We all know how really irritating Bill O’Reilly is, and there are even times when I want to reach right into the TV and grab him by his necktie. There’s probably nothing more infuriating than when he cuts people’s mike off to stop them from talking. He’s egotistical, arrogant and just plain obnoxious. Well, now we have some research that backs up these claims. I never really stopped to think about the extent of his name calling and how it dominates his rhetoric, but he does resort to childish characterizations and denigrations. Yep, he’s the master, and Indiana University has called him out for it…

According to the Indiana University study, they found that O’Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during his ‘Talking Points Memo’ editorials that opens his program each night. So, now you have it — Bill O’Reilly really is officially a jerk. And, you heard it here on Blog4Brains. [smile]

For their study, they used six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I. Using these analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, the researchers found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials.

The seven propaganda devices include:

Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
Glittering generalities — the opposite of name calling;
Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

Among some of their other fascinating findings are:

Fear was used in more than half (52.4 percent) of the commentaries, and O’Reilly almost never offered a resolution to the threat. For example, in a commentary on “left-wing” media unfairly criticizing Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales for his role in the Abu Ghraib scandal, O’Reilly considered this an example of America “slowly losing freedom and core values,” and added, “So what can be done? Unfortunately, not much.”

The researchers identified 22 groups of people that O’Reilly referenced in his commentaries, and while all 22 were described by O’Reilly as bad at some point, the people and groups most frequently labeled bad were the political left — Americans as a group and the media (except those media considered by O’Reilly to be on the right).

Left-leaning media (21.6 percent) made up the largest portion of bad people/groups, and media without a clear political leaning was the second largest (12.2 percent). When it came to evil people and groups, illegal aliens (26.8 percent) and terrorists (21.4 percent) were the largest groups.

O’Reilly never presented the political left, politicians/government officials not associated with a political party, left-leaning media, illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists as victims. “Thus, politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists — never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy,” the authors concluded.

According to O’Reilly, victims are those who were unfairly judged (40.5 percent), hurt physically (25.3 percent), undermined when they should be supported (20.3 percent) and hurt by moral violations of others (10.1 percent). Americans, the U.S. military and the Bush administration were the top victims in the data set, accounting for 68.3 percent of all victims.

One of O’Reilly’s common responses to charges of bias is to come up with one or two examples of “proof” that he is fair to all groups. For example, in October 2005, Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez accused O’Reilly of treating the southern border “as the birth of all American ills.” O’Reilly responded by showing a video clip in which he had called Mexican workers “good people.” He called for a boycott of the newspaper if it did not retract Hernandez’ column.

Of course, you didn’t need a university study to tell you this, but it was fun passing on this information to you guys anyway. It is interesting how O’Reilly uses propaganda techniques to influence his viewing audience, and all the while, I just thought he was name calling and being an ass. Hmmm… something more sinister going on here? All I can say is that his propaganda is effective on some people because you can hear them parroting exactly what he says on the air. [scary]

O’Reilly is also known for using utter falsehoods to debunk any criticisms of him in the media. In regards to the Indiana University study, he stated that Media Matters who published the university study, was using it as a smear campaign against him funded by George Soros, a left-wing philanthropist. In his “exposition” on the subject on the air, he accused Soros of funneling money through the Tides Foundation to Media Matters. The Tides Foundation did receive money from Soros but it was earmarked for a specific list of projects, none of which involved Media Matters. Media Matters stated that they found the aritcle regarding O’Reilly on a press release and it was not intended to smear O’Reilly. And, the university study stated that they had not received any grant money on the research. But all the while, O’Reilly rants on with complicated charts and convoluted theories but no facts to back it up. For more information on this sordid story and a video of O’Reilly’s rantings go here.

By the way, did you catch a glimpse of O’Reilly in action in his interview with George Tenet, the former CIA Director? O’Reilly was in typical form when he said,

at the beginning of the war in Iraq, everybody in the country was behind it, except the kooks.

And, just who were these “kooks”? Well, there were 23 senators and 133 members of the House of Representatives, including a majority of House Democrats, voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. If you’d like to see the list of these “kooks”, you can go here. It’s just another typical example of O’Reilly’s endless propaganda tactics. My only regret is that there weren’t more kooks back when it really mattered.