Bill O'Reilly: The Arbiter of What's Out of Context

On his show this Wednesday night, Bill O'Reilly once again showed just how hypocritical Fox News is with this bit where he was complaining about MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell taking Mitt Romney out of context and carrying on about how terrible it was that nothing could be done about cable news organizations showing their biases. Then he turns right around and does the same thing himself to Melissa Harris-Perry.

O'Reilly brought in Fox Democrat Lanny Davis, who calls himself a liberal and a progressive when he's neither, who has teamed up with former RNC chair Michael Steele in forming some new lobbying/media/consulting shop, Purple Nation Solutions, and who have apparently already achieved half of their goal, which is to get as much air time as possible and spout more Villager conventional wisdom, fake centrist, can't we all get along, inside the Beltway clap trap about "both sides" being equally at fault for the gridlock in Washington and to give the Republican Party cover for losing its damned mind and being taken over by the Grover Norquist, Libertarian, birther, Evangelical, teabagger, extremist wings of the party, which now controls all of them and their agenda.

O'Reilly started out the segment complaining about MSNBC taking Mitt Romney out of context on Andrea Mitchell's show which we posted as well. As I noted in an update to the post, Romney was taken out of context by Mitchell and her staff, but I don't think the editing necessarily did him any great favors, since the part that was left out didn't make him look much better than them trying to paint him as out-of-touch for his comments. Lanny Davis took up for Mitchell, saying he didn't think she realized the clip was edited and I actually have to agree with him. I've got issues with Mrs. Greenspan and her reporting, but making a habit out of showing highly edited videos on a regular basis is not one of them. In all of the time I've been monitoring media for this site and her show, I have never seen another incident where they did something like Mitchell did this week. We made the mistake of trusting her staff with the video used in the post and I expect she did as well. I can't say the same, however, for Fox. They do this sort of thing day in and day out.

Just to prove our point, that's exactly what Bill O'Reilly did immediately after he got done complaining to fake liberal Lanny Davis about Mitchell, then moved on to taking MSNBC weekend host, Melissa Harris-Perry out of context when he showed part of her speech at Campaign for America's Future's conference this week.