So Bill O’Reilly had Scott McClellan on tonight and I almost had a nosebleed watching. It was classic O’Reilly acorss the boards: the shouting, shutting down everything the guest says as “just your opinion”, cutting the guest off as “wrong” repeatedly, bringing up George Soros and the far-left media, and claiming to know more about the situation than the man who was in the center of it.

To quote Will, Bill O’Reilly could be interviewing Jesus Christ and say “I read the Bible, I know what it says, and you’re WRONG.”

Now, I’ve gotten into discussions with many conservatives and for all my polemic statements on here, I’m generally very civil with those I disagree with. I don’t antagonize and unless someone throws something flaming and belligerent at me (“liberals want to have sex with Al Qaeda”), I don’t toss any grenades out there.

One spot I have a problem with is the right-wing media, specifically the television and radio aspects of it, even more specifically the trinity of Hannity, O’Reilly, and Rush. I’ve noticed I have a very, very hard time convincing conservatives that my beef with them is not that they’re conservatives, but that they’re drooling idiots. It took me a while to figure out why this is so difficult, but I’ve finally discovered it.

FOX’s “talent” was specifically chosen to make liberals unable to criticize them.

Pick anyone on FOX. Anyone from the heavyweights like O’Reilly, middleweights like Cavuto, or lightweights like Doocey, and you’ll notice that down the boards, each of the high-profile pundits are loudmouth wackjobs that spin like crazy, shoot down everything that contradicts them and otherwise takes a crap on what is generally considered “journalistic integrity”.

This isn’t by accident. FOX’s viewers are not intellectually curious people. They aren’t watching the news in order to learn things about the world around them. They aren’t trying to gather information in order to make a well-researched opinion. Rather, they come into the day with a set of opinions and want their “news” to remind them that they’re right about everything. That’s why you’ll rarely find a FOX viewer that loves one show but dislikes another (not counting everyone hating Colmes).

Bill O’Reilly’s popularity is a result of his ability to shout down guests, and muddy the debate by insisting that everything the guest says is “opinion”. A viewer never comes out of one of O’Reilly’s interviews having learned anything new. He gets a liberal on, shouts at them for a while, and the viewers ends up happy because Bill “stuck it to” the left-wing loony.

Here’s where FOX’s genius comes in. I, as a liberal, am unable to point at anyone else on the network as an example of a calm, level-headed conservative host. They don’t have anyone on that quietly discusses a disagreement with their guest, defers to them in realms the host is unfamiliar with, or concedes a point when proven wrong.

That puts me in an awkward position when trying to explain my beef with any one of them. I can’t say something along the lines of “Look, it’s not because X is a conservative, it’s because he’s an idiot. Look at Y, he’s another host on FOX and he’s perfectly reasonable.” And reasonable conservatives exist. NPR has lots of them, Jack Cafferty has a lot of great moments as do Dobbs and Buchanan.

Thanks to that, I the liberal can’t agree that a single FOX host is an example of a good journalist, meaning that, to the conservative, I come across as a rabid liberal moonbat who hates all conservative pundits. And since FOX has a few milktoast liberals on board that don’t rock the boat too much, they can claim less-ideological status by pointing them out and saying “I don’t have a problem with THEM.”

Rupert Murdoch’s empire is built around comforting conservatives and confounding liberals. It’s a great business model. In fact it’s a brilliant business model. By being so unflaggingly partisan and unashamedly subjective, their viewer base loves them and even feels validated when the left attacks the network.

After all, it’d be one thing if Media Matters supported a few of FOX’s hosts or at least respected them but went after others. By constructing it so MM will go after the network as a unit, the claim that liberals are this crazy fringe is well-supported, at least according to those in the FOX bubble.

Brilliant business, bad journalism. It’d be great if it wasn’t having such a terrible effect on our political system.