Culture Warrior

by Bill O'Reilly

  I believe, though I could be wrong, that if some conservatives had been caught misbehaving on camera the story would have run. Or if gays had been the ones imposed upon, the story would have aired. But the Rather crew did not want to scrutinize the behavior of a highly vocal minority group. This is the kind of tilt that has been going on at CBS News for decades. The operation leans left, no question, and the aforementioned UCLA study backs that up. In the past, CBS News has been far more ready to promote a secular cause than a traditional one, and as managing editor, Dan Rather had a strong hand in shaping that situation. Maybe the new management at CBS News will change that culture; however, the hiring of Katie Couric to take Rather’s place on the Evening News anchor desk is an interesting choice.

  Ms. Couric is a decidedly liberal thinker. I’ve been interviewed by her a couple of times on the Today show and there’s no question that her sympathies lie on the left. How dedicated she is to any agenda is hard to tell. Ms. Couric has broad audience appeal, and I believe CBS would have hired her even if she were a conservative, because her talent can translate into ratings. It will be fascinating to see if traditionalists get a fair shot on her broadcast. It will be to Ms. Couric’s credit if they do.

  The late Peter Jennings: For some reason, Peter liked me while many at ABC News, where I worked in the mid-eighties, did not. Like Dan Rather, Jennings was a tough, hardworking reporter, but he was far more interested in foreign news than the culture war in the United States. I think it pretty much bored him to tears.

  Although Peter surrounded himself with liberals, he did have friendships with people like the conservative writer John Leo. Above all, Jennings liked feisty, challenging individuals. Despite what some conservatives believe, he was in no way an ideologue.

  The late Peter Jennings.

  In his private life, Peter Jennings was politically correct and probably favored Democrats most of the time. But I never saw Peter Jennings shade a story toward the S-P cause or denigrate a conservative for a point of view. I spoke with the man regularly. He did have a traditional streak in him, but largely kept it to himself. Jennings often watched The Factor and was greatly amused by the battles we fought—constantly telling me that I was completely insane to take on the elite media. But he was always supportive of me both publicly and privately, and he didn’t have to be—there was nothing in it for him. Jennings may have been a bit too patrician for the hard right (some took it as condescension), but to me he was a straight shooter to the end, advancing neither secularism nor traditionalism on the air.

  Tom Brokaw: I know him but have never worked with him. Still, I consider Brokaw the most liberal of the three network titans (this may surprise Dan Rather). His remarks to the press about the Fox Newschannel have bordered on the snide, and I resent it. For years, NBC News stopped just short of declaring itself a fellow traveler of the left. To be fair, Brokaw never crossed the ideological Rubicon, but he often went out of his way to read copy that was shaded progressive. He had full editing power and could have been more neutral.

  Having retired from daily broadcasting, Brokaw is now a man-about-town in New York City and his social set is primarily liberal. I don’t consider him a committed culture warrior, but I do believe his heart is with the progressives. I could be wrong, but don’t bet on it. In March 2005, secular-progressive columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times actually floated Brokaw’s name as a possible Democrat presidential candidate. That wouldn’t automatically make him an S-P officer, but it does give you an indication of where he lives politically. Ms. Dowd is not going to become your champion unless you have solid S-P credentials.

  Tom Brokaw, the most liberal of the network titans, in unaccustomed company: with me and Fox Newschannel boss Roger Ailes.

  Ted Koppel: A straight shooter, but you don’t know where his gun is holstered. Plays it close on ideology and seems to dislike most of those holding power; in other words, Ted’s a bit of a cynic (not a bad thing when your job is to watch the powerful). Very smart and well read, Koppel is definitely not a culture warrior and probably couldn’t care less who wins the fight. I’ve never seen Koppel allow himself to be used on the air, but one of his former producers, a guy named Rick Kaplan, is a fanatic leftist who would smear any with whom he disagrees in a heartbeat. I know; I worked with Kaplan at ABC. How Koppel could work with an individual of this low character is one of the great media mysteries. I respect Koppel but could never really trust his fairness because of the Kaplan factor.

  So based upon my assessment of these four network news legends, traditional Americans did not have much sympathy on their broadcasts over the past couple of decades. There is no Paul Harvey (who is traditional to the core) in network news. There’s not even a Bill O’Reilly! Seriously, despite my success now, the networks never would have given me the chance that Fox News gave me. Never would have happened.

  As for the other new blood on the evening broadcasts, I can’t really evaluate them with any accuracy. All of them are highly skilled and none of them strikes me as engaged in the culture war to any great extent. So I’ve got nothing to report right now on these people. But their potential influence has been greatly diminished anyway; these days, what they put out to the public has little or no impact. Things have really changed since Walter Cronkite, a man whom traditional Americans once embraced on a massive scale. But Cronkite was really the conjurer behind a curtain. Unbeknownst to most of his viewers, he gave the secular-progressive movement some major growing room.

