Commentary

Bullied By O'Reilly, George Will Has The Last Word

by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 12, 2015

Although Bill O’Reilly’s many fans may have seen it differently, their guy came across like a colossal jerk in his confrontation last Friday with George Will on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

It was an ugly encounter -- one of the ugliest in recent memory on a talk show, with O’Reilly behaving like a barroom bully. You can watch the whole thing here.

At issue was a column Will wrote last week in which he was pointedly critical of O’Reilly’s latest history book, a bestseller called “Killing Reagan.” The book is the latest in O’Reilly’s series of “Killing” books, which he churns out at a rate of about one a year with the help of a co-writer named Martin Dugard. The pair’s other books include “Killing Lincoln” and “Killing Kennedy,” in which “killings” actually occurred.

Not to minimize the importance of the attack, but Reagan was not killed when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate him in 1981. However, the O’Reilly book -- subtitled “The Violent Assault That Changed A Presidency” -- seems to posit that the assassination attempt led to a gradual deterioration in Reagan’s mental and physical health as he grew older, maybe even leading to his Alzheimer’s disease and eventually his death.

According to an Associated Press story (cited here because I have not read “Killing Reagan”), the book’s hypothesis hinges mainly on a memo that circulated around the White House staff in 1987 that expressed some aides’ fears that Reagan was not competent and might have to be relieved of his duties under constitutional guidelines outlined in the 25th Amendment.

In his nationally syndicated column published last Thursday, Will said O’Reilly’s book amounts to slandering President Reagan because the memo the book cites has been widely discredited by a number of former White House staffers who have all testified in interviews over the years to the president’s competence.

Will’s column derided the book’s “scholarship” as “pretense,” declared it to be “nonsensical history” and ended this way: “Caution – you are about to enter a no-facts zone” -- a direct parody of O’Reilly’s nightly “no spin-zone” claim on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

To Will’s credit, he agreed to appear on “The O’Reilly Factor” the very next evening, where he withstood a withering verbal assault by O’Reilly lasting about seven minutes. Among other things, O’Reilly called Will a “hack” and complained that Will violated journalistic protocols by not calling O’Reilly to discuss the book before he went ahead and published his column.

While O’Reilly went over a bunch of other items that ticked him off about Will’s column, Will never lost his poise, although you could detect that he was probably upset at the way he was being treated. Will also works for Fox News as a contributor seen mainly on Chris Wallace’s show, “Fox News Sunday.”

Will’s obligation to contact O’Reilly in this context is debatable, and was not necessarily warranted at all. With his emphasis on this issue, the name-calling and other petty complaints, O’Reilly came across like a self-righteous crybaby -- a public figure who can dish it out all day long but cannot tolerate the same when it is directed at him.

Will returned to the subject of O’Reilly’s book in his syndicated column published this week, on Tuesday. “Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not,” wrote Will in this column’s lead sentence. “So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth cannot catch up with him. It has, however, already done so.”

The man does have a way with words, doesn’t he?

politics, tv

7 comments about "Bullied By O'Reilly, George Will Has The Last Word".

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Ted Faraone from Faraone Communications, November 12, 2015 at 12:43 p.m.
It sure does, Adam. I think it is time for a column or a book about the decline of graciousness in America. Bill could write it. At his best he can be among the most gracious people in the TV biz. I know. I worked with him.
Reply

Adam Buckman from MediaPost replied, November 12, 2015 at 12:54 p.m.

Thanks for commenting here, Ted. Personally, I've always liked O'Reilly. He's been cordial to me as well and some years ago, I appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" a couple of times and I never felt attacked or otherwise ill at ease. I think he did himself a disservice in his approach to Will last week, losing his temper like that.

Mark Ramsey from Mark Ramsey Media LLC, November 12, 2015 at 12:56 p.m.

Pure entertainment!

Thomas Siebert from BENEVOLENT PROPAGANDA, November 12, 2015 at 1:12 p.m.

First: This is like Godzilla vs. King Kong, Alien vs. Predator. Two bad guys, hopefully they'll destroy each other.

Second: One of the more interesting but largely forgotten tidbits about the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan is that the Bush family and the Hinkley family were close for many, many years. In fact, VP (at the time) George HW Bush's son Neil Bush was scheduled to have dinnner with Scott Hinkley, brother of John Hinkley, Jr., the day after the assassination attempt.

Small world! Or something. Because almost all the reporting about the Bush/Hinkley dinner has been scrubbed from the internet. The NBC news story reported by John Chancellor, and excerpted on YouTube, has been edited. The Houston Post story cannot be found in their online archives, though fortunately somebody found a copy of the paper and scanned it into Google: 06&dat=19810331&id=3gMtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=G_QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3098,2655414&hl=en

Moreover, start digging into the Hinkley family some and you'll find that John Hinckley Sr., father of the would-be murderer, was past president of World Vision, a right wing evangelical association. Hinkley, Sr., was president of the organization when Mark David Chapman--John Lennon's assassin-- was working for it, quite the strange coincidence. World Vision's largest contributor is the U.S. State Department Agency for International Development, which has led to accusations that the organization has deep ties to the intelligence community and assisted the CIA in many of its projects.

I share no opinions with you, only facts. Do with them what you will.

Oh, wait: Here's an opnion: ALL of O'Reilly's books are bullsh!t. He's a propaganda tool, and a very successful one. I'd bet on him over George Will any day in a cage match

Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, November 12, 2015 at 1:37 p.m.

Go, Tom !!!! Perhaps there should an investigation of the Agency of who and who to whom. Sounds like a TV, a bit like the one about conspiracies of the rare few 1% of the 1%of the 1% who run the world. (Cannot remember the name of it, but truth it spoke.)

ida tarbell from s-t broadcasting, November 12, 2015 at 2:25 p.m.

O'Reilly is a bozo. I frequent smaller Wal-Marts to see what the unread are reading. They're reading all the O'Reilly titles with "KILLING" in the title, all the biographies having been written before by better writers than O'Reilly. Not that O'Reilly actually writes these lowest common denominator Tomes. Wal-Mart tried the new Harper Lee Go Set a Watchman based on her best-selling numbers with the original To Kill a Mockingbird. It didn't last long. These O'Reilly tomes are books for dummies. Another similar cartooned book recounting the midnight ride of Paul Revere was put out under the name of Rush Limbaugh. It read like an illustrated children's book. The publishing business has been going through some tough times. Its output for the last six years has featured some very safe choices. Publishers can't take chances on risky books that could fail in the markeplace like they did for my entire life until the showdown with Amazon cut book prices generally. Even good writers have been affected by the recent blight. Laura Hillenbrand took out an insurance policy on her recent Unforgiven by having her little known Japanese prison camp victim a participant at Hitler's Jesse Owens 1936 Olympics in Germany locale, a crutch for the author and the publisher. The hero of the Boat, another recent biography, also did a stint at the '36 Olympics in Germany. I'm reading that publishers are starting to raise prices again. I doubt if it will turn the tide at the small Wal-Mart bookshelves where bodice rippers with barechested men and/or nearly barechested women are on shelves near religious books where even best-sellers and Bob Woodard books fail to sell

Christopher Weakley from Virgo replied, November 17, 2015 at 8:13 p.m.

Perhaps O'Reilly's next book should be an autobiography titled "Killing Cultural Literacy."