The foolishness Factor

I rarely watch "The O'Reilly Factor" -- for that matter, I rarely have the TV on at 8 p.m. -- but I tuned in tonight to catch Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who was on to talk about the NSA wiretapping story and his related essay in last week's Boston Phoenix.

O'Reilly was unusually respectful of Silverglate. But next up were Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard's Kennedy School, and Marvin Kalb, Jones' predecessor, who now heads up the school's Washington branch. The ostensible subject was why the Shorenstein Center has gone "far left." But the subtext -- actually, it was right on the surface -- was O'Reilly's continued resentment of the fact that Al Franken researched his bestseller "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" while he was at Shorenstein a few years ago.

O'Reilly, himself a K-School alumnus, referred incessantly to Franken's "defamation" book and to the fact (I guess it's a fact; maybe it isn't) that Franken used Shorenstein research assistants and misused Shorenstein letterhead in gathering material for his book, of which O'Reilly is one of the main targets. O'Reilly also claimed that his own research shows Shorenstein currently has 22 Democrats on board and just one Republican. (I'm using the ambiguous "on board" because O'Reilly seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between fellows, faculty and staff.)

Where it really got weird, though, was when O'Reilly began attacking former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, who recently joined Shorenstein as a visiting professor, as "far left." His voice rising, O'Reilly claimed that both Carroll and editorial-page editor Michael Kinsley, whom Carroll brought to the L.A. Times, were forced out because of their "far left" views. What?

Carroll, who turned the Times into a Pulitzer machine, is well-known for, among other things, criticizing his staff for its alleged liberal bias. In May 2003 he wrote a memo that began:

I'm concerned about the perception -- and the occasional reality -- that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring "so-called counseling of patients." I don't think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it "so-called," a phrase that is loaded with derision.

Was Carroll sincere? Consider the words of conservative pundit Catherine Seipp, writing in 2004 for National Review Online:

The longstanding leftist orthodoxy of the Los Angeles Times has improved noticeably under editor-in-chief John Carroll, a respected newsman who moved here from the Baltimore Sun four years ago. Carroll has made a real effort to rein in the paper's liberal bias, at least in straight news stories. Earlier this year, Carroll wrote a famous (in media circles) in-house memo scolding a reporter for a story about a Texas abortion law; the piece had implied anyone against abortion is obviously nuts.

As for why Carroll left, it's been pretty widely reported that he could no longer put up with the cost-cutting ways of the Times' corporate owner, Tribune Company. His hand-picked successor, Dean Baquet, is now in charge, so it's not as though the Carroll era has been discredited. As for Kinsley, well, he just didn't work out. Kinsley has always been the most tepid of liberals, and his problems at the L.A. Times appear to have had more to do with his refusal to move to Los Angeles and to his embrace of ridiculous notions such as wikitorials.

I know that pointing out O'Reilly's misrepresentations is pretty cheap entertainment. Still, I haven't done it for a while, and I'm not planning to tune in again any time soon. So there you have it.