| Propoganda is not journalism |
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| Written by Sarah Richmond | |
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My parents have always told me to mind my own business, to tell the truth and to respect others. It’s that “if everyone swept their own doorstep, the world would be cleaner” idea. That’s why I was so upset when I went home and realized that they had recently started listening to Bill O’Reilly. For those of you who don’t know who Bill O’Reilly is, he’s a political pundit who has a radio show, a TV show and countless books. On his Fox show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” he claims to be an Independent. In reality, he leans far to the right and is not afraid to destroy his journalistic integrity in order to prove a point. He’s known for bringing guests on his show in order to cut them off, dismiss their facts as spin and generally insult them. His books aren’t a lot different. In most of them, he just lists off his political rivals and then proceeds to tear them apart, all the while showing why he is superior to them. He’s an egomaniac with resources. Then why do so many people—my parents included—listen to his show? I started looking for the answer, and I found that I’m not the only person who feels this way. There are several web sites dedicated to pointing out each and every time that Bill O’Reilly lies, spins the truth and strokes his ego. Everything from a false report that gangs of lesbians are terrorizing the east coast on July 7, 2007 to his over-hyped cat fight with television hostess Rosie O’Donnell last year, to his on going Culture War and struggle to “save” Christmas (and I thought it started earlier this year). All of these can be found on the internet at sites with humorous names like oreily-sucks.com and sweetjesusihatebilloreily.com. These sites are the home pages of people with a bone to pick with Stephen Colbert’s “Papa Bear” and have an obvious bias. More importantly, they didn’t answer my question as to why so many people still listen to him. Then I found “Villains, Victims and the Virtuous in Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin Zone: Revisiting world war propaganda techniques.” It’s a 2007 study by the University of Iowa that reveals that O’Reilly’s journalistic methods closely resemble those of 1930s propagandists who used fear appeals and presented the political landscape of the time as an allegorical battle between good and evil. How did they determine this? By using the Institute for Propaganda Analysis’ system of coding speech to determine whether the broadcaster was spreading facts or propaganda. And what the study found along the way was pretty revealing. For example, O’Reilly calls someone a name on average 8.88 times per minute, totaling 2209 total name calls. If you don’t believe it, just visit O’Reilly’s website billoreilly.com to purchase a “don’t be a pinhead” t-shirt. How is that for journalistic integrity? And, at a rate of 2.96 generalities per minute, O’Reilly “mix[es] information with opinion and presents[his] opinions as facts.” O’Reilly also uses other propaganda techniques such as casting political elements like the Bush administration and the media in to roles of “victim” and “evil”, manifesting fear in the listener and appealing to listeners he can no longer economically relate with through his working class childhood. The result is a quantifiable argument that O’Reilly is more a propagandist than a journalist. You can look up the details of the study at http://journalism.indiana.edu/news/oreilly-study-generates-national-attention/. What you need to take away from this article is this: even in this information age, you still need to be careful who you listen to. O’Reilly gets attention because he manipulates his listener’s sense of fear in an ever changing, insecure world. Still, when it comes right down to facts, O’Reilly’s arguments don’t hold up. Political journalists and all politically minded Americans on both sides of the issues need to show O’Reilly for what he is and refuse to stoop to his level of name calling and bullying. Only then can we really enter the no spin zone. |
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