Factoring in Bill O'Reilly

I am not a big fan of the cable news shout fests, like The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball with Chris Matthews, or Keith Olbermann's program. Once in a while, via the constant news feed at work, when I am there in the early evening, I'll catch a few minutes of one of these programs. However, I do think that these folks perform a service, the kind of service Jon Stewart was urging Jim Cramer to perform in his now famous Daily Show interview. This service consists of asking the tough questions that we all want to ask and pressing interviewees hard for answers, not letting them off the hook in the easy manner in which they are let off on, say, ABC's This Week, and other more convivial shows.

I have to admit that at least Bill O'Reilly has a sense of humor about himself and appears on The Colbert Report, on which he is known as Papa Bear, and has also appeared on the Daily Show. Even though he and Jon Stewart could not have a more different political frame of reference, I think Stewart respects O'Reilly, at least as much as he respects anyone, though not to the point of not criticizing him, as when he lambasted O'Reilly's two-faced take on women running for high political office, depending on whether he was talking about Hilary Clinton or Sarah Palin.

For some odd reason, I linked to an interview with O'Reilly off the Yahoo home page this morning because I really had to find out who the actor was that O'Reilly would not even go see his movies- Sean Penn. I actually found the interview interesting and O'Reilly's answers to be refreshingly straightforward and candid. He has a lot of very complimentary things to say about a lot people. It was nice to read about this side of a guy whose on-air persona is gruff and often angry. On his Hollywood A-List? Clint Eastwood. His favorite Eastwood film? Unforgiven. I can't fault him for taste on that!

The part of the interview I liked the most and to which I found myself saying Yeah! to was this:

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHY ARE ACTORS SUCH FREQUENT TARGETS OF "THE FACTOR"?

O'Reilly: My job is to watch the powerful. A performer has a forum that other people do not, and all we ask is that they be fair. If they believe something and use their TV show, movie or concert to spout off about it, that's fine. But if we have some questions about their beliefs, I think they should answer them -- and not be drive-by people.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHO ARE THESE DRIVE-BY PEOPLE YOU SPEAK OF?

O'Reilly: I take it case by case. We took on George Clooney over the 9/11 charities, and we were absolutely right, but Clooney does a good job with Darfur. We took on Bruce Springsteen for things he has done at concerts because we want to know what his frame of reference is. These are powerful people, and we're not going to give them a free ride. If there was somebody screaming right-wing stuff, we'd do the same thing. But there is no one like that because if they do that in Hollywood, they're not going to work, which is an interesting story in and of itself.

After all, how many drive-by attacks has the Holy Father endured both with regard to his largely misunderstand and misinterpreted lifting of the SSPX excommunications and his all too accurate statement that condoms are not the answer to HIV/AIDs in Africa?

the words we use are secular words

01-03-2007 - Traces, n. 3

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Editorial

The Pope’s Challenge and Our Responsibility

Some time ago, the well-known editor of an Italian daily informed a large audience that it was quite some time that something had changed in what they, the journalists (and, along with them, intellectuals and opinion leaders), call “Catholicism.” As a clear sign of this rather recent phenomenon of change in the Church, he noted that for the first time a Pope, in an encyclical letter, had used the word “Event” to describe the nature and originality of the Christian fact. He saw this as a warning light. Now, there is nothing new in the concept of Christianity as an historical event–it pertains to the whole of Church history – but the use of this word particularly aroused this editor’s curiosity.

To tell the truth, Benedict XVI’s use of certain words is astounding many people–just read the authoritative writers published in this issue of Traces: Riotta, Allam, Reale, Borgna, Albacete and Lenoci – and is worrying others who hear him. The Pope is speaking of the heart, of love, of reason, of education, of dialogue. He is speaking of “secular” matters, instead of concerning himself with faith and religion, which is, after all, his field of competence. Instead, he dares to use the words that thinkers and ideologies hostile to Christianity claim as their own, and on questions into which Christians, not to mention the Pope, have no right to poke their noses; these are the words of modernity, which interest modern man.

By excluding the Church from the use of these terms and from the debate on the questions linked to them, they want to present the Church as an antique curiosity that can have nothing useful to say about present-day life – but they are wrong, because the Church has always addressed herself to what interests man of all ages, to that which the Pope called the “heart.”

In taking up the challenge of modernity and, as it were, throwing it back, Benedict XVI has used those forbidden words but, above all, he has re-examined them and re-proposed them in their original meaning. He has thrown out a loftier and more loving challenge, and we Christians are the first at whom the challenge is aimed. Look at your own experience and see if the meaning of those words is more open and deeper in light of a familiarity of life with Christ. It is a challenge to love man’s freedom to the end, as Christ did, entrusting yourself to this freedom in order to see if the most important message that can reach us is true – that there is something that survives amidst all this confusion, that life is not empty, that there is a Father who wanted you and is waiting for you, and that what you love will not be lost.

What a responsibility – and what a change – for Christians, immersed like everyone else in a world that has erased certain words from its dictionary, declaring them impossible to live. To take up the Pope’s challenge doesn’t mean merely to repeat his words, it means above all to document the truth of those words – what is the essence of Christianity. “Christ gives flesh and blood to concepts–an unheard-of realism” (Deus Caritas Est); it means to demonstrate that it is possible to live like this, because if men don’t see, they don’t believe it. They can be attracted only by a change that they see in the lives of men like themselves. So our responsibility before the world is called “witness.”