William James "Bill" O'Reilly, Jr. (born September 10, 1949) is an American television host, author, syndicated columnist and political commentator. He is the host of the political commentary program The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel. During the late 1970s and 1980s, he worked as a news reporter for various local television stations in the United States and eventually for CBS News and ABC News. From 1989 to 1995, he was anchor of the entertainment news program Inside Edition. O'Reilly is widely considered a conservative commentator,[6][7][8] though some of his positions diverge from conservative orthodoxy.[9][10] O'Reilly is a registered "Independent" (See: Political views of Bill O'Reilly) and characterizes himself as a "traditionalist".[11][12] O'Reilly is the author of over a dozen books, and hosted The Radio Factor until early 2009. After Harvard, he was hired by Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of the then startup Fox News Channel, to anchor The O'Reilly Report in October 1996.[38] The show was renamed The O'Reilly Factor, after O'Reilly's friend and branding expert John Tantillo's remarks upon the "O'Reilly Factor" in any of the stories O'Reilly told.[38][39][40] The program is routinely the highest-rated show of the three major U.S. 24-hour cable news television channels and began the trend toward more opinion-oriented prime-time cable news programming.[41] The show is taped late in the afternoon at a studio in New York City and airs every weekday on the Fox News Channel at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time and is rebroadcast at 11:00 p.m. Until early 2009, O'Reilly hosted a radio program that had more than 3.26 million listeners and was carried by more than 400 radio stations.[42] According to the talk radio industry publication Talkers Magazine, O'Reilly was No. 11 on the "Heavy Hundred", a list of the 100 most important talk show hosts in America.[43] Conservative Internet news site NewsMax '​s "Top 25 Talk Radio Host" list selected O'Reilly to the No. 2 spot as most influential host in the nation.[44] O'Reilly's life and career have not been without controversy. Progressive media watchdog organizations such as Media Matters and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have criticized O'Reilly's reporting on a variety of issues, accusing him of distorting facts and using misleading or erroneous statistics.[45] After the September 11 attacks, O'Reilly accused the United Way of America and American Red Cross of failing to deliver millions of dollars in donated money, raised by the organizations in the name of the disaster, to the families of those killed in the attacks.[46] O'Reilly reported that the organizations misrepresented their intentions for the money being raised by not distributing all of the 9/11 relief fund to the victims. Actor George Clooney responded, accusing O'Reilly of misstating facts and harming the relief effort by inciting "panic" among potential donors.[47] Beginning in 2005, O'Reilly periodically denounced George Tiller, a Kansas-based physician who specialized in second- and third-trimester abortions,[48] often referring to him as "Tiller the baby killer".[49] Tiller was murdered on May 31, 2009, by Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion activist.[50] Critics such as Salon.com's Gabriel Winant have asserted that O'Reilly's anti-Tiller rhetoric helped to create an atmosphere of violence around the doctor.[51] Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that O'Reilly "clearly went overboard in his condemnation and demonization of Tiller", but added that it was "irresponsible to link O'Reilly" to Tiller's murder.[52] O'Reilly has responded to the criticism by saying "no backpedaling here ... every single thing we said about Tiller was true."[53] In early 2007, researchers from the Indiana University School of Journalism published a report that analyzed O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" segment. Using analysis techniques developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, the study concluded that O'Reilly used propaganda, frequently engaged in name calling, and consistently cast non-Americans as threats and never "in the role of victim or hero."[54][dead link][55] O'Reilly responded, asserting that "the terms 'conservative', 'liberal', 'left', 'right', 'progressive', 'traditional' and 'centrist' were considered name-calling if they were associated with a problem or social ill." The study's authors said that those terms were only considered name-calling when linked to derogatory qualifiers.[56] Fox News producer Ron Mitchell wrote an op-ed in which he accused the study's authors of seeking to manipulate their research to fit a predetermined outcome. Mitchell argued that by using tools developed for examining propaganda, the researchers presupposed that O'Reilly propagandized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_O%27Reilly_%28political_commentator%29 Image by Justin Hoch [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 05 Feb 2015
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