combined? I'm not sure. But this "poor-me, I'm standing up the Right all alone... boo-hoo" crap is so stupid.
And I agree with Perry - in fact I said the same thing the other day when accused of being too partisan. If the Dems would ever get around to doing anything, or pushing policy through - hell, just giving me something to write about - I'd be critical of them too. Maybe.
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