Commentary: Bill O'Reilly vs. the Internet

LOS ANGELES, July 8 (UPI) -- People love to hate O'Reilly. But despite his bluster and occasional fudging of facts, the man is usually smarter than his antagonists, and there's something intrinsically satisfying at watching a master at his craft. Plus, anyone who so consistently and expertly puts the establishment media in their place can't be all bad.

"I do respect you for coming in here and taking the heat," he told a USA Today columnist, who'd observed that O'Reilly had bad on-camera manners. "Most weasels in your category wouldn't have."

And last year I saw him face a room full of TV critics at a Fox News press conference. The antagonism in the room was palpable, but O'Reilly swatted his questioners like flies.

"If conservative Americans like us, it's because they don't hear any conservative point of view on NPR, very little on PBS," he responded to a question about Fox's right-of-center viewpoint.

So when Bill O'Reilly puffed himself up into a bit of nanny-state indignation against the Internet recently, my reaction was: Say it ain't so, Bill!

In the wake of the Fox News star's anti-cyberspace tirade, I tuned into "The O'Reilly Factor" and was relieved to see that, despite his lapse into ranting outrage - "Nearly every day, there's something written on the Internet about me that's flat out untrue" - the master hasn't lost his touch, even if the net seems to have driven him momentarily nuts.

The other night (but it could have been any night) O'Reilly effectively slammed Bill Clinton - and Clinton's onscreen apologist, Boston University professor Caryl Rivers - for a speech claiming that right-wing talk radio pundits have become dangerously influential.

As O'Reilly pointed out to Rivers, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage et al preach to the choir, while mainstream left-of-center media institutions reach the entire congregation.

When he scolded a black pastor who thought that more federal funding, not better policing, was the answer to inner-city crime, his tone had just the right combination of respect and dismissiveness.

He plugged his new book - "Who's Looking Out For You," due in September - while taking a couple of twinkling, geezerish shots at the "ridiculous" popularity of Harry Potter.

Then he brought in a couple of fish in a barrel -- some woman who'd been arrested for breastfeeding her infant while driving on the freeway, along with the woman's self-righteous husband.

"Render unto Caesar," O'Reilly suggested mildly, when the couple argued that their allegiance to their "Creator" -- who presumably mandates breastfeeding while driving -- trumped a citizen's obligation to pull over for a state trooper.

"AND if you read Acts..." petulantly interrupted the husband, who was dandling the baby on his lap in-studio.

O'Reilly could have squelched them easily, the way he did Marlo Thomas when she threw a fit on his show, or Morley Safer when Safer cut in line at the CBS cafeteria many years ago, when O'Reilly was a local newsman for a CBS station.

But he's too much of a pro not to realize that audiences don't really want to see a couple of mice blown to smithereens by someone loaded for bear, even if they might think they do.

O'Reilly's response instead: "You have a beautiful daughter, sir."

Still, that poor baby. Next thing you know the parents will be spraying her diaper with Windex and using her for a squeegee.

"The reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one," O'Reilly huffed in his Talking Points memo, in the same aggrieved tone liberal media folk use when complaining about Matt Drudge.

O'Reilly was annoyed that various web sites had repeated a false San Francisco Chronicle report that a radio station up there had dropped O'Reilly's radio show.

Granted, anything picked up from the Chronicle really should be checked, but online news and gossip sites generally correct mistakes quickly and ungrudgingly (unlike, for instance, the Chronicle.)

How disappointing to see O'Reilly, who so constantly touts his maverick independence, assuming the same teacher's pet, finger-wagging tone towards blogging as the American Prospect and the Nation: Miss Jones! Miss Jones! Johnny's reading ahead again - without permission!

Naturally, the blogosphere has been having a field day with this.

"Well boo-freakin'-hoo," wrote Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, in an MSNBC.com column called "The No-Weenie Zone."

"Books - a menace and a cesspool," UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh sarcastically argued on Volokh.com. "They're just an appalling, awful technology; and the worst of it is NO ONE IS CONTROLLING THEM."

Jim Treacher (Jimtreacher.com) suggested that O'Reilly's tantrum may have at least contributed a new word to the online vocabulary: O'Reilled-up.

I suspect one reason O'Reilly dislikes the Internet is that it makes it too easy to call his bluff.

He had a bee in his bonnet a couple of years ago about the Los Angeles Times's supposed refusal to write about Juanita Broaddrick, who'd accused President Clinton of rape. He brought it up whenever I saw him speak and regularly on his show.

Then when I interviewed him over breakfast, he did it again. "The L.A. Times has never mentioned Juanita Broaddrick's name, ever," he told me.

But after that quote appeared in a piece I wrote for Mediaweek, a former Times editor did a quick search of the paper's online archives and informed me that she found Broaddrick's name mentioned 21 times there in two years.

I should have caught that myself, and might have, except that I was mesmerized by O'Reilly's sheer O'Reillyness.

Maybe it's the way he stared at the menu for a good five minutes in grim silence before finally announcing to the waiter, "Irish oatmeal." Maybe it's that at six-foot-four, he's intimidatingly tall. Maybe it's the way he insists he always flies coach when traveling on his own dime, which I don't quite believe, and get leg cramps just thinking about.

Or maybe it's his haranguing style of rhetoric, even when you're basically on his side.

"Today's paper is probably the worst piece of junk I've ever seen!" he growled, when I ventured that the Times had improved markedly under Tribune Co. ownership.

O'Reilly can sometimes relax into the genial persona of the most entertaining guy at the neighborhood Irish bar, the guy who tells it like it is, complete with funny voices and gestures. This wasn't one of those times.

He seemed to be in strict headmasterish mode - O'Reilly taught high-school for a year after graduating from college; I can only imagine what happened to any clueless adolescent who tried to give him any lip - and I was charmed by the rather bossy inscription he wrote for my daughter when I asked him to sign a copy of his latest book for her.

"To M--," he wrote. "Through the kindness of your mother who loves you very much. Work hard and stay honest!"

For all O'Reilly's occasional insufferablness, one of his saving graces is his genuine concern for children, and part of what fueled his anti-Internet tirade was his anger at online child molesters.

I'm sympathetic with him here, even if segueing from a mistaken report about his radio show to the North American Man-Boy Love Association's web site is a bit of a leap.

And he has an appealing soft spot for young viewers who write into "The O'Reilly Factor" - although O'Reilly being O'Reilly, he can't resist giving them a quick, cranky lecture when he gets the chance.

"My school is making us read books over the summer," a boy named Matthew informed O'Reilly recently via viewer mail. ""And 'The No-Spin Zone' really made me think."

"Well, that's good, Matthew," O'Reilly responded. "You'll be smarter than the other kids. Who are probably reading" - here he affected a brief sneer of disgust - "HARRY POTTER!"

Or even - heaven forbid! - surfing the Internet.