I finished my
30 Day Experiment in Ignorance on August 30th, and actually skimmed over a bit of REAL news yesterday! What a relief, but I did not truly catch up as work ate up the majority of my time. That I will fix today. I will then let you know, in yet ANOTHER diary, those news items which were completely absent from my radar as a result of OReilly's bias.
In the meantime, anyone keeping up here will not be at all surprised by the final count of what Bill OReilly spent his on air time discussing. I'm going to put a complete list under the cut, but let me list out the top 3 here, where EVERYONE can see.
TOP THREE OREILLY NEWS STORIES FOR AUGUST:
1) Aruba/Natalee Holloway: 17.9% of airtime, 127 mins, 26 segments
2) Jessica's Law/Child Sex Offenders: 12.6%, 89 mins, 17 segments
3) Cindy Sheehan: 10.7%, 76 minutes, 14 segments
See how out of touch we are at dKos? Anyone here talking about Aruba or Jessica Lunsford? More proof of our blindness below -->
4) Illegal Aliens/Border Dangers: 6.6% airtime, 47 minutes, 10 segments
5) Terrorism/Terrorists: 5.8%, 41 minutes, 8 segments
6) Iraq War: 5.2%, 37 minutes, 6 segments
7) "Able Danger"/911 CoverUp: 4.2%, 30 minutes, 6 segments
8) Delores Kesterson: 2.8%, 20 minutes, 3 segments
9) Intelligent Design: 2.0%, 14 minutes, 3 segments
10) Atlanta Voting Rally/ID Cards: 1.8%, 13 minutes, 3 segments
Obviously we are getting into some fairly small percentages at this point, so let's take a quick look at the Top Ten Factor Topics for the month. Let's cluster some of them and find themes - not too hard to do, but humor me.
Let's cluster 1, 4, 5, and 6 to show just how SCARY foreigners are to Americans. From Aruba to Mexico to the Middle East, they are ALL out to get us. OReilly attacks not only these unfortunately obvious targets (Aruba quite tenuous, mind you), but he also spouts off against Europe and the UN. OReilly viewers live in a world where only America can be trusted, and anything we do must be supported by other countries OR they are enemies. Black and white, with nearly everyone outside of Britain being black. And we're still looking at them Brits.
Let's cluster 1, 2, 3 and 8 to show how dangerous the world is for our children. Granted much of the time spent on Cindy and Delores was bashing them for treason. However, OReilly did frequently point out the difficulty of "losing a child" - he simply prefers parents who celebrate the loss of their child as a patriotic and honorable act. The dangers to our children allow us to act in any way necessary to "protect" them. Mandatory minimum sentences are a GREAT and difficult to argue against position that doubles as a ploy to undermine the power of the Judicial Branch. Don't like it? Then you are "soft" on molesters and responsible for each of the horrific worst-case-scenarios he presented.
Let's cluster 3, 7, 9, and 10 to show how out of touch Democrats are. Cindy Sheehan has been effectively "swift-boated" into a treasonous puppet for Michael Moore. The FLO's (my beloved acronym for Far Left Organizations) have all of her strings, and the words that come out are anti-American. Watching the quotes they pulled from her was painful, because I knew they were out of context, but they sounded AWFUL! "Able Danger" proves that 9/11 happened because of Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick's failures. Thanks Clinton! Intelligent Design HAS to be addressed in schools so that children understand the debate. And the Voter ID Cards are CLEARLY a great idea, especially since GA officials will come to your home to issue them.
Now, a few more topics that got 2 segments, and between 8 and 11 minutes of airtime (1.1%-1.6%):
11) John Roberts, 12) Bush's Legacy, 13) ACLU, 13) ACT/Air America Collapse,
13) Air France Crash, 16) BTK Murderer, 16) Hillary's Senate Run
With these, we continue to see the Left presented as "just causing problems" and "dying a slow, humorous death." OReilly loves to show how poorly our FLO's are doing, how much they hate America, how obstructionist they are, how problematic they are purposefully being toward the otherwise PERFECT legacy Bush ought to leave in his wake. Hmmm, perhaps I overstep a bit there - OReilly actually does seem to have some problems with poor George, he just thinks Bush needs to move further RIGHT, while we are unpatriotic to think he oughtta come our way. I can honestly say I do not remember OReilly ever sympathizing with any idea or concept which might be considered "Left Leaning." Right is right and left is wrong, as the high school bigots used to say.
I'm about to start really reading up on some of the news I've missed, but if you want to help me along, PLEASE do drop me a comment and send me in the right directions. Catching up from this far behind without instruction is daunting, but I hope I can squeeze one more interesting diary out of my discoveries.