The biggest ego on cable news is fond of propping himself up and exalting his intellect and insight. Unfortunately, Bill O’Reilly is so often wrong that he becomes a parody of himself.
On his program Monday night, O’Reilly embarked on a mission to belittle President Obama and the State of the Union speech that would be delivered the following night. Consistent with the Fox News philosophy of disparaging all things Democratic – even before they occur – O’Reilly asserted that the American people wouldn’t care about the speech, but would be enthralled by Papa Bear himself.
O’Reilly: There is no question that President Obama’s first five years in office have been troubled. Tonight he will try to regroup, but Talking Points believes that few Americans will be paying close attention to him. In fact, I predict that this broadcast you’re watching right now, will be higher rated on the Fox News channel than the president’s actual address. We’ll see.
Yes, we shall indeed see. But first of all, isn’t it cute that O’Reilly refers to himself as “Talking Points,” as if it were an anthropomorphic entity with opinions separate from his own? Well, Mr. Talking Points might be disconcerted to learn that 33 million people watched the State of the Union speech. That is actually fewer than watched in recent years, but still a hefty chunk of viewers that exceeds all other conventional programming.
More to the point, O’Reilly’s prediction that his own show would outperform the speech has blown up in his face. The Factor drew only 3.5 million viewers, which means he was off by a mere 90 percent. O’Reilly’s broadcast didn’t even beat just the viewers who watched the speech on Fox (4.7 million). And since there was no rational way to spin his prognostication failure, O’Reilly simply ignored it last night in his first post-speech broadcast.
This is typical of O’Reilly’s pompous conceit as he strives to present himself as an omnipotent and infallible observer of human events. It recalls his dreadfully wrong prediction that the Supreme Court would overturn ObamaCare, when he promised to admit that he was an idiot if he were wrong. He was wrong, and he broke his promise. But that came as no surprise to those who pay attention to his daily blather.
When Pres. Obama predicted that the ACA would get x-amount of people signing up for it, Fox News, the right-wing, and Bill O’Reilly called that a LIE.
Not a bad guess or poor prediction, a LIE.
I guess that would make O’Reilly a LIAR cause he guessed wrong, when surely he must have known he wouldn’t come anywhere near the SOTU numbers!
Perhaps Congress should investigate him and his research staff for such an egregious error????
On second thought, I don’t want to lower myself to O’Reilly’s idiotic standards, so I’ll just say that he was wrong and leave it at that!
Bill O’Reilly is not the greatest talk show host of all time…. he’s actually pretty close to the bottom. But he still FAR exceeds the integrity of the talk show hosts on MSNBC(maybe excluding Rachel Maddow). If I had to pick between Fox and MSNBC, I would pick Fox every single time.