Pages

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Cenk Uygur Referees Bill O'Reilly-George Will Cage Match

This is the year of the GOP civil war. We have the civil war in Congress that brought down Boehner and also claimed Kevin McCarthy's scalp.

We have the civil war in the GOP primary between the establishment candidates and the outsider candidates-and the establishment candidates against themselves.

We have the civil war between the candidates and the RNC but then of course the candidates couldn't agree either on what debate demands they would come up with.

Now we have a civil war for the heart of Fox News as showcased in the George Will-Bill O'Reilly slugfest last Friday night. I don't mind telling you I can't watch  this video enough.

What seems to be going on is Will and O'Reilly work for different Fox News departments which are all at war among themselves.

"What makes the exchange so fascinating is that O’Reilly pulled the curtain back and discussed Fox’s internal workings on air, something that never happens at Roger Ailes’s secretive network. “Fox News hard news chief Mike Clemente, who you know, told us that you told him that you would call me before the column was published," O'Reilly said on-camera. Will disputed that Clemente issued a directive. “It would not be the first time you got something wrong," Will told O’Reilly.

"Inside Fox, the O’Reilly-Will feud is being closely studied by executives because it is part of a larger power struggle that’s taking place at the highest reaches of the organization. On opposing sides of the fault line are Clemente, who oversees news (where Will works), and executive vice-president Bill Shine, who oversees prime-time shows (where O’Reilly works). Clemente and Shine are vying to replace Ailes and are such bitter rivals that they barely speak, numerous Fox employees say. In August 2014, the rivalry intensified when Ailes put Shine in charge of the Fox Business Network. “This is some Game of Thrones shit,” one insider told me. The relationship is so bad that Clemente is not involved at all in preparing for the upcoming GOP debate on Fox Business."

"Shine’s loyalists tell me that Clemente did not confer with Shine about Will’s anti-O’Reilly column before it was published. Furthermore, they’re furious at Clemente for not stopping Will from embarrassing Fox’s highest-rated host in the pages of the Post. They reminded me that it was Clemente who recruited Will to Fox from ABC in 2013. One source also explained that Will received a special contributor contract with Fox that grants him editorial independence for his column (other contributors are barred from writing about Fox without permission). “He doesn’t have to check with Fox,” the source said.

"Clemente did not comment, but his camp is firing back off the record.“Almost everyone is on team George,” one said. “Everyone is snickering and thinks it's a riot.” Another told me that O’Reilly’s Killing series is considered something of a joke inside the network. “He certainly doesn’t research his books,” one executive said."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/oreilly-will-feud-part-of-a-fox-news-civil-war.html
A lot of people seem to be on Will's side in the dispute-these people, of course, are part of the Very Serious Punditry.

I think many are against O'Reilly stylistically here-they don't like the way he shouts down people and attacks them in such visceral terms. I never liked that either-until he directed at O'Reilly!

I guess this makes me a 'Situationist'? Or is that a 'Contextualist?'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International

No, I'm not really a Situationist now that I read their manifesto. How about Contextulist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextualism

Yes, that sounds a little more like me! A piece by Erik Wemple seems pretty representative of reaction to the debate among the Very Serious.

"What reporting!"

Think about the backdrop here: “Killing Reagan” is the fifth in a series that includes “Killing Jesus,” “Killing Lincoln,” “Killing Patton” and “Killing Kennedy.” Unlike most or all of those previous projects, “Killing Reagan” offered O’Reilly and Dugard an enticing opportunity to do some heavy-duty original reporting, as opposed to relying mostly on previous works and documents and the like. Meese, Schultz, Baker et al. surely do have “skin in the game” — which is precisely why they can and must be consulted. As should those who may rebut their memories. Once all that material is collected, O’Reilly and Dugard could have sifted through it all and presented the results to readers."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/11/08/in-epic-clash-with-george-will-over-killing-reagan-fox-news-host-bill-oreilly-renounces-journalism/
But I think that Cenk Uygur sort of gets it in his analysis here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POjNm9Wojyw

Yes, O'Reilly doesn't do much actual research-he churns out these Killing books of his too fast for that.

But in a larger Macro sense O'Reilly is right. Using a kind of Bizzaro Ben Carson logic, O'Reilly is trying to help Reagan out. He's trying to explain why he seemed so often to not be all there.

The problem was serious enough that his own staff once seriously considered invoking the 25th Amendment and declaring him unable to continue to do the job.

This is the forest that Will's argument over the trees is meant to obscure.


No comments:

Post a Comment