Bill ‘Sixty Percent’ O’Reilly
In a discussion of media ethics and mistakes made by Fox news in reporting that the Sago miners had been found alive, Sixty Percent O’Reilly notes that “Standards today are just not what they were ten years ago.” Of course, as Murray Waas notes, O’Reilly wasn’t on the air ten years ago!
And if Sixty Percent O’Reilly himself had any standards, he might have instead been discussing the lowering of safety standards in the mines instead of perpetuating ignorance by covering it up with self-serving blather. According to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, Serious and Substantial safety violations in the Sago mine were four times higher in 2005 than in 2004
Some people say (as Fox news likes to say) that “Sixty Percent” is an underestimate of the amount of crap in what O’Reilly says, and that it is really more like 95%. I’m not one for beancounting, and to give O’Reilly some credit, he actually accepts that global warming is real, unlike Amy Ridenour, and other denialists who call themselves skeptics, but then again, he also thinks that it caused the tsunami, but is no big deal…. Video at Crooks and Liars.
Transcript and video of Ol Reilly on the Letterman show available here.
