The O'Reilly Harassment Machine keeps spinning. Last night on The Factor, O'Reilly called Think Progress "insects," said Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta was "driving the hate industry," and that blogger Amanda Terkel was "harming a rape victim and her family." Let's deconstruct these idiotic insults.
For starters, Think Progress clearly aren't powerless insects, but they have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. They have launched a campaign to compel O'Reilly's leading corporate sponsors (including AT&T, Johnson&Johnson, Capital One, UPS, Audi, Sharp, Hyundai, P&G, Chrysler, Mercedes Benz, Ford, and Bayer) to end his ambush journalism. And as I wrote yesterday, they've got a list chronicling 40 instances of this deplorable practice. This campaign has already been effective; a Ford spokesman agreed with the criticism of O'Reilly, whom he called "hopelessly pig-headed," and Capital One also expressed regret and claimed they don't endorse O'Reilly's views. This is fantastic pressure that hopefully will curb O'Reilly's "gotcha" journalism that he plays off as accurate investigative reporting.
Ready to shut down Bill O'Reilly's Harassment Machine? Think Progress has responded to O'Reilly's ambush of blogger Amanda Terkel by launching a campaign demanding accountability from O'Reilly's corporate advertisers. This certainly wasn't O'Reilly's first journalistic ambush; in fact, Think Progress counts 40 instances in which O'Reilly has used his henchmen producers to go after everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Moyers to our own Robert Greenwald.
Going after O'Reilly through his corporate sponsors seems like a fitting punitive measure, considering O'Reilly's manic obsession with his imaginary enemy NBC and their parent company GE. O'Reilly even managed to use the Terkel ambush to continue his assault on his network nemesis, which was particularly strange since Terkel has nothing to do with NBC whatsoever. (In fact, as Terkel told Keith Olbermann, she derived her initial report from a News Hounds post on O'Reilly's despicable comments regarding the rape of Jennifer Moore.) It was even odder when O'Reilly tried desperately to make the connection between Terkel, NBC, GE, and Iran in less than one minute!
The bottom line is O'Reilly's thuggish brand of gotcha journalism has got to end, and you can hold O'Reilly to a higher standard by dropping his corporate sponsors a quick note telling them to shut down the O'Reilly Harassment Machine.
Bill O'Reilly took his history of harassment to a deplorable new low last weekend. He sent FOX producer Jesse Waters to ambush Think Progress' Amanda Terkel for highlighting O'Reilly's outrageous comments about the rape and murder of Jennifer Moore in the context of his recent appearance at the Alexa Foundation for rape victims. O'Reilly clearly said--and there's audio proof--that Moore and women who dress in a certain way and consume too much alcohol basically bring rape upon themselves. But did O'Reilly bring up those atrocious comments on last night's show? Hell no!
According to Terkel, "Here are the two things that O'Reilly conveniently left out of his segment:"
- His Original Comments. O'Reilly said that he posted the full Aug. 2 interview about Moore on his website. (It's here.) But he did not repeat his comments on air, nor did he try to defend them - perhaps recognizing that they are indefensible. These comments elicited outrage from more than 900 signatories to a petition by the Concerned Citizens Against Sexual Violence.
- His Harassment. O'Reilly never mentioned to his viewers how he scored that interview with me. He never contacted me for a statement or the chance to appear on his show before deploying his harassment machine. Instead, he sent his producers to stake out my apartment, follow me for two hours, and accost me while I was on vacation in Virginia (and the least prepared to recall a post I had written three weeks earlier).
So O'Reilly had Waters stalk and harass Terkel while on vacation; accuse her of dishonesty for not recalling there and then an unrelated part of that radio segment regarding Mel Gibson's drunken anti-semitic comments (which O'Reilly actually compared to Moore's rape!); and then used this video to continue his delusional beef with NBC. O'Reilly even managed to include GE and Iran in the same conspiratorial breath. Now you tell me who's in dire need of a "Reality Check?"
He's done it again. Bill O'Reilly's stalker-producer Jesse Watters conducted another stalking-ambush, this time of Think Progress's Amanda Terkel. She describes the setup.
- The Stalking: Watters and his camera man accosted me at approximately 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, in Winchester, VA, which is a two-hour drive from Washington, DC. My friend and I were in this small town for a short weekend vacation and had told no one about where we were going. I can only infer that the two men staked out my apartment and then followed me for two hours. Looking back, my friend and I remember seeing their tan SUV following us for much of the trip.
