Filed under: Rants and raves, General Electric (GE), News Corp’B’ (NWS), Media World, Politics, Presidential elections

My media world makes no sense anymore.

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, the symbol to liberals of all that’s evil, rushed to the defense of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after Chris Matthews of MSNBC pointed out that she owed her political position to the fact that her husband “messed around…. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.”

Now Matthews, who now reportedly is upset that Keith Olbermann is the rising star at MSNBC, is being lambasted by media types over those remarks, that came after Clinton’s surprising victory in the New Hampshire primary. Greg Sargent of Talking Points Memo accused the pundit of, “oversimplifying complex voter sentiment in the most crude and reductive fashion he can muster.”

In his report on Fox News (transcript from Media Matters), O’Reilly pontificated that ” Mr. Matthews has a perfect right to say whatever he wants to say because he is not a reporter. He is a commentator, as I am. But … that is a personal attack. And it is questionable whether a network should allow that or not.”

Let’s leave aside the irony of O’Reilly, the master of the personal attacks, criticizing Matthews for doing the same thing and focus on how this all happened. Matthews, like many other pundits, was caught flat-footed by Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire. One of O’Reilly’s pet peeves besides the evils of Hollywood is NBC, which happens to be the employer of his nemesis Olbermann. So sticking up for Hillary was the perfect opportunity for him to jab the General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE) cable channel, which in this case deserved it. No doubt News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), Fox’s parent, was delighted by this as well.

Continue reading Media World: Why Bill O’Reilly stuck up for Hillary Clinton

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.