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View Full Version : What Bill O'Reilly Really Told Me and points beyond that to consider


trumptman
09-30-2007, 02:28 PM
Time.com-Juan WIlliams (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1666573,00.html)

Time.com-Bill smeared (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1665904,00.html)

First we have some allegations from a well known friend that was featured in another thread... Media Matters.

The allegations sound very familiar and the tactics to make the allegations sound familiar as well.

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly said Wednesday his critics took remarks he made about a famed Harlem restaurant out of context and "fabricated a racial controversy where none exists." He criticized the liberal group Media Matters for America as "smear merchants" for publicizing statements he made on his radio show last week.

And...

O'Reilly told The Associated Press that Media Matters had "cherry-picked" remarks out of a broader conversation about racial attitudes. He had told listeners that his grandmother — and many other white Americans — feared blacks because they didn't know any and were swayed by violent images in black culture.

"If you listened to the full hour, it was a criticism of racism on the part of white Americans who are ignorant of the fact that there is no difference between white and black anymore," he told the AP. "Circumstances may be different in their lives but we're all Americans. Anyone who would be offended by that conversation would have to be looking to be offended."

His radio show was a conversation with Fox News contributor Juan Williams, author of a book about the coarseness of some black culture. Williams defended O'Reilly during a Tuesday appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor."

"It's so frustrating," Williams said. "They want to shut you up. They want to shut up anybody who has an honest discussion about race."

I'm sure we will find a transcript and audio of the entire hour on the Media Matters website since the claim is that they are don't cherry pick.

Juan continues to defend OReilly and their points about race this week.

It started with Bill O'Reilly's grandmother. And it blew up into charges of O'Reilly being called a racist and me being attacked as a "Happy Negro" (read that as a lackey or Uncle Tom).

Juan notes that some people have been bamboozled.

I defended his grandma.

After watching all those racist, minstrel images of black people, I argued, she is right to buy into stereotypes of blacks as ignorant, oversexed and violent. And I said while I worried about his grandma having racist images justified in her mind I had bigger worries.

The most pernicious damage being done by the twisted presentation of black life in pop culture is the self-destructive message being beamed into young, vulnerable black brains. Young black people, searching for affirmation of their racial identity, are minute by minute being sold on the cheap idea that they are authentically black only if they imitate the violent, threatening attitude of the rappers and use the gutter language coming from the minstrels on TV.

The lesson from the rappers and comedians is that any young brother or sister who is proud to be black has to treat education with indifference, dismiss love and marriage as the business of white people and dress like the rappers who dress like prisoners — no comb in the jail so they wear doo-rags all day, and no belts so their pants hang down around their butts.

That was the heart and soul of the conversation between O'Reilly and me. The point of the whole exchange was to defeat corrupt, untrue and racist images of real black people.

This part is astonishing when considered that it was spoken on a mainstream news channel.

That twisted assumption led me to say publicly that the attacks on O'Reilly amounted to an effort to take what he said totally out of context in an attempt to brand him a racist by a liberal group that disagrees with much of his politics. But the out-of-context attacks on O'Reilly picked up speed and ended up on CNN, where one commentator branded me a "Happy Negro" for allowing O'Reilly to get by with making racist comments without objection.

CNN is calling Juan Williams a "Happy Negro." I wonder if they rolled it on the scroll at the bottom of the screen.

BTW, this is why some Republicans are fully justified in not wanting to use certain people as moderators who the left declares to be "moderate." You know like when Tavis Smiley calls Bush a serial killer and then wonders why some don't want him to be the impartial moderator on the impartial PBS, yeah instances like that do sound justified.

For the record, I am a black man who lives in a black neighborhood in a mostly black city, and is married to a black woman. I am also the author of several books and documentaries on the civil rights movement. And any viewer of the O'Reilly TV show knows that O'Reilly and I respect, even like, each other but are frequently at loud, finger-pointing odds over politics and people.

I guess he knows how giant will challenge his contentions about "blackness."

I very much liked this part.

The critics want to shut up Cosby, O'Reilly, me and anyone else who points out the crisis in black America. They want anyone who dares to speak publicly about problems in black America to fear being called a racist, if they are white, or a "Happy Negro" if they are black. They want silence so they can continue to make money by distorting black life and allowing black on black murder rates to climb along with the black dropout rate and the black poverty rate.

The critics want to paralyze efforts to help those locked in poverty and too often in a criminal culture where acceptance of drug use and violence becomes acceptable. They don't want black people to be known as Americans with a long distinguished history of patriotism, reverence for education and a willingness to fight for America's ideals — justice for all — despite the harsh facts of slavery and legal segregation.

They prefer to bash anyone who points out their tragic, mindless willingness to sell out the history and pride of black people to make a buck. But take this from the "Happy Negro." The critics are some Sad People.

You get to dismiss critics as sell-outs and racists, while peddling misery for top dollar. People need to WAKE UP.

Nick

addabox
09-30-2007, 03:05 PM
Huh. So the new standard for "fariness" is to print the transcript of a one hour conversation, or it's "cherry picking"?

That's cool. I'm sure you'll be carefully moderating your remarks, in the future, about things like Kerry "calling the troops stupid", to include this generous new metric.

No more rushing here to post the latest Fox gotcha or Drudge "breaking news" for you! No sir, the thoughtful, nuanced Trumptman needs to see the entire transcript of any given speech, interview, or offhand remarks before casting judgment! I'm sure we'll all enjoy holding you to your lofty standards.

