Why does Bill O’Reilly say that the fourth annual National Conference for Media Reform, which was held June 6–8, 2008, in Minneapolis, was an anti-American conference of the “lunatic left,” “fascists,” and “unstable people” who want to take over this country and use the government to suppress Fox News? The conference, which spearheads the media reform movement in this country, is sponsored by Free Press and included among its speakers FCC Commissioners Michael Coop and Jonathan Adelstein, as well as U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison. NCMR2008 featured more than 200 presenters and speakers and attracted almost 4,500 attendees over the June weekend.
O’Reilly’s analysis deceptive bloviating, which focused on selective editing of footage shot at the conference and identified George Soros as the financier of the far-out left, was no more illuminating about the purpose of the conference than the audio and video clips that were all the MSM rage on Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. No, the substance of the NCMR2008 was much, much more than O’Reilly and his two pundits would acknowledge in their less-than-eight-minute segment. Bill Moyers’s address succinctly covered the spirit of the media reform movement in this country. This quote from Moyers’s address highlights one of the central problems with mainstream news media and the pundits that inhabit them:
- The stars of the dominant media now tell us they did indeed ask tough questions of government during the run-up to the war. But you will go through the transcripts of that period before the war and you will find very few tough questions, and if you come across them, you will discover they are asked of the wrong people. ... Sadly, the Fourth Estate became the Fifth Column of democracy, colluding with the powers-that-be in a “culture of deception,” to quote Scott McClellan, that subverts the thing most necessary to freedom — the truth. Danny Schechter reminds us on Huffington Post that after the media’s “all the war, all the time” coverage of this contrived and manufactured war, Vice President Cheney dropped into a post-invasion media dinner to thank journalists for their service.
I. F. Stone would have had something to say about that “service.”
The June 15 show of Reform Radio featured a conversation with two of those left-wing loons—Alex Thompson, an Ohio University graduating senior majoring in video production, and Elizabeth Goussetis, a 2006 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and reporter for the Athens Messenger—who attended the conference. A podcast of that conversation is available here.
Here’s two—among other—reasons that O’Reilly smears the media reform movement in this country: it would minimize the power, if not presence, of Fox News and increase public awareness and outrage at the actions of those that control the medium as well as the message, as shown in the Free Press video below. Take a look.
2008 Big Media Hall of Shame
