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126 Pundit Knows Best The Self-Help Boom, Brand Marketing, and The O’Reilly Factor for Kids “The more polite you are, the more responsive the other person will be. Remember that in any debate.” —Bill O’Reilly, in The O’Reilly Factor for Kids 5 Few other media personalities have enjoyed more success during the past decade than Bill O’Reilly. His nightly current events and political talk program The O’Reilly Factor, which first aired in 1996, is the most popular cable news show in the United States, routinely attracting more than two million viewers (Crupi). Likewise, its guest list is a veritable pantheon of well-known journalists, cultural commentators, and prominent politicians. Among the figures who have made repeat appearances on The O’Reilly Factor since 2000 are civil rights activist Al Sharpton, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bob Woodward, and public figures Newt Gingrich, Hillary Clinton, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, Laura Bush, Barney Frank, John McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. The radio version of the program—called The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly— is just as successful. According to a report about talk radio prepared by the Pew Research Center in 2007, the show enjoyed an audience of 3.25 million listeners in 2006, an increase of 1.5 million since 2003 (“Talk Radio Audience”). In addition, as Westwood One, the distributor for The Radio Factor, reveals, the program is carried on “over 390 radio stations, in 100 of the top 100 markets” (Westwood). Together with appearing on the show that bears his name, O’Reilly is both a frequent political commentator on various television programs concerning politics and culture and a regular columnist for various nationally circulating periodicals. O’Reilly can regularly be seen as a “talking head” on current events and news analysis shows like Hannity & Colmes, John Gibson’s Big Story, and segments of Fox News. Meanwhile, his weekly syndicated column appears in newspapers around the country, including the Boston Herald, the THE O’REILLY FACTOR FOR KIDS 127 Washington Times, the New York Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times (“Newspaper Column List”). O’Reilly is an equally popular and prolific author. From 2000 to 2006, he released four books: The O’Reilly Factor (2000), The No-Spin Zone (2001), Who’s Looking Out for You? (2003), and Culture Warrior (2006). Each title flew off the shelves and sold millions of copies to reach the number one spot on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.1 In late September 2008, O’Reilly added a fifth book to his oeuvre, the memoir A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity. Bold debuted at number fourteen on USA Today’s best-seller list for nonfiction. Moreover, the New York Daily News reported that O’Reilly received an astounding five-milliondollar advance from his publisher for the memoir (Kelly, par 24)—a figure that indicates his continued esteemed cultural status and strong commercial appeal in American print and visual media. At the same time that Bill O’Reilly has attained a level of success enjoyed by few other media personalities during the past decade, he has also achieved a level of notoriety that is almost equally unparalleled. From the moment of his debut on the national broadcasting stage, O’Reilly has generated at least as much controversy and criticism as he has ratings and recognition. First, the live-to-tape format that he uses for The O’Reilly Show has sparked accusations that he edits material—including comments by his own guests—to affirm his viewpoint or suit a particular political agenda rather than simply to fit in the time allotted. A representative example of such editing occurred in June 2005 when O’Reilly omitted segments of George Stephanopoulos’s interview with Joseph Biden regarding the Abu Ghraib scandal and then criticized the Democratic senator from Delaware for failing to address these exact issues (O’Reilly Factor, 6 June 2005). In addition, O’Reilly’s confrontational on-air style—in which he routinely interrupts guests and callers—has come under attack for being combative, promoting incivility, and generally lowering the level of public discourse. People have similarly complained about his frequent use of the term “pinhead” for individuals whom he thinks are misinformed, have behaved inappropriately, or disagree with him;2 he also has a predilection for telling interviewees to “shut up” or ordering their microphones cut off. Perhaps the most infamous example of this kind of behavior occurred when...

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