While I’ve never seen a single episode of 24, Survivor or American Idol and I don’t normally watch Fox News, whenever I get an e-mail telling me that someone whom I’ve actually met is going to be interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, I usually feel obligated to tune in, if only to see what they look like on TV.
While I’ve never seen a single episode of 24, Survivor or American Idol and I don’t normally watch Fox News, whenever I get an e-mail telling me that someone whom I’ve actually met is going to be interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, I usually feel obligated to tune in, if only to see what they look like on TV.
The only problem is that Fox News is a lot like a very easy video game that you can figure out after a few tries. After that it just gets boring, even when it involves people I know. Sunsara Taylor, the national spokesperson for World Can’t Wait, seems to have been given the same gig on the O’Reilly Factor that Maryscott O’Connor has with John Gibson, the token leftist used to embarrass liberals. We all know the dance. Fox will put fringy leftist groups on air hoping that they’ll make perfectly reasonable arguments (like the idea that Bush should be impeached or that the Democratic Congress should vote to end the occupation of Iraq) look fringy and unpatriotic. This drives elite liberal Democrats — who want ordinary people out of the streets, off the air, and at home watching TV — nuts. Being the sacrificial victim on Fox News also provides an excellent opportunity for anti-war organizers and progressive activists to get airtime they wouldn’t ordinarily get on CBS or MSNBC. It’s not necessarily about converting Fox’s viewers. It’s about getting the segment on YouTube and up on your website, using the credibility that even national media exposure on Fox can give you to raise funds and continue organizing.
One of Bill O’Reilly’s jobs is to make sure this doesn’t happen, to minimize the ability of anti-war and progressive groups to leverage credibility and exposure out of Fox’s desire to embarrass elite liberals and the Democratic Party. In other words, he can’t just debate them. He has to destroy them, make them look so stupid and so crazy that nobody in their right minds would want to have anything to do with them, or else he gets a lot of nasty letters from his mullet headed, meth addicted viewership about why he’s putting on them damned commie Islamofascists. Normally it’s not very difficult. All of Fox’s shows are taped so they can edit out any kind of material they don’t want on the air. They control the lighting, the timing of the segments, the cameras, the microphones. And it’s not only Fox. When the Washington Post did their hit piece on leftist blogger Maryscott O’Connor, all they really had to do was take enough photographs to be sure they’d have a usable one from the worst possible angle.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401648.html
This isn’t brain surgery. Give me a digital camera, a raw converter, a 1 Gig flash card and a few minutes, let me control the lighting, and I could make James Madison look like a kook on the political fringe or Brad Pitt look like someone who can’t get a date. Call it character assassination by drivers license photo. But occasionally things get out of control. Sunsara Taylor, who looks a bit like Tina Fey’s younger sister, is a little too attractive and a little too conservative looking to fit the typical Fox News viewer’s stereotype of an anti-war activist. But during the first one on one interview with Bill O’Reilly, he and his crew went for the full, head on, frontal assault. While they may not have gone as far as the Washington Post did with Maryscott O’Connor, Fox’s crew, who tape hundreds of people a week and know exactly how someone would come across on camera, certainly did forget to tell her to remove her jacket (Are they cutting back on heat at Fox?) and certainly did forget to tell her to brush back her hair and take off her glasses, all the better to set her up for O’Reilly, who wanted to portray her as the out of touch, elitist leader of the moonbat horde who routed Rahm Emanuel from his Capital Hill press conference.
Nevertheless, this kind of full, head on bullying, which works so well against liberals, who, like Charlie Brown fooling himself again and again that Lucy will actually hold the football in place and let him kick it, really do think people at Fox are interested in a fair and honest debate, is much less effective against hard core radicals, who realize they aren’t. In his first one to one interview with Sunsara Taylor, he actually gets flustered by her ability to stay on message, and he comes off looking more like my Uncle Charlie at a family reunion than a professional TV journalist. You can almost imagine him leaving the Fox studios to go back out to his ten year old Ford Taurus with the “Jane Fonda Traitor Bitch” sticker on the rear windshield. Damned commies. We should send em all to Gitmo and hang em up on a meathook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UarLnP690i8
Score one for Sunsara Taylor and World Can’t Wait.
But don’t count out Fox News and Bill O’Reilly that easily. They weren’t going to make that mistake twice. After the March on the Pentagon to commemorate the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the O’Reilly Factor invited Sunsara Taylor for a second try. This time they went for a more subtle approach, invited her to the studio itself and shot her from a more flattering camera angle and in a more flattering light. But in the meantime they had figured out how to use her own strengths, the ability to stay on message and to challenge Bill O’Reilly head on in a way most liberals (like the awful Kirsten Powers) won’t against her. O’Reilly does, you have to concede, have some skill as a broadcast journalist. After all, if being an ignorant, bullying right wing lunatic were all it took to make it on TV, my Uncle Charlie would have had his own show on Fox News a long time ago, and, quite obviously, when it comes to a TV segment, O’Reilly’s going to have a better sense of timing that Sunsara Taylor. So he not only let her go on without actually disputing anything she had to say, he encouraged her, repeatedly changed the subject and made her answer so many questions in so little time, it wound up look as though she were just throwing out random bits of anti-American propaganda she had picked up at the March on the Pentagon.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5fsJrRt0gcU
Score one for Bill O’Reilly.
