Affleck bashing is so last month.
Hell, they can shrink it to an hour and a half… just get GWB to concede now and we’ll call it quits…
That’s an amazingly prescient speech considering it was written several years before GWB got into the White House. They even got a crack about the National Guard into the rant. if one didn’t know better, one might think it was a screed against Shrub.
I think, rather, that it was a criticism of an amalgam of Bill Clinton and the previous Republican administration, with Dan Quayle playing the part of the National Guard.
As another nitpick, O’Reilly has a Master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University, and worked several jobs as beat reporter and news correspondent before moving into Inside Edition. He worked as a local reporter and anchorman for several network affiliates for years, and won several awards from regional journalism organizations. He also won two emmy awards for pieces he did as an investigative reporter with, I believe, ABC and CBS.
It doesn’t make him “fair and balanced” but you have to give him the credit he deserves. Whatever he may be at the moment, he was trained as and practiced what most would call excellent journalism for 20 years. That’s if we don’t count Inside Edition, which, to be fair, I always felt was more sensation and scandal than news.
Notice I said near uniform. While it’s true Matthews wrote a column and ran the San Franciso Examiner’s Washington bureau, his history is not one of a trained journalist. His past, ironcially is as a congressional aide for such Liberal luminaries as Tip O’Neill. Be became a columnist and “bureau chief” after Reagan came to power. He was a pundit writing an opinion column, not a journalist.
O’Reilly does have a background as a report, but he is mostly alone in that regard. But his role now as a commentor is not journalism.
Journalists are supposed to be fair an objective. They report. They don’t editorialize. They don’t blather on as these guys do. They are not journalists, they are talking head pundits. Likewise, James Carville, Michael Moore and Al Franken aren’t jounalists.
Going after Ben Afflect? Now that’s just lo.
Why is that ironic? Matthews has never been all that conservative. And, yeah, obviously, none of these people are journalists now, whatever their backgrounds were. I think they’ll admit they host opinion shows.
Didn’t Bill O’Reiily’s “journalism” career consist chiefly of digging through celebrity garbage cans for tabloid television show?
The invective on those shows can’t even be honestly called “opinion.” It’s not like those guys research the issues and come to a conclusion, then earnestly defend it. They just come to “talking points” and berate us with them. I don’t have a doubt in my mind that they don’t believe a lot of what they say, and believe their “fans” to be rubes for listening.
Yes it was Damon, and the “Hollywood Liberal” is of course from Boston (OK Cambridge) where he was raised in a working class family unlike the friggin President who was born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple (thanks Molly Ivins).
What? A political convention - boring? Dear God! What has become of the world when our politicians are boring?
So are the Republicans gonna bring in dancing girls and pyrotechnics to keep things exciting?
Huh? Matthews says of himself “Mentally I clearly am blue, but my gut is red.” Which I guess is why he’s said of Hillary Clinton “I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for.” He has spoken at Richard Mellon Scaife-subsidized forums. He calls intellectuals “propellerheads”. He supports Bush on many issues. Even though he opposed the war, he has questioned the loyality of Democrats who objected. He said his continued harping on the Lewinsky “issue” was because of his moral Catholic upbringing. He’s a liberal only in comparison to the majority of cable pundits.
Early scuttlebutt is that they’re going to put Bush up on stage, hand him a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and refuse to take the camera off him until he can read the whole thing without mispronouncing a word.
They expect it to take five hours. 
Hey, he won like three Peabody awards for that! 
Oh, and don’t forget Ron Reagan.
Of course, he’ll be in the press box at the RNC because he wasn’t invited as a guest. I guess being the son of a saint just doesn’t do it anymore.
So, when pubbie actors start spouting at the RNC, are you going to apologize for being a total fuckwit?
-Joe
I know, I was just pointing out that he was actually a journalist once who reported strait news for a long time. I tend to disagree when people come down on somebody for something that isn’t really accurate. Blowhard? Yes. Stubborn? Yes. Infuriatingly overzealous? Yes. But before Inside Edition he was an exceptional investigative reporter, and from what I’ve heard, a rather boring anchorman. He did work on the hard stories for a long time, political corruption, bad cops, etc. and probably did a lot of good in his career. I don’t blame him for hopping on the growing trend of people telling us what we ought to think of the news instead of just reporting it
For the record, I disagree with your definition of journalism as well, and think it goes against the basic premise of the thing. A journalist is always slanted and biased, or is directed by a slanted and biased person. They don’t function like objective robots of the news. They follow up on stories they believe in, and tell the story from their own viewpoint, with supporting details and an investigation that provides a sense of what they believe is happening. That is different from what O’Reilly and Moore do now, but a journalist chooses their angle and their presentation, it’s impossible for that not to be slanted, it’s just more subtly done.
I’ve watched Ben interviewed a few times, and he’s an articulate guy with reasoned opinions. Look, news analysis needs to be somewhat entertaining. No one is going to watch a brilliant nobody who’s boring as hell.
At any rate, we’re going to get more of this rather than less, so get used to it. You’re better off hoping that we see more of the Ben Afflecks of the world on these shows than the your typical Hollywood airhead who doesn’t his/her ass from his/her elbow.
I watched Ben Affleck on O’Reilly last night while waiting for the (disappointing) Michael Moore appearance with O’Reilly. Affleck came across as reasonably intelligent, articulate and kind. He didn’t flame Bush, but said he seemed like a decent person who wants to do well for the USA. Affleck said he disagreed with his policies, particularly that he didn’t a) finish the job in Afghanistan and b) gain international consensus before entereing into Iraq. He hardly came across as a left wing radical. Likewise O’Reilly actually seemed reasonable and conceded points. Neither is going to win a PhD in foreign affairs anytime soon, but this was a nice example of discussing differing points of view without resorting to shrillness and name calling.
Well your view of a journalist’s role is quite different than the one I trained for while working on my degree in Journalism. We were taught to be be aware of our own biases so that we could take steps to ensure we don’t inject those into our stories. We were taught to purposefully include different viewpoints in our reports in order to be more objective.
The right-wing since the time of Agnew has constantly screeched on and on about the “Liberal Media Bias” so much so that far too many people believe it. However the charge is not support by fact.
The right-wing has exploited that standard of fairness and objectivity in mainsteam media while at the same time not giving the same level of voice to the left in their own outlets. You doubt that? Then see how many liberal columnists work for the Washington Times, Post or Wall Street Journal. How many liberal talk shows are there on FOX? Why did Donahue get canned even though his ratings were beating other shows on the network?