How Do I Get On This List?



Conservative talk show pundit Bill O’Reilly really hates the St. Petersburg Times. Really, really hates them. Hates them so much he put them on his short list of enemies. Boy, they must be really falafel… I mean, awful.

Beyond something so weirdly adolescent in nature as an “enemies list” coming from a 55-year-old man, the strangest part of O’Reilly’s singling out of the St. Pete Times is his explanation for the Times being on it. “The following media operations have regularly helped distribute defamation and false information supplied by far left websites.”  The thing is the two issues that O’Reilly has disagreements with the Times on are not of much interest to “far left websites.”

The first is the case of Sami Al-Arian, a former college professor at USF in Tampa who was arrested and tried for allegedly aiding a Palestinian terrorist group. (He’s awaiting the verdict as we speak.) I’m not sure what issue O’Reilly had with the Times coverage, but Al-Arian hasn’t exactly been a cause celebre at the far left websites. I've noticed a couple of bloggers picking up the story, but they tend to lose interest once they learn that Al-Arian was a strident Bush supporter. He bragged that his influence in the Muslim community helped Bush win Florida in the last election. He was even invited to visit the White House by Karl Rove. Locally, the area's free "counter-culture" newspaper spent a lot of time defending Al-Arian a couple years ago, but when the detailed indictment came down they admitted they had been used.

The other case was that of James Couey, who is accused of murdering 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford in Homosassa. Couey was arrested, confessed, and is now awaiting trial, and there is little doubt he will be convicted and sent to death row. It’s a horrible and tragic story, but that didn’t stop O’Reilly from trying to whip up some self-serving outrage with it. O’Reilly apparently thinks that some of the people Couey was living with at the time of the murder should have been charged with a crime, though both the local prosecutor and sheriff say there are good reasons they weren’t. The Times did a story about how O’Reilly was covering the story, and this caused O’Reilly to become enraged and start proposing all sorts of bizarre theories about how the local officials and the Times are part of some sort of conspiracy to hide “the truth.” Precisely why local law enforcement and the press would want conspire to protect members of a confessed child-killer’s family is not at all clear to me, nor do I understand what O’Reilly thinks any of this has to do with those darned “far left websites.”

Posted: Thu - December 1, 2005 at      

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