At any rate, here is the transcript that Media Matters did, in fact, publish:

O"REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don't think there's a black American who hasn't had a personal insult that they've had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don't think there's one in the country. So you've got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] "You call me that, I'm gonna be more successful." OK, it depends on the personality.

So it's there. It's there, and I think it's getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out: "Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it."

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he's made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia's, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin.

[...]

O'REILLY: No, no, I mean, I like that soul food. I had the meatloaf special. I had coconut shrimp. I had the iced tea. It was great.

WILLIAMS: Well, let me just tell you, the one thing I would say is this. And we're talking about the kids who still like this gangsta rap, this vile poison that I think is absolutely, you know, literally a corruption of culture. I think that what you've got to take into account that it's still a majority white audience -- young, white people who think they're into rebelling against their parents who buy this stuff and think it's just a kick. You know, it's just a way of expressing their anti-authoritarianism.

O'REILLY: But it's a different -- it's a different dynamic, though.

WILLIAMS: Exactly right --

O'REILLY: Because the young, white kids don't have to struggle out of the ghetto.

WILLIAMS: Right, and also, I think they can have that as one phase of their lives.

O'REILLY: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: I think too many of the black kids take it as, "Oh, that's what it means to be authentically black. That's how you make money. That's how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos." And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they're on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it's inauthentic. It's not in keeping with great black traditions of struggle and excellence, from Willie Mays to Aretha Franklin, but even in terms of academics, you know, going back to people like Charles Drew or Ben Carson here, the neurosurgeon at [Johns] Hopkins [University]. That stuff, all of a sudden, is pushed aside. That's treated as, "You're a nerd, you're acting white," if you try to be excellent and black.

O'REILLY: You know, and I went to the concert by Anita Baker at Radio City Music Hall, and the crowd was 50/50, black/white, and the blacks were well-dressed. And she came out -- Anita Baker came out on the stage and said, "Look, this is a show for the family. We're not gonna have any profanity here. We're not gonna do any rapping here." The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn't know, particularly people who don't have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg.

WILLIAMS: Oh, and it's just so awful. It's just so awful because, I mean, it's literally the sewer come to the surface, and now people take it that the sewer is the whole story --

O'REILLY: That's right. That's right. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, "M-Fer, I want more iced tea."

WILLIAMS: Please --

O'REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all.

Couple of points:

You'll notice that the transcript does, in fact, include the context of Williams' remarks about his dim view of current black role models, which seems to be the point of contention for a lot of the push-back.

I also have to say that the context given is far more spacious and detailed than what typically is provided when some right wing enthusiasts go after a figure on the left, which usually boils down to a single sentence that gets repeated over and over again, everywhere.

Your larger explanatory narrative--that there is a liberal media that disproportionately distorts the remarks of conservatives-- is still bullshit, as it always has been, no matter how many threads you start purporting to make your point.

It would serve your specific premise-- that there is a crisis in black America that the politics of race make it difficult to talk about-- far better if you didn't yoke it to stalking horses like the liberal media or determinedly divisive mouth-pieces like O'Reilly.

trumptman
09-30-2007, 03:44 PM
Huh. So the new standard for "fariness" is to print the transcript of a one hour conversation, or it's "cherry picking"?

That's cool. I'm sure you'll be carefully moderating your remarks, in the future, about things like Kerry "calling the troops stupid", to include this generous new metric.

Actually that is the generous metric I apply. In this thread as in all others, I do post as quotes, the most relevant points, but I still always link to the full source for the quote.

Clearly Media Matters either has to have someone going through the entire transcript for this show or they have to be creating the transcript themselves. Eitherway, they should provide access to the first hand source in some fashion.

No more rushing here to post the latest Fox gotcha or Drudge "breaking news" for you! No sir, the thoughtful, nuanced Trumptman needs to see the entire transcript of any given speech, interview, or offhand remarks before casting judgment! I'm sure we'll all enjoy holding you to your lofty standards.

At any rate, here is the transcript that Media Matters did, in fact, publish:


Ranting ad-hom.

Couple of points:

You'll notice that the transcript does, in fact, include the context of Williams' remarks about his dim view of current black role models, which seems to be the point of contention for a lot of the push-back.

I notice the transcript has three dots where it stops and then continues ten minutes later without noting that fact.

I also have to say that the context given is far more spacious and detailed than what typically is provided when some right wing enthusiasts go after a figure on the left, which usually boils down to a single sentence that gets repeated over and over again, everywhere.

/sarc - Gee you are right. I didn't hear this boiled down to "OReilly amazed black people behave in restaurant," at all. It wasn't repeated anywhere. CNN calling Juan Williams a "Happy Negro" is just my imagination.:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Your larger explanatory narrative--that there is a liberal media that disproportionately distorts the remarks of conservatives-- is still bullshit, as it always has been, no matter how many threads you start purporting to make your point.

I'll admit that your point has some powerful reasoning in it. My points being wrong because they are "bullshit." I'll probably pull that old Trumptman trick of calling "bullshit" an ad-hom. You'll probably complain about being dismissed since I never proved to your satisfaction they weren't "bullshit."

It would serve your specific premise-- that there is a crisis in black America that the politics of race make it difficult to talk about-- far better if you didn't yoke it to stalking horses like the liberal media or determinedly divisive mouth-pieces like O'Reilly.

Thanks Mr. Editor.

Nick

@_@ Artman
09-30-2007, 03:53 PM
http://www.carlabraham.com/bill%20oreilly%20wnep.jpg (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0301061billo1.html)