Bill O'Reilly Is on the Ropes: Tries to Defend His Harassment Machine

Alternet.org
April 02, 2009

Yesterday, Bill O’Reilly defended his top henchman, producer Jesse Watters, who is supposedly “the subject of far-left angst, because he goes out and talks to the bad guys.” During his conversation with Amanda Carpenter of the Washington Times — who agreed with everything the Fox News host was saying — O’Reilly defended his “ambush journalism” as a “legitimate brand of journalism”:

O’REILLY: Now the far-left websites fear greatly the vicious guy Jesse Watters. And Jesse Watters is now the subject of far-left angst, because he goes out and talks to the bad guys. Tell us about that.

This, of course, a legitimate brand of journalism, has been practiced ever since television news was invented in the ’60’s when the bad guys won’t comment, when they run and hide.

Watch it:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/v/PCxNVmyyfHY&hl=en&fs=1 expand=1]

Actual journalists disagree with O’Reilly. While he’s right that man-on-the-street interviews have been around for a long time, Fox has taken them to a whole new level. ThinkProgress recently contacted Columbia Journalism Review editor in chief Mike Hoyt — also a victim of an O’Reilly ambush earlier this year — who said that what O’Reilly does is nothing more than “fake journalism”:

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