O'Reilly and Soldiers

O'Reilly and Soldiers
Originally uploaded by art progress

This is Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly enjoying a hamburger with a group of American soldiers. He has a show called the O'Reilly Factor which generally follows the prescribed American right-wing talking points of the day. Sometimes he will have someone with a dissenting opinion into his "no spin zone" where he'll talk over them and tell them how wrong and insane they are to his audiences great satisfaction. He likes to call a lot of sensible people left wing loons and kool-aid drinkers which I find hilariously ironic.

I find his show really fascinating. I'm fascinated that there is actually a large segment of the American public perfectly willing to follow without question. I'm also fascinated that such extreme commentary even exists and that his audience does not see his rhetoric as extreme- quite the opposite, his viewers and listeners eat up his "Fair And Balanced" reports. He has a radio show that I sometimes listen to too. Sometimes he says some pretty hateful things.

Anyway, I saw a picture of O'Reilly on wikipedia sitting in a mess hall with a group of American soldiers. I find it interesting because he's sitting with soldiers who are largely bearing the brunt of the insane policies he largely supports. In the picture, O'Reilly is also giving the soldier to his left the stink eye like the soldier just asked him what exactly happened to WTC 7 or why the hole in the pentagon was only 80 feet wide after a big 757 with wings just hit it.

A free and unmolested media is vital to the health of a democracy. So is an informed and active public. The state of the once proud American democracy has been decimated, possibly forever, by the ideologically driven editorial policies of Fox News and America's right wing echo chamber. They've made it so the truth is whatever they say it is and made journalistic integrity a slogan, not a ideal. As a journalist I'm appalled, but it's something that I have a very hard time looking away from. It's a democracy car crash.

Keep on fighin' that culture war, Bill.

The picture itself took a long time to draw and I'm pretty proud of it. I drew it in ink on paper.

Blake Betteridge 2007