Ex-Fox Host: Fox Is a ‘Cult’ and O’Reilly Is a Liar
This clip is primarily about a former Fox “News” host Eric Burns, who ironically hosted a media criticism show on the network until 2008, who identified it as a “cult,” and said that Keith Olbermann was mostly right in his accusations of lying against O’Reilly while he was a host on MSNBC. But the clip also features nuns from the order in which two of the nuns murdered in El Salvador in 1980 - which O’Reilly claimed to have witnessed in person - speaking out against him.
As for Olbermann, I had my troubles with him, and often found him to be difficult to take seriously at times, sometimes even unwatchable. But his takedowns of O’Reilly were epic, and important, because he was the only one doing it.
Back to Eric Burns, who also mentioned a report that O’Reilly’s ratings have increased as this controversy has unfolded, and his money quote:
I think the way to understand this is to make a distinction between the words “culture” and “cult…I’m saying that the people who watch Fox News are cultish. Because for many years conservatives have been extremely upset in this country because the only newscasts they had to watch were liberal - you people at CNN and how liberal you are, and NBC and ABC and CBS, and they never had - the extreme right - they never had their own television station. When they got one, their appreciation - their audience loyalty - and I know what the audience loyalty was like when I was there - their audience loyalty soared. And so O’Reilly as the head of the cult is not held to the same standards as Brian Williams, who was part of the media culture - the larger culture. Every time, it seems, Brian, that O’Reilly lies - and he’s lied so many times - Keith Olbermann used to be on opposite him with his show “Countdown,” he later wrote a book of all the segments in his show called “The Worst Person in the World…and every time he (O’Reilly) was named (Worst Person in the World), a charge was made by Olbermann about something O’Reilly had said or done that was a complete fabrication…and it was completely substantiated. I mean Olbermann had all the evidence possible.
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…yet the cult…to the Fox News cult, this kind of thing doesn’t matter. It’s a lie from the liberal media, it’s…who cares what it is, the point is, it doesn’t matter.
More: Ex-Fox Host Tells CNN: Olbermann Was Right All Along — Fox Is a ‘Cult’ and O’Reilly Is a Liar