The Canadian columnist Heather Mallick appeared on the The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News last Tuesday night to discuss a column she wrote welcoming the presence of American deserters in Canada.  Needless to say, Bill O’Reilly was outraged by such a position.  He was fuming, to put it mildly.  Heather was in his sites.  And somehow he managed to get the Globe and Mail to schedule her on his show for a chat.

 

Well, Heather actually agreed.  As she says – "I always say yes to American TV because how else are Americans going to hear about radical notions like feeding the poor and sheltering the gentle, or letting black people vote in Florida?"

 

This was going to be classic.

 

Now much has been said in these pages about Bill O’Reilly – like this from last September on his rhetoric technique, which is basically telling people to shut up.   

And how did this encounter go?

 

Well, there is her view of that.

 

See My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly

Heather Mallick, The Globe and Mail (Canada), Saturday, May 1, 2004 - Page F2

 

Here’s the key passage:

 

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man.  He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation.  He talks to his trousers.  You know the type.  They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine.  He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945.  I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging.  "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not."  (We are.)  Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far….

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk.  He then went into a mad rant about lefties … and how I was a typical Globe columnist.  I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

 

… The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism in public life.  In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer describes an O'Reilly-esque scene.  "A man squats and defecates in the street, without comment."  Re-reading these diaries decades later, Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say?  Olé?"

 

Bill O’Reilly is still gloating how he put the lefty Canadian woman in her place – he showed the American people who our true enemy really is.  And on the show you hear further rumblings about ruining Canada with a Fox-News-inspired boycott just as we ruined France.

 

There is a disconnect here.

 

If we are to believe Bill O’Reilly and Fox News, our boycott of French products – wine and cheese and whatever else – has devastated the place.  Paris looks like Dresden did in May of 1945 – just dusty rubble and hollow-eyed, starving waifs clad in tatters. 

 

Well, I do trade emails several times each week with four friends in France, two in Paris and two in la France profonde (the countryside, or really, any place that’s not Paris).  Not one of them has mentioned this ruin of a once proud country -at all.  I’ll ask again.

 

Bill O’Reilly runs a show that is, at bottom, opinion and commentary.  But it is opinion about and commentary on the facts of what happened in the world.  It seems there are facts, and the there are facts.  Fox News sees a quite different world than CNN and MSNBC and what they call the left-wing liberal media – the Los Angeles and New York Times, and the Washington Post and the rest.

 

My friends are lying to me about France?  Fox News sort of says they are.

 

Well, some would say only fools rely on news organizations that get the facts wrong.  And that brings us to Dick Cheney.

 

In the Washington Post this week Cheney says he likes Fox News.  Why?

Vice President Cheney endorsed the Fox News Channel during a conference call last night with tens of thousands of Republicans who were gathered across the country to celebrate a National Party for the President Day organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign.

 

... "It's easy to complain about the press -- I've been doing it for a good part of my career," Cheney said.  "It's part of what goes with a free society.  What I do is try to focus upon those elements of the press that I think do an effective job and try to be accurate in their portrayal of events.  For example, I end up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they're more accurate in my experience, in those events that I'm personally involved in, than many of the other outlets."

Readers might recall this from last October - regarding a study done by researchers from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint project of several academic centers, some of them based at the University of Maryland) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm.  The study showed that, statistically, those who consistently get the actual facts wrong about what our country has done and is doing - and about much of what is happening in the world - use Fox News as their usual source of information.

 

The item in these pages quoted Harold Meyerson’s summary –

 

... People are proceeding from radically different sets of facts, some so different that they're altogether fiction.

 

In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war.  Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.  Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein.  Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.

 

The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get their news.  The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were "the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions." Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three.  Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta.  And in the daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all three.

 

Ah, well, does it matter?

 

Yes. 

 

As Eugene Oregon explains - 

It is a pretty slick setup, frankly.  When Cheney lies, Fox News reports it as the truth and together they fool Americans into supporting this administration.

Yep, Cheney is still saying, even if not as often, that we still could find those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even the nuclear bombs.  They were there.  Really.  And he’s still saying Saddam Hussein was working with that Osama fellow.  He says that’s a fact.  Fox reports that.  No question.

 

Oh well.  Facts just aren’t what they used to be.

 

And France is ruins because we stopped buying their wine and cheese, and renamed those deep-fried salty potato sticks as the final coup de grace.  We really fixed their wagon.

 

Damn.  One might conclude America is not only divided in opinion, but actually sees two completely different worlds, and cannot even agree on some basic facts. 

 

No.  That couldn’t be.

 

On the other hand, given the choice between believing my friends who actually live in France, where the tell my the sky is not falling and the restaurants are open and folks still buy crap at Monoprix and all the rest, and believing Bill O’Reilly who tells me France is an economic wasteland, and he personally helped make it happen, well, I trust my friends.  They even send pictures.

 

But we all could be wrong - and Bill O’Reilly should tell my friends in France to stop lying.  I’m afraid they’d just laugh.