Slate - "Bill O'Reilly's Long Career of Transforming BS into "Common Sense"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/04/bill_o_reilly_s_most_corrosive_trick_was_turning_bs_into_common_sense.html

The All Spin Zone

by Justin Peters

Earlier this month, a few days after the New York Times published the report that would ignite the explosion of Bill O’Reilly’s cable-news career, I tuned in to The O’Reilly Factor. The Times had uncovered five sexual harassment lawsuits that either Fox News or O’Reilly himself had paid to settle, and I wanted to see if he would address the revelations on his own show. He didn’t, of course. Instead he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Geraldo Rivera to condemn the alleged misdeeds of former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. “As an investigative reporter—and I am myself—this is a pretty interesting story, no?” O’Reilly asked Geraldo.



And I am myself. I burst out laughing. O’Reilly did investigative work when he worked for local television stations in the 1970s and 1980s, but that was a very long time ago. When I was a kid I had a lemonade stand, but it doesn’t mean I can go around calling myself a restaurateur. That was O’Reilly, though: a man who built an empire pretending to be something he wasn’t. He was a smug rage-volcano who spewed cant and bluster, who called his shtick common sense, and who yelled at dissenters until they backed down or changed the channel. For 20 years, he was the biggest bullshitter on television.

Bullshitting isn't exactly lying. A liar flatly denies the truth of something. A bullshitter obfuscates the truth for his own benefit. When a liar is caught stealing a candy bar from the corner store, he will swear up and down he didn't do it. When a bullshitter is caught doing the same thing, he will try to cloud the issue. Maybe by saying the theft of one measly candy bar is nothing compared to the vast sums the government steals every year through punitive taxation. Or maybe by observing that the store is run by dirty immigrants.

Every weeknight at 8 p.m., O’Reilly built his namesake program around a series of obfuscatory premises: that America’s problems could be fixed by a diet of resentful, uninformed solutionism; that white, middle-class Christians were under siege; that deceptively edited ambush interviews qualified as accountability journalism; that Dennis Miller—a frequent guest—was funny. Though he had a middle-class childhood in Levittown, New York, he became an extremely wealthy man who feigned a hardscrabble Irish-American persona, a champion of old-fashioned values who moonlighted as an alleged serial harasser of
women.

snip.....read on at the link above