To: Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR Ombudsman
Dear Mr. Dvorkin:
In your October 15 Ombudsman page on NPR's website, you commented on the Terry Gross/ Bill O'Reilly dust-up on "Fresh Air" from a couple of weeks ago. Your judgment was not sympathetic to Gross; you wrote:
I believe the listeners were not well served by this interview. It may have illustrated the "cultural wars" that seem to be flaring in the country. Unfortunately, the interview only served to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR's liberal media bias.
I agree with you, but not for the reasons you give. Frankly, O'Reilly's indignation sounded completely contrived to me. If I read tomorrow that he came to the studio planning to provoke a confrontation and walk out, giving him fresh meat for his own viewers and readers, it wouldn't surprise me very much.
By comparison, I've listened to Terry Gross interview all manner of guests on "Fresh Air" over the years, and the idea of her doing an "attack" interview seems pretty improbable--even in cases where I might have thought the guest had it coming.
Given that the several minutes leading up to the incident which prompted O'Reilly to walk out of the interview were taken up with his proud recounting of the day as a young man when finally hit his abusive father back, his dramatic objection to "reviewing me"--meaning O'Reilly himself--rather than "reviewing the book" seems pretty thin. When a political commentator and entertainment show host with no particular track-record of self-help expertise writes a book on self-help, one could be forgiven for assuming that the book is, indeed, "about him" to a large extent and that questions about him are therefore fair game.
But I think that "review me"/"review the book" business was hokum anyway. It was, remember, Gross's attempt to read and get O'Reilly's response to a USA Today review of the book--not the man--that led to O'Reilly's abrupt departure. I agree that it seemed a little odd for Gross to read the review after O'Reilly left the interview, but he was not deprived at gunpoint of his chance to respond, and the review was already published for all to read anyway.
So, like you, I don't think this interview did anyone much good, and I am disappointed to see that O'Reilly and his cohort have, predictably, already begun using this as grounds to renew the hoary "liberal bias" charge against NPR.
But we disagree about what it means. For O'Reilly and his fellow operators of the right-wing echo chamber, "liberal bias" simply equals failing to stick to the one-sided take on issues so characteristic of O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and most of the conservative media establishment today.
By all means, continue inviting the O'Reillys of the world to be interviewed on NPR--ironically, it's probably the most "liberal" thing you could do. But please stop being shocked when they behave much as O'Reilly himself did on "Fresh Air," and stop reacting to that "liberal bias" charge as if it were anything more than a stick for the conservative media machine to beat you over the head with.
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