Billo’s Spin-Factor

By Scott Horton

I’m a big fan of Indiana University—one of the nation’s premier research universities, and one I always reckon it a pleasure to be dealing with. But when the latest IU release landed on my desk, I was arrested by the topic: the Rhetoric of Bill O’Reilly. A group of IU media scholars decided to undertake a study of the language and habits of Fox News’s number one draw. The conclusions:

The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

“It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities,” said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. “He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint.”

The technique used for this study has been applied to a number of other prominent U.S. media figures over time. One is the famous radio minister, Father Charles Coughlin. A media fixture of the Depression era, Coughlin used incendiary anti-Semitic rhetoric and defended Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini up to the eve of World War II. The IU researchers compare O'Reilly directly with Coughlin, and the comparison they make is negative. O’Reilly is a “heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin,” they conclude.

Mr. O’Reilly is a master of the modern fact-free journalism. It’s all spin, all the time.