  Walter Cronkite: He was not what he appeared to be on the air in the 1960s and ’70s. If you really want to know the prevailing attitude of those in control of network news, listen to Uncle Walter today. He has exploded out of the closet as a full-tilt leftist, complete with harsh remarks about conservatives and a proudly “internationalist” point of view. In the interest of full disclosure, I do have a dog in this fight. Cronkite hates me. I wrote a column calling him out on his opinion that other nations should have some say over how the United States defends itself. Walter took serious umbrage. (Come to think of it, there’s a lot of umbrage coming my way.) He told Texas Monthly: “O’Reilly said I was an internationalist! My God, what a terrible thing to be. I try to avoid his program whenever possible.” No problem there, Walter, but being an internationalist when foreign terrorists are looking to kill us may not be the wisest thing.

  Anyway, for more than two decades, Walter Cronkite was the most powerful media person in the world. And he ran a low-keyed, stealth-liberal operation. Walter was careful not to editorialize openly, but he had final say over which stories ran on the CBS News shows, how much time they got, and how they were introduced and edited for air. That’s tremendous power, and I believe Cronkite used it to further his ideology in small but important ways. For example, he gave Democrat Lyndon Johnson far more leeway than Republican Richard Nixon. And he knew all about John Kennedy’s “personal issues,” his rampant adulteries and health problems and amphetamine use, but refused to report the story. Would he have been as accommodating to a conservative president?

  Today, Uncle Walter is an openly enthusiastic liberal if not quite a secular-progressive warrior. He’s more into politics than culture, although he has railed against opponents of gay marriage at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and declared his opposition to the death penalty and his support of abortion.

  Nearing ninety, Walter Cronkite no longer has to hide anything. As he was inaugurating a national newspaper column in June ’03, he described his current viewpoint to the Washington Post: “I would call myself a liberal, but I hope I don’t lose my ability to be dispassionate. My first [newspaper] column would be setting the record straight and pointing out what is a liberal and explaining why I think most reporters are liberals.”

  Walter Cronkite, in happier days at CBS News with me and my Connecticut coanchor Don Lark. For years the most powerful man in broadcast news, he’s come out of the closet as a full-tilt leftist.

  Well, with all due respect, I th
ink Cronkite should have bestowed that observation on his viewers while he was sitting behind that powerful CBS News anchor desk. Goes to fairness, right, Walter? You could still have remained “dispassionate.” By the way, Cronkite’s newspaper column was a bust with the public and he quietly dropped it. I think many Americans were disappointed in him. Not that he’s a confirmed liberal, but that he wasn’t up front about it. Again, I could be wrong.

  One last word about our pal Walter. In February 2005, a fund-raising letter went out from an organization called the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates the legalization and/or decriminalization of narcotics. The letter was signed by Walter Cronkite. In the body of the cash pitch Uncle Walter stated: “We have locked up literally millions of people, disproportionately people of color, who have caused little or no harm to others.”

  What Cronkite is referring to is the 1990s crackdown on street drug dealers who sell hard narcotics to anyone with money, including children. Simple drug users are rarely sent to prison unless they commit another crime, like robbery, or violate their parole. But meth and heroin and cocaine dealers are sentenced to prison, as well they should be. Millions of lives have been ruined by drug dealers, and Walter Cronkite should be smart enough to realize that.

  By the way, one of the big donors to the Drug Policy Alliance is George Soros. If you see him, tell him Walter Cronkite said hello.

  Bill Moyers: Talk about confirmed liberals—this guy is the poster boy for the secular-progressive movement in the media. He actually did commentary for CBS News for a number of years. (And CBS wonders why conservatives dislike it? Come on.)

  Bill Moyers is the poster boy for the S-P movement in the media.

  As the most visible face of PBS along with Jim Lehrer, Moyers has blossomed into an S-P bomb-thrower, perhaps the farthest-left broadcaster in the history of television. Few watched him before he left PBS (his average audience was about 1 million), but the guy lit it up for the S-Ps on his program Now, relentlessly attacking the right and cheerleading the progressive movement.

  The thing about Moyers is that, unlike Cronkite, he won’t admit he’s a far-left kind of guy. But in the aforementioned New Yorker magazine article on George Soros, the S-P banker told writer Jane Mayer that he occasionally gets political advice from Moyers (as well as from Harold Ickes, the Clinton confidant). There is no question that Moyers is a hardened secular-progressive who is almost fanatical in his leanings.

  Besides watching a few of his well-done documentaries about working Americans, I had never paid too much attention to Moyers until he started to attack me and the Fox Newschannel. I assumed his PBS program was a secular forum; after all, it was on the Public Broadcasting System, which has been an S-P stronghold for years at taxpayers’ expense.

  But after Moyers threw some bombs my way, I began to research him. Behind his public image as a “journalist,” Moyers runs a foundation that doles out fairly significant money to left-wing organizations like TomPaine.com, which was conveniently run by his son, John. TomPaine routinely attacks Republicans and warns that the United States is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian state. So, while the taxpayers were footing the bill for Bill to bloviate on PBS, he was funding liberal causes behind the scenes. Shouldn’t PBS have made that public in the interest of fairness? Maybe we should ask Walter Cronkite.

  I could list far-left “Moyerisms” all day long, but let me give you one very offensive observation Moyers made on Now. The date was February 28, 2003: “I put it on [he is referring to a flag lapel pin] to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us.”

