Of Agendas, Fetishes and Crusades

By Brian Montopoli

For more than a year, Bill O'Reilly has been railing against the New York Times for what he believes is its excessive coverage of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Back on May 27, 2004, he said, "some press people are using the terrible Abu Ghraib prison scandal as a political hammer. Some people don't see that as a bad thing, but I do. I think the story should be reported accurately and aggressively, but not used by the media to advance an agenda." (Emphasis added.)

O'Reilly feels the Times, more than anyone else in the "left-wing media," has focused far too much on the military prison torture scandal. On his Fox News show, "The O'Reilly Factor," he has repeatedly condemned the paper for its Abu Ghraib coverage, and has kept a running tab of the number of front-page stories the Times has written about it. O'Reilly hasn't always had the numbers exactly right -- on May 27th, he said there had been "total of 50 front page articles" in the Times about the scandal, and then on June 22nd said, "They got 47 stories on Abu Ghraib on the front page" -- but his point is clear: The Times "is using the prisoner story to hammer the Bush administration." In the past year, in addition to the examples above, he criticized the Times' Abu Ghraib coverage on June 11, June 14, June 30, July 1, July 9, July 21, August 9, Oct. 8, Oct. 25, Nov. 9, Nov. 22, Feb. 16, March 9, April 12, May 3, May 16, and May 17. The notion that the Times is allowing ideology to dictate its coverage has become a common refrain on the show.