Bill O’Reilly is a man that cannot say the word “left” without appending modifiers like “far,” “ultra,” “committed,” or “looney.” He is a man who is convinced that every critic is a “smear merchant.” And his opponents are never merely disagreeing with him, they are “vile.”

BILL O'REILLY: PROPAGANDA PIMP
By News Corpse
In a roomful of egomaniacal bloviating pundits, Bill O'Reilly would stand out as a towering infernal display of delusional demagoguery. His crusading rants are illustrative of a society that is weakened by a disease (a social disease?) whose predominant symptoms are a mash of masochism and narcissism. Almost any random sampling of The O'Reilly Fester will reveal a man obsessed with his own righteousness. He views himself as the singular savior of America's meek, who he refers to simply as the "Folks." The semantic approach to his message is overwhelmed with the imagery of conflict and danger. Take, for instance, the titles of his books:

• Culture Warrior
• Who's Looking Out for You?
• The No Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in America
• The O'Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America's Families

Even children are not exempt from his apocalyptic world view. There is also his laughably inept attempt at fiction, Those Who Trespass, which betrays his hostile tendencies, if not his fantasies. From the book's description: "One by one, high-level executives and news correspondents are being brutally murdered in the cutthroat world of television journalism."

If it wasn't already glaringly obvious from watching his nightly bombast; if you hadn't already seen the acute paranoia in his red-faced shouting matches; if you need something more to conclude that O'Reilly is in a downward spiral of tyrannical propagandizing: well now you have it...

Researchers at Indiana University have just published the results of a study that provides academic validation that O'Reilly is a textbook propagandist. Amongst the key findings is that:

"...the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric."

The study itemized seven propaganda devices as defined by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis:

• 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.
• Testimonials - involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

O’Reilly was found to have employed six of the seven nearly 13 times each minute. This is an important statistic because it is not merely the use of these devices that define their effect. It is the repetition and the absence of any substantive debate that produces the desired manipulation of free thought. This is why O'Reilly repeatedly interrupts and cuts off his guests - to keep them from diluting the rhetorical Kool-Aid. And contrary to his assertions that he doesn't "do personal attacks," IU has documented the reality that any cognitively functional bipedal hominoid has already figured out - O'Reilly is a bullying buffoon:

"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 the editorials that open his program each night." [See the Stalking Points Memos]

Of course, O'Reilly didn't invent these tactics. They have been used before by governments, churches and corporations. The notorious American racist/anti-semite/nazi sympathizer, Father Charles Coughlin, served a bit of each of those masters. But O'Reilly has an unprecedented platform from which to spew his bile. And he is not merely a pundit expressing his opinions. He routinely calls on his disciples to act on his directives, whether they be boycotts, petitions, marches, or political activism and voting.

It will be interesting to see how O'Reilly reacts to the IU report. If he bothers to react at all, it is fairly easy to predict that he will aim both barrels at the vile haters and smear merchants that dominate the ultra-liberal academia with their looney far-left agendas.

Update: Well, I called that one right. O’Reilly has responded to the IU study with a Talking Points memo dripping in sarcasm. And while he continues to slam George Soros and Media Matters (who masterfully debunk his nonsense), he doesn’t make a single coherent argument to counter the conclusions of the research. He does, however, accuse the university of being in Soros’ pocket along with the rest of the left-wing cabal that he fears is aligned against him.