Bill O’Reilly Talking Points: Obama Is Too Sensitive, Fox News is Fair

Bill O'Reilly

Last night on “The O’Reilly Factor” Bill O’Reilly (@oreillyfactor) took to task a comment President Obama (@barackobama) made in an interview on CNBC lamenting the unfair coverage he and his administration receives from Fox News (@foxnews).

In his Talking Points Memo segment he outlines how “fair” Fox News has been in covering President Obama and his administration including citing Pew Research Center that cites Fox News as “the most balanced cable news coverage”.

O’Reilly believes that because Obama is worshiped, his perspective on the amount of criticism is distorted and that Obama is too sensitive.

More analysis after the video.

What O’Reilly doesn’t say is that in that same Pew research report, a significant number of respondents actually believe that Fox News is biased in their coverage of President Obama (as we all know, perception (not reality) is everything). My Direct Democracy breaks down the research how people feel about Fox News and their coverage of Obama:

“According to the survey, 29 percent of respondents indicated that they believed Fox News was too critical of Barack Obama. Even one in five Republicans (18 percent) agreed with this sentiment, as did a quarter of Independents (25 percent) and an even larger share of Democrats (44 percent). In contrast, just 5 percent of respondents believed the network to be too easy on the President.

To compare Fox with its competitors, a little under a sixth of respondents believed that the other news networks — CNN (16 percent) and MSNBC (16 percent), but also ABC (14 percent), CBS (13 percent) and NBC’s broadcast channel (15 percent) — were too easy on President Obama. In the case of CNN, another one in ten respondents (11 percent) said they thought the network was too hard on Barack Obama, so at least one news organization was viewed as striking a decent balance (or perhaps more precisely an equal lack of balance).”

I’m not going to defend Fox News (I have enough to attone for in my life, I don’t need that on my records on judgement day) but I do think O’Reilly has a point about Obama being slightly sensitive to criticism (not that he doesn’t handle criticism well — you’d never even know he had a problem with criticism but for these candid moments in interviews when he mentions his critics).

But let’s be real, the Republican party (bloodied, confused and on their last leg) and having only one tv outlet to vent their frustrations (Fox News) has bitterly criticized everything Obama has done (hence their nickname as “the party of ‘no’”). They are going down guns a blazing (granted most of their bullets ricochet off of Obama and hit them instead, but the intent is there and clear none-the-less).