Study: Bill O’Reilly is a Propaganda Pro

While I knew Bill O’Reilly was a bloviating blowhard before I read the Indiana University study, I did not realize that 40 percvent of Americans consider him a journalist while only 30 percent of Americans think Bob Woodward is a legit journalist. Now granted, Woodward’s creds have been somewhat reduced by his recent tactics, but still, he was half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal, so he at one time was the kind of journalist that journalists want to be.

But O’Reilly has never been a journalist and should not be confused with one. Instead, according to the study, which used methods employed in the 1930s to measure propaganda, O’Reilly should be considered a master at propagandizing.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, [researchers] found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

• Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
• Glittering generalities — the oppositie of name calling;
• Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
• Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
• Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
• Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
• Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

The researchers should be commended for having sat through six months (115) episodes of the opening editorial of “The O’Reilly Factor” or we should chip in and buy them a vacation or something. Other findings included:

• Fear was used in more than half (52.4 percent) of the commentaries, and O’Reilly almost never offered a resolution to the threat. For example, in a commentary on “left-wing” media unfairly criticizing Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales for his role in the Abu Ghraib scandal, O’Reilly considered this an example of America “slowly losing freedom and core values,” and added, “So what can be done? Unfortunately, not much.”
• The researchers identified 22 groups of people that O’Reilly referenced in his commentaries, and while all 22 were described by O’Reilly as bad at some point, the people and groups most frequently labeled bad were the political left — Americans as a group and the media (except those media considered by O’Reilly to be on the right).
• Left-leaning media (21.6 percent) made up the largest portion of bad people/groups, and media without a clear political leaning was the second largest (12.2 percent). When it came to evil people and groups, illegal aliens (26.8 percent) and terrorists (21.4 percent) were the largest groups.
• O’Reilly never presented the political left, politicians/government officials not associated with a political party, left-leaning media, illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists as victims. “Thus, politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists — never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy,” the authors concluded.
• According to O’Reilly, victims are those who were unfairly judged (40.5 percent), hurt physically (25.3 percent), undermined when they should be supported (20.3 percent) and hurt by moral violations of others (10.1 percent). Americans, the U.S. military and the Bush administration were the top victims in the data set, accounting for 68.3 percent of all victims.
• One of O’Reilly’s common responses to charges of bias is to come up with one or two examples of “proof” that he is fair to all groups. For example, in October 2005, Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez accused O’Reilly of treating the southern border “as the birth of all American ills.” O’Reilly responded by showing a video clip in which he had called Mexican workers “good people.” He called for a boycott of the newspaper if it did not retract Hernandez’ column.

Read the full study, with charts and stuff, here.

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