Being fed mostly on BBC News here in the UK for most of my life, I’ve kind of got used to (and taken for granted) the lack of political bias and the integrity of television journalism – at least on terrestrial channels.

I wouldn’t classify myself as being of any specific political orientation. And so I have absolutely no problem with people expressing conservative, liberal or any other views on television, so long as it’s made clear that it is a viewpoint, and is done rationally and fairly.

After a friend recently introduced me to the wonder of a certain Mr Bill O’Reilly, I realised that he does none of these things. He has a strong conservative viewpoint, which again, I have no particular problem with, but he seems to enjoy ramming it down people’s throats as the ‘right way’ of thinking – and insulting those who challenge him in any way. His favourite way of dealing with ‘awkward’ guests and people he just doesn’t like seems to be to call them names – of which “pinhead” seems to crop up fairly often.

I still just can’t understand why he is actually allowed his own show – the guy shouldn’t even be allowed anywhere near a camera. His arrogance and narrow-mindedness should never be promoted as a legitimate way of thinking. It’s actually ironic that he thinks he is ‘protecting’ kids from so called bad influences (such as his hate of rap music) when he is teaching them to treat debates as shouting contests when your opponent has a better argument than you.

To his credit, he is an intelligent man. He does have some good points of view, and is actually fairly calm when discussing them (if there’s no objection then he obviously doesn’t need to argue!). He’s also very good at covering up any controversy he’s caused by acting like it never happened (see the Shawn Hornbeck video below).

Bill should go and watch some real news programmes. Then again, he’d probably just tell them they’re all full of crap.

Here is another gem… there are loads more on the net, so I encourage you to sample the delight that is Bill O’Reilly!