Bill O'Reilly: Propaganda Pimp

[Dardedar]

Bill O’Reilly is a man that cannot say the word “left” without appending modifiers like “far,” “ultra,” “committed,” or “looney.” He is a man who is convinced that every critic is a “smear merchant.” And his opponents are never merely disagreeing with him, they are “vile.”



BILL O'REILLY: PROPAGANDA PIMP

By News Corpse
In a roomful of egomaniacal bloviating pundits, Bill O'Reilly would stand out as a towering infernal display of delusional demagoguery. His crusading rants are illustrative of a society that is weakened by a disease (a social disease?) whose predominant symptoms are a mash of masochism and narcissism. Almost any random sampling of The O'Reilly Fester will reveal a man obsessed with his own righteousness. He views himself as the singular savior of America's meek, who he refers to simply as the "Folks." The semantic approach to his message is overwhelmed with the imagery of conflict and danger. Take, for instance, the titles of his books:

* Culture Warrior
* Who's Looking Out for You?
* The No Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in America
* The O'Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America's Families

Even children are not exempt from his apocalyptic world view. There is also his laughably inept attempt at fiction, Those Who Trespass, which betrays his hostile tendencies, if not his fantasies. From the book's description: "One by one, high-level executives and news correspondents are being brutally murdered in the cutthroat world of television journalism."

If it wasn't already glaringly obvious from watching his nightly bombast; if you hadn't already seen the acute paranoia in his red-faced shouting matches; if you need something more to conclude that O'Reilly is in a downward spiral of tyrannical propagandizing: well now you have it...

Researchers at Indiana University have just published the results of a study that provides academic validation that O'Reilly is a textbook propagandist. Amongst the key findings is that:

"...the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric."

The study itemized seven propaganda devices as defined by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis:

* Name calling - giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence.
* Glittering generalities - the opposite of name calling.
* Card stacking - the selective use of facts and half-truths.
* Bandwagon - appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd.
* Plain folks - an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”.
* Transfer - carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept.
* Testimonials - involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

O’Reilly was found to have employed six of the seven nearly 13 times each minute. This is an important statistic because it is not merely the use of these devices that define their effect. It is the repetition and the absence of any substantive debate that produces the desired manipulation of free thought. This is why O'Reilly repeatedly interrupts and cuts off his guests - to keep them from diluting the rhetorical Kool-Aid. And contrary to his assertions that he doesn't "do personal attacks," IU has documented the reality that any cognitively functional bipedal hominoid has already figured out - O'Reilly is a bullying buffoon:

The rest

[LaWood]

It's getting serious:

Jul 28, 1:50 AM EDT

Liberal Activists Pressure Advertisers Not to Patronize the Fox News Channel

By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network.

MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America's Future and liberal blogs like DailyKos.com are asking thousands of supporters to monitor who is advertising on the network. Once a database is gathered, an organized phone-calling campaign will begin, said Jim Gilliam, vice president of media strategy for Brave New Films, a company that has made anti-Fox videos.

The groups have successfully pressured Democratic presidential candidates not to appear at any debate sponsored by Fox, and are also trying to get Home Depot Inc. to stop advertising there.

At least 5,000 people nationwide have signed up to compile logs on who is running commercials on Fox, Gilliam said. The groups want to first concentrate on businesses running local ads, as opposed to national commercials.

"It's a lot more effective for Sam's Diner to get calls from 10 people in his town than going to the consumer complaint department of some pharmaceutical company," Gilliam said.

Some of the videos produced by Gilliam's company compile statements made by Fox anchors and guests that the activists consider misleading, such as those that question global warming.
........
The groups seem particularly angry at Fox's Bill O'Reilly, who has done critical reports on left-wing bloggers. On July 16, O'Reilly said the DailyKos.com Web site is "hate of the worst order," and sent a reporter to question JetBlue Airways Corp. CEO Dave Barger about the airline's sponsorship of a gathering run by DailyKos.

He'll never ride on JetBlue again, O'Reilly said.

LINK