If it’s true that, according to the Rove-Breitbart playbook, when your side is on defense you are losing, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly is losing the debate with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about his network’s use of racism to inflame and agitate its predominantly elderly white Republican viewers.
According to Bill O’Reilly, highly rated shows can’t possibly be racist.
Maddow apparently got under O’Reilly’s skin last week when she did a story about race baiting on Fox that documented the network’s on-air personalities’ lies about Van Jones, ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, the New Black Panthers Party, illegal immigration and other racially charged stories.
The next night O’Reilly took to the airways in defense of his network. He rebutted the video evidence of his colleagues’ racially inflammatory comments with a succinct, “Nuh-UHH” — Fox can’t be racist, he suggested, because his ratings were higher than MSNBC’s, and everybody knows that highly rated shows can’t possibly feature racism.
This defense was the subject of much well-deserved derision the next day, which prompted O’Reilly to return to the air and resort to name-calling — Maddow is a “far left loon,” he said. He then repeated the much-derided defense that his network’s high ratings are irrefutably prima facie evidence that Fox is free of racism.
Maddow responded last night by noting that sharks must be more even less racist than Fox because “Shark Week” beat Fox in the ratings last week.
She followed up with a video retrospective of O’Reilly’s own on-air racist comments — which she offered as irrefutable proof that race baiting is what Fox does.
Here’s a rough transcript of Maddow’s report — this was provided by MSNBC:
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