O’Reilly And Hume Claim Fox News Covered ‘All The Bad News That Came Out Of Iraq’
I'm sorry but this is simply ridiculous. O'Reilly claims that his programme routinely "hammered" Bush and "there was no cheerleading for president Bush" on Fox News, especially when it came to the Iraq war. Indeed, they base this claim on their belief that Fox News reported "all the bad news" which came out of Iraq.
On what planet do these two reside?
Fox News, and both O'Reilly and Hume, were utterly in the tank for the Bush administration; and they must be working on the assumption that their audience are utterly moronic if they think they can both sit there with straight faces and come out with the utter tosh which they are pedalling here.O’Reilly and Hume appear to have a selective memory when it comes to their cheerleading of the Bush administration. When Hume stepped down from the Special Report anchor chair, he marveled that Bush had put America on “an amazing” foreign policy “path.” During his time at Fox, Hume repeatedly spun bad news for Bush and pushed misleading information that bolstered the Bush administration’s faulty case for invading Iraq. Perhaps this is one reason why a 2003 study found that 80 percent of those who primarily relied on Fox News believed falsehoods about why we went into Iraq.
When it came to Iraq war coverage, O’Reilly explained his philosophy on his radio show in June 2007 after the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox covered the war less than CNN and MSNBC. Claiming that Fox’s competitors were reporting on violence “because they want to embarrass the Bush administration,” O’Reilly said, “Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No!” “There’s little news value in broadcasting daily bombings,” O’Reilly added on his Fox show.
UPDATE:
Towards the end of this clip you can clearly see what O'Reilly's stance was towards dissenters to the Iraq war:
It is our duty as loyal Americans to shut up and shut up publicly. We expect every American to support our military and, if they can't do that, to shut up.So, far from "hammering" Bush about the Iraq war, O'Reilly actually demanded that anyone who objected to it be silent.
Hat tip to Think Progress.
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