Interdiction: There’s Method to Fox’s Rudeness to the President

During the live portion of Fox’s interview with Pres. Obama before the Super Bowl on Sunday, Bill O’Reilly interrupted the president 43 times, according to Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” on Monday. (See #1 above.)

The interruptions continued in a second, taped part of the interview that was shown later, so that by the end of the 15-minute sit-down, O’Reilly had interrupted the president more than 70 times — once every 19 seconds, according to O’Donnell in a follow-up segment Tuesday night.

Conversely, the number of times O’Reilly let the president finish a sentence was zero, by O’Donnell’s count.

O’Reilly’s 70-plus interjections more than doubled the number of interruptions the president endured in his previous interview on Fox. In March 2010, O’Reilly’s lesser known colleague Bret Baier — host of Fox’s daily round-table presentation of Republican talking points — stopped the president in mid-sentence just 30 times or so. (See video #2.)

So, other than rudeness, what is behind this behavior from Fox? In a word: fear.

Fox Pres. Roger Ailes and his team of producer-propagandists are scared of the president’s communication skills. They fear that if their elderly, right-wing viewers see the president for who he really is, it would undermine the network’s caricature of him as a rabid, Kenyan Muslim Nazi — a depiction Fox has spent millions of dollars and devoted thousands of broadcast hours to create.

Tellingly, Baier’s March 2010 interview with the president came about six weeks after Obama had caused a panic in GOP circles with his graceful and agile responses during a Q&A with House Republicans at their annual conference retreat, which was televised live on cable. He was doing so well, in fact, that Fox panicked and cut the live feed within minutes.

This created a dilemma for Fox. In order to prop up the pretense that Fox is a real news network and not just the Republican Party’s central propaganda outlet, the network needs to interview the president from time to time — that’s what news networks do.

And yet Ailes et al knew that if a Fox host were to interview the president with the respectful manner that legitimate journalists usually reserve for heads of state, the president’s true nature — his reasonableness, intelligence and centrism — would likely shine through and put the lie to the network’s depiction of him as a totalitarian despot intent on making America part of the coming international caliphate.

Fox’s solution was this rhetorical tactic of constant interruptions, which is similar to what the military calls “interdiction” — the act of disrupting an enemy’s lines of communication. This is very unusual in journalism — it may be unique to Fox — because legitimate journalists have no interest in preventing a person they are interviewing from getting points across. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Take a step back. If Fox were a legitimate news organization, its purpose in interviewing the president would be to let its audience hear what he has to say so viewers could make up their own minds. You know, “We report. You decide.”

But by interdicting the president, O’Reilly and Baier showed that Fox’s intent was to do anything but allowing their viewers to hear what the president had to say.

The constant interruptions were also meant to demean the president and signal to the Republican base that, as Republicans, Fox hosts are superior to the socialist Obama. Thirdly, the interdictions were meant to goad Obama into losing his famous cool — which nearly happened early in the interview with Baier, when the president said, “Bret, let me finish.”

Imagine how frustrated politicians with short tempers — Dick Cheney and John McCain come to mind — or limited rhetorical gifts, such as George Bush or Sarah Palin, would become if they were interrupted every 19 seconds during an interview. (While we’re at it, imagine the howls from the right if a liberal interviewer were to take a cue from Fox and interdict an interview with a conservative pol.)

And yet this tactic is not without risks for Fox. To unindoctrinated voters — meaning those who rarely or never watch Fox — who tuned in on Sunday, O’Reilly’s treatment of the president undoubtedly read as rude and disrespectful to the office. Because O’Reilly’s interview ran in conjunction with the Super Bowl, arguably the vast majority of the 17 million who tuned in (a least 57 million fewer viewers than O’Reilly had predicted) were not regular Fox viewers.

What those independent and Democratic voters saw on Sunday was Pres. Obama remaining above the fray while an unprofessional jerk attempted to bully him. If anything, O’Reilly’s disrespectful treatment of the president probably increased support for him outside Fox viewer/Dittohead sphere.

Typically, Beltway pundits and other corporate media types are pretending not to understand what Fox is up to here. On MSNBC Monday, a guest actually opined that by constantly interrupting the president, O’Reilly had botched the opportunity to break some news during the interview — as if O’Reilly or Fox had any interest in reporting actual news.

When pressed, Fox reps say that O’Reilly and Baier were simply trying to keep the president from being too long winded — you know how he does go on — and were doing their jobs by asking tough questions. But that’s just more spin.

As evidence that O’Reilly and Baier intentionally interdicted the president, look at similar past sessions, including #3 above, O’Reilly’s respectful interview with candidate Barack Obama in September 2008, and #4, Bret Baier’s obsequious, interruption-free interview with George Bush in December 2008. (Or, for an even starker contrast, check out the transcript of Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” interview with George Bush in the Oval Office in February 2004.)

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