Bill O’Reilly: Less Moral than Eric Cartman

Bill O’Reilly has been playing nonstop in my apartment over the past few weeks based, in part, on YouTube and my boyfriend’s interest in the perverse. The O’Reilly Factor is, thankfully, mixed with LiberalViewer clips of lies and insanity, Al Franken snippets, the “OutFoxed” movie, Michael Moore interviews, political debates, and other reliable proof of the degradation of modern journalism and the opium-den of television news.

Amidst this inundation of unfair and intellectually dimming media, I have come to the conclusion that Bill O’Reilly is less “moral” than Eric Cartman.

As Southpark fans, willing to enjoy the vulgarity and humor that accompanies the scathing political and social commentary, my friends and I have long upheld Eric Cartman as the pinnacle of immorality. He has no conscience. He will do anything to make himself feel good at the expense of others. If Eric Cartman thinks that Scott Tenorman must die, he will do everything he can think of to demoralize and humiliate him, even tricking him into eating his murdered parents mixed with chili. He will build an amusement park with money his dead grandmother bequeaths to him, advertise how wonderful and fun it is, and then refuse to let his friends in. He’s no one’s true friend but his own. Cartman is accepted as the character without any redeeming qualities. And that’s fine. Nobody gets their news from Eric Cartman.

The thing is…Eric Cartman is on TV, but he doesn’t pretend to be a journalist. When Bill O’Reilly lies and slanders, he doesn’t admit that it’s a lie. Neither does Cartman. However, O’Reilly doesn’t lie solely for his own personal gain—that’s just secondary. First and foremost is “The Party Line.” He feels that the most important part of being on TV is the ability to spread his opinions to millions of viewers without actually educating them, while simultaneously vilifying his opponents.

Would Bill O’Reilly grind up his viewers’ parents and mix them with chili? No. But he would wrongly accuse Jeremy Glick, the son of a 9/11 victim, of claiming on the Factor that Bush planned 9/11. And he would continue spreading that lie for six months, plenty of time to find out it wasn’t true. If threatened with a defamation lawsuit, he would say he didn’t know it was a lie, and successfully dodge prosecution. But if O’Reilly reviewed the transcript of the interaction, what Glick said or didn’t say would be glaringly obvious. Yet somehow, in today’s world of muckraking journalism, it’s alright to get your news from a pundit that doesn’t understand the difference between what is truth and what is a lie.

I’ve started a sporadic boycott of O’Reilly in the apartment. It makes me physically ill. I’ve lost a few pounds in the past few days, and I think it may be related to replacing NPR with videos about Bill O’Reilly. I refuse to watch a YouTube video that is just Bill O’Reilly. Sometimes I’ll watch an expose, for the base justification that I’m not alone in the world. But I will not watch someone I fundamentally disagree with spout information I consider to be lies. I’d rather watch Southpark.