And there it would have stood, but Bill couldn’t quite stop there and the show wound up coming off the rails anyway. Taylor, in the segment, in addition to looking a bit like that TA at the University of Michigan you spent your freshmen year working up the courage to hit on, also has a creepy, superficial resemblance to Andrea Mackris, the ex Fox News TV producer who won a multimillion dollar settlement against O’Reilly for sexual harassment. So you’d have to wonder about O’Reilly’s motivations for structuring an entire show around a relatively obscure anti-war activist. Indeed, immediately after the segment was over, O’Reilly brought on three other guests, Gary Sinese, the far right wing actor who was last seen as Tom Hank’s sidekick in Forrest Gump, the ever more repellent Michelle Malkin, and a “Democratic Strategist” named “Kirsten Powers,” who looks a lot more like the typical blond, bleached Fox News bimbet than any liberal I’ve ever met. And he tipped his hand. He had brought Sunsara Taylor on Fox News, not because he was interested in anything she had to say or even in defeating her in a one on one debate. No, he had brought her on his show simply to make her look stupid, simply to make fun of her.
In other words, at long last we see where Fox News, its staff and crew, and most of its viewership is coming from, high school. Like the popular girl who acts nice to the class geek, invites her to a party, and pretends to be friends with her, only to drop the metaphorical bucket of pig’s blood on top of her head when the setup is complete. O’Reilly spent the rest of the show wrinkling his pretty little nose and hissing. “Don’t think I actually want you on this show because I think you’re cool or anything Sunsara. I only had you on to prove what a dork you are”.
But the segment is disturbing on a deeper level than the fact that the people running a major news outlet are emotionally stuck somewhere in the 10th grade. While her timing was bad and while O’Reilly was able to make her look a bit like a lightweight, everything Sunsara Taylor argued during her segment was not only true, but uncontroversially true.
We can argue about the validity of the Lancet Study. Have 50,000 or 600,000 Iraqis died? University of Michigan Middle East specialist Juan Cole thinks its perfectly reasonable but, in the end, nobody’s going to have any idea about the real numbers for decades, since Iraq is simply too dangerous for civilian academics and NGOs to spend too much time counting the bodies. Marla Ruzicka of CIVIC, the last person who actually tried, was burned alive in her car after it had been bombed by the Iraqi Resistence. O’Reilly comes off like the classic Holocaust denier, my Uncle Charlie in David Irving drag, and he trots out the arguments all Holocaust deniers use. Oh it wasn’t six million. It was more like a million. And besides, they all died of disease and Stalin killed way more people than Hitler anyway.
But there is no debate about Maher Arar. Maher Arar was kidnapped at Kennedy Airport by the American government. Maher Arar was taken to Syria and held in a coffin like cell. And Maher Arar was tortured. There’s no argument about this. It happened. 2 + 2 is four. The earth is not 6000 years old. And Maher Arar was tortured. Get used to it. It’s reality. The Canadian government has already conducted an extensive investigation into the matter, the Garvie report. They have already awarded Maher Arar a 9 million dollar settlement. They have already asked for an official apology from the United States government and they have already asked that Maher Arar be taken off the no fly list by the American government, which, up to now, they’re still refusing to do. Once again, there’s no argument about this, even for mainstream American politicians. Even Patrick Leahy, in his questioning of soon to be ex attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, makes substantially the same points Sunsara Taylor does.
There’s something decidedly terrifying, and I really don’t scare that easily, about the fact that O’Reilly wouldn’t concede the basic facts in the Maher Arar case, that he, like any mean girl in high school, simply wrinkled his nose and mimicked what Taylor had to say instead of either conceding the facts and moving on or disputing them. “Oh you’re such a dork worrying about a completely innocent man locked up in a cell for close to a year. I say it didn’t happen and since I have all the power and you don’t it didn’t. What’s more, like duh. Up is down. War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. And, by the way, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.”
Worse yet was Kirsten Powers, who, to be fair, might not have seen the previous episode. Powers, who is apparently some sort of liberal Democratic, wouldn’t dispute O’Reilly on the issue of the US government’s extraordinary rendition and on legalization of torture. Why risk that cushy gig on Fox and that condo on the Upper West Side over a few Arabs? Instead, she talked about Sunsara Taylor’s motivations, as if Sunsara Taylor were the issue and not the conduct of the US government, the Democratic Party’s acquiescence in the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, and the extensively documented abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Powers, by backing down, gave a bipartisan effect to O’Reilly’s agenda against Sunsara Taylor and the anti-war movement. She made it look as if both the legitimate right and left, conservatives and sensible liberals, accepted the idea that the US government doesn’t torture innocent people in their “war on terror”, that wanting to acknowledge and come to terms with these abuses makes you, if not an America hating traitor, then at least a far out, beyond the pale, probably emotionally unbalanced radical.
And that, my friends, is why we’re still in Iraq.