  Yes, you read that right. Bill Moyers believes that removing Saddam Hussein and setting up a system where the Iraqi people actually have the opportunity to freely elect their leaders is akin to a sneak attack by terrorists that killed three thousand American civilians. This über-liberal icon draws a comparison between the butchery of Osama bin Laden and the coalition action. Even if you oppose the war in Iraq, you must find that comparison odious and inaccurate if you have any perspective at all. Bill Moyers is quite simply Michael Moore’s older brother as far as ideological thought is concerned. He is a true believer and ardent supporter of the secular-progressive movement. But he’s also a man who commands respect in elite media precincts, winning all kinds of prestigious awards.

  I’ve tried many times to get Moyers on The Factor so I could expose his radical thinking, but he’s read Lakoff’s book and will not show up. He told a Utah newspaper on January 15, 2003: “[O’Reilly] asked me on his show and I declined for the simple reason that I do not believe journalism is about journalists attacking each other.”

  Well, that’s nice. Bill wants to give peace a chance. Swell. Then Moyers does an interview with Charlie Rose on November 2, 2004, and says this about Sean Hannity: “I’ve never heard such vile bigotry and belligerence as I heard [on Sean’s radio program].”

  Call me crazy, but I believe that might qualify as an attack. No?

  End zone on Moyers: He’s a man who firmly believes in the S-P cause and has dedicated himself to advancing it. I just hope Elmo wasn’t influenced by him when Moyers was patrolling the halls of PBS. If Elmo and his crew go S-P, I’m beyond depressed.

  The Morning Anchors: The network morning programs have more influence than you might think, especially among American women. Having appeared on all three broadcasts, I’d say Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer are the most liberal of the bunch, but truthfully, their primary goal is to entertain and they certainly don’t want to tee people off with controversial comments. For that reason the culture war is largely absent from the morning chatfests, although liberal book authors are generally given an easier ride than conservatives. But traditional America is a key audience in the morning and any outright alienation of that audience would be ratings suicide. The true culture warriors tend to be creatures of the night, making full use of darkness to wage their stealth campaigns.

  The Late-Night Guys: All the comedians holding court post–11 P.M. are liberal guys. Jon Stewart heads up the ideological parade, followed by David Letterman and Jay Leno. Stewart, whom I like, has taken The Daily Show sharply left and gives progressive guests a nice opportunity to present themselves as reasonable and looking out for the folks. But Stewart usually greets conservative and traditional guests with skepticism. On my last appearance with him, he was annoyed with my boycott of France. I appealed for Americans not to buy French goods because Jacques Chirac and his pals do not provide much help in the war on terror. Stewart thought my boycott call was misguided.

  The Late-Night Guys—Leno, Letterman, and Stewart.

  My reply to him: “Did you miss 9/11?”

  Because the entertainment industry is solidly S-P, far more progressives get booked on all entertainment programs than do traditional people. Nothing particularly wrong with that, as Robin Williams is far funnier than Jerry Falwell…but, again, it’s “advantage” to the secular-progressives at the net.

  David Letterman’s sensibilities definitely lie on the left, but he’ll skewer anyone. However, he does on occasion promote dishonest radicals like Al Franken and relishes denigrating traditionalists. I enjoy jousting with Dave, and in what is now a broadcast legend, I appeared with Letterman on January 3, 2006. As soon as he introduced me, we began sparring. First, it was over the Christmas controversy (more on that later). Dave said I made the entire thing up. I told him he was misguided and provided three quick examples of Christmas under siege. But when radical antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan’s name came up, things really got heated:

  O’Reilly: “The soldiers and Marines are noble. They’re not terrorists, and when people call them that, like Cindy Sheehan called the insurgents freedom fighters, we don’t like that. It is a vitally important time in American history, and we should all take it very seriously and be careful with what we say.”

  Letterman: “Well, and you should be careful with what you say also. How can you possibly take except
ion with the motivation and the position of someone like Cindy Sheehan?”

  O’Reilly: “Because I believe she’s run by far-left elements in this country. I feel bad for the woman.”

  Letterman: “Have you lost family members in armed conflict?”

  O’Reilly: “No, I have not.”

  Letterman: “Well, then you can hardly speak for her, can you?”

  O’Reilly: “I’m not speaking for her. Let me ask you this question. This is important. Cindy Sheehan lost a son, a professional soldier in Iraq, correct? She has a right to grieve any way she wants, she has a right to say whatever she wants. But when she says to the public, that the insurgents and terrorists are freedom fighters, how do you think, David Letterman, that makes people who also lost loved ones, by these people blowing the hell out of them, feel? What about their feelings, sir?”

  The conversation continued in this contentious vein and exploded into this final confrontation:

  Letterman: “I’m very concerned about people like yourself who don’t have nothing but endless sympathy for a woman like Cindy Sheehan. Honest to Christ.”

  O’Reilly: “No way a terrorist who blows up women and children…”

  Letterman: “Do you have children?”

  O’Reilly: “Yes, I do. I have a son the same age as yours. And there’s no way a terrorist who blows up women and children is gonna be called a freedom fighter on my program.”