Two blogging sites I frequent quite often are Michelle Malkin's sites www.michellemalkin.com and www.hotair.com. On both of these sites, Michelle offers in depth analysis from a conservative perspective of the political world. They are both great sites.
The other night while watching "The O'Reilly factor", O'Reilly decided to dump on www.hotair.com by pointing to one derogatory remark on the Sotomayor pick. The comment read as follows, "Unqualified, militant and socialist, NEXT, please. The GOP has to block any of Hussein's extremist picks.". Bill was looking for reaction to the Sotomayor supreme court pick. He wanted to see how the right wing blogs were reacting to it. However, in the attempt, he managed to smear Michelle Malkin's Hotair.com site because of one comment by one its readers. He described it as a Hotair.com blog posting. It, of course, was not a blog posting, it was one comment out of the thousands of comments hotair receives a day. O'Reilly somehow feels that every comment posted to a blog site should be moderated. That would of course require endless hours of moderation, and most blog sites do not have nearly the staff required to monitor every comment that is posted to these websites.
Bill O'Reilly in his zeal to appear "fair and balanced" tries just a little too hard. He has gone after the far-left websites for not moderating their comments like the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. There are loons from both the left and the right. If there is hateful speech in an actual blog posting, that is one thing, but if it is from a commenter, that is another thing all together. Blog postings are contributors to the sites who actually write op-ed pieces. Commentors post their own views from one of the blog postings they see, and it would be virtually impossible to moderate every comment posted to the site. Michelle Malkin states in her comment section that any commentor who fails to abide by "its terms of use" may lose their commenting privilege, but again it would be impossible to monitor every comment that is posted. To comment on Bill O'Reilly's blog, you have to be a premium member (a paying member.) A hotair reader actually signed up for premium membership on O'Reilly's site to see the comments on his site and it appears that O'Reilly fails his priestly duties by not monitoring the comments on his site too which you can view here. O'Reilly apparently doesn't understand the difference between comments and blog postings.
There is a need for The O'Reilly factor, because he does offer a different perspective than the typical media outlets that are in the tank for Obama, but he needs to get his facts straight. O'Reilly does some good reporting like his exposé on the corruption of the far-left organization ACORN, but then he comes out of left-field when he supports the new car emission standards of Obama while in the same breath tells his audience that he has the sensibilities of the middle class. I wonder if Bill O'Reilly will have a difficult time in paying the extra $1,300 dollars per vehicle (for a smaller vehicle) as the rest of the middle class will? If he continues to put out misinformation in his zeal to appear "fair and balanced", he may lose credibility and go the way of the New York Times.
Bill O'Reilly always says that he has open invitations for various guests. I am waiting to see him invite Michelle to the show. She can hold her own.
Update: The commenter who published the quotes from Bill O'Reilly's site account has been terminated. Is Bill O'Reilly following the same pattern of which he accuses the left?
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