Good piece here that explains how O'Reilly will *always* be vindicated - no matter what he says or does.
It's Magic!
Bill O Reilly and the Truthiness Defense - TIME
<snip>
"It’s no accident that O’Reilly was a chief inspiration for Stephen Colbert’s character on
The Colbert Report, for whom he invented the concept of “truthiness”: that what your gut tells you is more important than what the literal facts say, that how the news
feels is more important than what the news
is.
Once you’re inside that No-Spin Zone, all arguments become political arguments. And any argument can be considered, and attacked, with the tactics of political ones: ad hominems, consider-the-source rebuttals,
somebody-else-did-something-bad-once-too rebuttals, appeals to loyalty and the sense of persecution.
Like so: the original claim against O’Reilly came from
Mother Jones.
Mother Jones is a liberal magazine; therefore its argument is invalid and we don’t even need to consider it further. If anyone follows up on the report–
CNN, the New York
Times–they’re also liberal, because all the media outside Fox is liberal, therefore we can disregard them too. If anyone else joins in, they are by definition
also liberal because they’re attacking Bill-O, QED.
The fact that charges exist becomes the best defense against the charges. Not only that, they only reinforce that O’Reilly is right: he has the right enemies, he must be on the right side. The liberal media claims Bill lied about being in a war zone? Well, what is a “war zone” anyway? Look at the footage he showed of demonstrators in the streets! That’s combat enough for me! Case closed.
It’s almost magic."
Read the full piece.