I will first give credit where it is more or less due: Mr. O'Reilly does have a solid point re: the overly idealist nature of a lot of liberal arguments. And he does correctly point out that his average lambaster is not listening to the entire extent of what he's saying; the "O'Reilly's an idiot and therefore nothing he says is worthwhile" is an overly simplistic argument and one that basically assumes his entire listening audience is stupid. People frequently quote him out of context and/or accuse him of spouting things he does "just for ratings." I have been surprised that O'Reilly on his radio show has sounded more and more rational lately; he still has his same ultra-traditionalist leanings, but he has curtailed the "just shut up" angle a bit and left more of his arguments out for analysis. In other words, his show has boldly progressed from unlistenable to mildly annoying, which is leaps and bounds.
Now we go for the bad - and there's a bevy of badness here. For one, O'Reilly pushes an anti-intellectual agenda that equally destroys his own arguments while condescending to his actual, real, "just folks" audience. He doesn't cite anything throughout the book; true, there's an index where you can learn where he talks about hot topics like David Letterman and Jon Stewart, but there's not anything in the appendix of the book that indicates where he's getting any of his "facts" from. I understand the desire to avoid the use of footnotes and citations in what is otherwise a pop lay political book, but completely refusing to acknowledge sources and instead using the same "Studies show" for which I would skewer a 10th grade science paper is just, gulp, bad journalism. The bulk of his book in fact consists of completely anecdotal evidence, and worse, it's anecdotal evidence that often has a not-so-subtle subtext of illustrating what a great and stand-up guy he is. He additionally frequently drops statements as though they were fact without any backup whatsoever, a sort of "Everyone knows all colleges are liberal" reporting. (Um, Texas A&M, anyone?). The overall effect of this is to one, contradict any kind of argument about factual reporting he was actually making, seeing as his facts are not verifiable (whether they're true or not), and two, he implies that his audience is at the fourth grade reading level that not only can't handle footnotes, but doesn't notice when they're (the footnotes are) glaringly missing.
The tone, also in the "read this to fourth graders vein," is another gigantic problem of the book. O'Reilly writes as though he were speaking, which is not inherently a bad thing (see Kerouac), but because his speech is generally heavy-handed and often gruff, he comes across in the written form with an informality that stinks of a lack of effort. This, too, seems to be either targeted marketing, that the very people O'Reilly feels he is lauding are incapable of handling a crisply written piece, or just a form of laziness that he thinks will be comforting to his already-listening readers of his book.The structure of the book is also ridiculous - he starts off with a "Central Command: Initial Briefing" that is supposed to make this whole debate a sort of "warrior training" guide. This is a big gimmick, of course, and a childish one, but he doesn't even stick to his gimmick throughout - the "in training" idea only pops up at uneven intervals, finally "tying together" with a list of directives in the end. It's again insulting to think that your readership needs to be spoonfed like a child, but worse because he doesn't pull it off very well.
The text is also littered with bad puns, always followed with a (sorry) or a (I couldn't help it). But this is not the worst (or the most painfully transparent) technique that O'Reilly uses to adopt his "aw shucks" demeanor. The worst, imho, is that he frequently makes bold, over the top accusations, using 2/3 of a page to attack and belittle a person or a comment, but then feigns some kind of journalistic integrity by ending a paragraph with the succinct, "but, I could be wrong." This ends up serving Bill's need to seem even-handed and journalistic - he's not spouting facts that he can't verify - but it also allows any kind of humility to ring with an overt sarcasm, a sort of "I believe Charles Manson is a vicious murderer - but, you know, I could be wrong."
This is not the most disingenuous thing O'Reilly throws out - he also uses more "defender of the people," and I can't help but write it, the "aw shucks I'm regular folks just like you" rhetoric by occasionally pointing out how his shortcomings have always come at the hands of the evil S-Ps. And he also frames any mistakes of any confession of perhaps questionable behavior of his own with a dismissive "I've made mistakes, but aren't we all sinners here?" attitude that I found repulsive. His simultaneous kowtowing to and condescension towards his target audience seems more than dishonest to me, and the fact that more of his viewers cannot see this, or at least question its motive. Mr. O'Reilly's defense of accusations that many of his ploys (the "War on Christmas," his attacks on lenient judgments) are just ratings baiters is equally goofy - he responds to the charge of "You're being disingenuous!" with a cry of, "No, I'm not." Not exactly a brilliant defense (no really guys, I mean it!), especially when all the while he mercilessly plugs his book on the air under what certainly feels like the guise of "spreading the word."
