Watching the O'Reilly Factor is an occasional masochistic ritual that I perform, for reasons that are still unknown to me, especially of late.  I've seen him descend further and further into the realm of a conservative Jerry Springer, and further away from where he started, which was a fairly reasonable and fair political commentator.  He now simply blames everything bad on the SP's (Secular Progressives for the uninitiated Factorite) and touts the growing Culture War^TM as the next greatest threat to our society.  Sometimes its hard to tell whether he thinks the War on Terror is as large of a threat to our civilization as the Culture War^TM.  Mostly I think this is just him trying to sell his latest book by manufacturing controversies that simply don't exist so he can bloviate (another of his favorite words) endlessly on a slow news day.

His other big tactic now, which I find repulsive and unbecoming of a professional news organization, is to stalk people who refuse to go on his show, and catch them in parking lots of grocery stores and in their driveways (and sometimes following them into their homes without permission in this last instance), demanding answers to questions that they've answered in other places, and then feigning anger when they refuse to go on a show that won't give them a fair hearing.  It's outrageous, shameful, and something I would expect of tabloid news, not Fox News.

His latest invented controversy really takes the cake though.  It's over the top because he flat out lied about the facts of the case in order to invent this controversy.  Normally he simply stretches the truth to the breaking point, but this time it shattered.  I'm referring to a case in Denver Colorado where a school invited a group of panelists to talk to students about drugs and sex.  If the only news about this case you heard was from Bill O'Reilly, you would have heard a few small clips that amounted to less than one minute out of a much longer panel discussion (around an hour I believe).  He played those same clips over and over again, as if they were representative of the entire panel, and then declared that the panelists were encouraging children to have unsafe sex while in high school, and encouraging them to do drugs.  Neither statement was true as it turned out.  In fact, when those clips are taken in full context, O'Reilly's declarations are close to slanderous.

Bill O'Reilly's short clippings can be found here.  However, for those that are interested, you can actually hear the entire panel discussion here (with plenty of more links here).  You'll also find that nowhere on O'Reilly's site does he ever provide links to the full content... only his small representative bits.  What is he afraid of?  Dave Kopel has an excellent Op Ed in the Rocky Mountain News covering this issue which I recommend.  To O'Reilly's credit, he actually had Kopel on his show last night... the third night O'Reilly covered the controversy, and the only time someone ever presented another view.  O'Reilly was forced to back down a little bit, by trying to restate his opinion that he disagreed with how they were discouraging sex and drug use.  This is utter bullshit, since O'Reilly kept hammering the panelists for encouraging drug use and under age sex for two solid shows beforehand.

What the panelists did, was tell the truth about how condoms can sometimes be inconvenient, and how you can actually get high from drugs.  I'm sure some of you are shocked by these revelations, but they are actually true.  Those are the clips that O'Reilly chose to air.  What he didn't air was the later discussions by the panelists that despite those things, having unprotected sex is dangerous, and you shouldn't do it, despite the inconvenience.  Same goes for drugs.  Many of the statements that he aired were actually the panelists talking as if they were themselves in high school, and then talked about how they wished they could go back as adults and tell their high school selves how wrong they were.  Now O'Reilly is free to disagree with this method of teaching, but he is not free to invent facts.  Personally I think its a good tactic for the speakers to put themselves in the minds of those they are speaking to, and talk directly about their fears and concerns, instead of talking from a high pedestal as so many do, and then be ignored by the students.

If this is the kind of "reporting" that O'Reilly is going to be doing from now on, Fox News would do well to cancel his show.  One Jerry Springer on television is enough.