Bill O’Reilly’s baroque period

The New Yorker writes a nice piece about my favorite asshole, Fox New's Bill O'Reilly, courtesy of Eschaton:

O’Reilly has been playing O’Reilly so successfully for so long, and has developed such a substantial library of hooks, tics, and subplots, that he sometimes seems to be parodying himself, or parodying Colbert’s parody of him; “The O’Reilly Factor” and “The Colbert Report” are a matched pair. Both shows air twice most weeknights—the rebroadcast of the previous night’s “Colbert Report” is on during the broadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor,” and the broadcast of “The Colbert Report” is on during the rebroadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor.” With those hours, plus the regular anti-O’Reilly sallies of Olbermann and other hosts, and the relentless promotion of O’Reilly on other Fox shows, O’Reilly dominates cable news as much as Walter Cronkite dominated network news during his heyday, if not more so.

Click here for the rest.

While the essay is definitely an attack piece, and how I hope O'Reilly whines about it on his show, the one thing that comes through in this article more than any other is that the big butthole is wildly successful in terms of ratings. As far as the commercial television industry goes, that means he's a major money-maker for his employers. I've got to admit some small bit of admiration for him because of that. And not just because of all the cash he's generating for himself and Fox: there is a reason O'Reilly has so many viewers; he's great at what he does. He is, in short, an excellent showman, on the scale of PT Barnum, and he really knows who his audience is and how to work them. Hell, I really love hating him. He's a great villain, as good as Doctor Doom or Darth Vader in his own way. Let's face it, O'Reilly may be a nut, but he's damned good TV.

Too bad so many viewers take him seriously. That's why, ultimately, he's a threat to the entire nation.

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