The question of authenticity is really the biggest one around O'Reilly; otherwise he's just a conservative blowhard with questionable journalistic techniques (whose bullying style grates on people). The charge, of course, by the left is that he's an idiot, and I would defend against this notion completely. He is not an idiot - and if anything, he's something of a rhetorical mastermind. His categorization of the world into traditionalists and secular progressives is a move that most people don't think to stop; there's actually a huge gap between those two stances that I would argue the vast majority of Americans fall in. To his credit, he does manage to point out that the SP distinction doe snot mean "liberal" or "Democrat," because there are traditionalist versions of those. Notice that he doesn't make the same claim on "traditionalist," making it seem that Republicanism and conservatives are auto-Traditionalists whereas only the few, enlightened (HA!) liberals could possibly be traditionalists. So while he does acknowledge that his own division is not the traditional one (irony?), he doesn't state overtly what he can do with this overtly wider than it should be divide.
What he does is quickly drop any sentiment of the bridge across the middle. He shortens the clumsy "secular progressive" to S-P and begins to demonize. He never says "left" or "liberal," he refers only to "far left" and "radical liberals" and "San Francisco value S-P's." The whole thing is essentially Michael Moore in reverse: he goes completely over the top with his analysis and accusations, using anecdotes that support his claims. His aim is to shoot well past the mark in hopes that things will average out more onto his own side. And he could not hope to pull this off without his consistent hyperbole-laden rhetoric nor without his technique of dividing the country to a patently absurd, black and white, either or division. He labels you so he can negate you, and the brilliant tactic is that he gets to call the labels and that people are willing to jump along and use them, too.
O'Reilly uses other insidious techniques, such as the overly emotional constant "what if this was your child," banter that ignores inconveniences like statistics. In regards to the question of his being disingenuous, on one hand I feel that the answer is blatantly yes - a genuine person would say, "Of course I do this for ratings, I'm in the radio business," rather than dodge the issue with a self-righteous I'm for the people mantra (whether he actually is or not) - but on the other hand, I don't question that he believes what he is selling. Though clearly, the triumphant point is often the "selling" and not the believing.
O'Reilly ends the book with a laundry list of mandates for the true traditionalist "culture warrior" that admittedly look great -
Keep your promises
Focus on other people, not yourself
See the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be
Understand and Respect the Judeo-Christian philosophy
Respect the nobility of America
Allow yourself to make fact-based judgments
Respect and defend private property
Develop mental toughness
Defend the weak and vulnerable
Engage the secular-progressive opposition in a straight-forward and honest manner
Some of these (keep your promises) are generally good; others (respect and defend private property) are ideological is nature; others (defend the weak and vulnerable) seem, um, stolen; others still (Judeo-Christian philosophy) have interpretations up for debate - I for one would say that whole "rich man - kingdom of heaven - eye of needle" things precludes the average Republican idea from the Christian philosophy. And its the debate where the problems lie.
Bill O'Reilly is a traditionalist, and as such largely operates on a change = bad foundation. A change = good foundation would be equally flawed; the problem here is that the mentality shuts off debate. "Tradition" often recollects a forgotten and, in all probability, never existed golden age in America where men were men, women were women, snicker bars cost a dollar, etc. The attitude reeks of desperately emotional nostalgia, and as such is difficult to view as a rational philosophy (particularly when its same "fact" touting speaker uses anecdotal evidence to support ALL of his arguments). Worse, when this fails, the traditionalist here refers to 230 years of American history, a history that rather obviously cannot be threaded together with a single set of values or traditions, so to what exact long lineage of inborn tradition is he referring. Worse still, the traditionalist drops the values of the founding fathers, throwing out Jefferson, Adams, Washington, as though they were gods from whom only and all good things have come. (Several hundred slaves, for one example, would beg to differ).
That is the crux, and that is where the whole thing becomes moot. O'Reilly's book, despite his protests and his identification of others as "preaching to the choir," is itself a tome which, in order to any sense be believable, can only be read and swallowed by someone who has already made the leap to declare non-existing traditional times to be sacrosanct and miscellaneous white men from 230 years ago to be deities. Not to say they weren't great men; they were, but to use "George said" as validation for your argument is two steps short of insane. Regardless, you do indeed, O'Reilly, need to drink the Kool-Aid before you can swallow this tripe, and thinking that a self-focused book of anecdotal evidence written at the fourth grade level is going to convince anyone of your vision of what is right is ridiculous. I can't recommend this to anyone, SP or otherwise, and I would hope that the readers and followers would realize just how condescending, manipulative and inauthentic his tone is.
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