Bill O’Reilly vs. Alan Colmes Family Spat Shows Why There’s Fox News…And There’s Everyone Else

Mediaite.com:

George W. Bush wins the 2000 Presidential Election by (in essence) 537 votes; Fox News goes to #1 in the cable news race a few months later. 

Bush narrowly beats John Kerry in 2004. Not surprisingly, Fox is still #1, and by a wider margin. 

Barack Obama soundly defeats John McCain in 2008; Fox is still #1 by a Secretariat-esque margin. 

Mr. Obama decisively beats Mitt Romney four months ago; Regardless of which party holds executive power, Fox is still decimating the competition, albeit by a slightly smaller-than-usual margin. Sure, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell are periodically beating Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren in the demo, but for 22 other hours out of the day, it’s not even a fair fight. 

So why does this keep happening? 

Why, for the better part of 12 years, can’t anyone seriously challenge Fox News? 

The country IS becoming more socially progressive, whether it be gay rights, legal pot or its attitude toward illegal immigrants. 

So why isn’t the country—of which 51.1 percent of its registered voters went for Mr. Obama last fall—moving away from a network that many of its critics call an extension of the Republican Party? 

The answer played itself out again this week starting on Tuesday’s night O’Reilly Factor: Bill O’Reilly is speaking with his usual Tuesday night guests in the form of Monica Crowley (conservative) and Alan Colmes (liberal). This is a segment that has existed for years. Colmes is married to Crowley’s sister, bringing a Carville-Matalin element (sort of) to the show. The topic is sequester, who’s to blame, and particularly if the President has any inclination to ever cut anything given his record over his first 50 months in office. 

Part I: O’Reilly claims that Mr. Obama has no inclination to reduce spending, wants Colmes to specifically list what the President is willing to eliminate. 

Part II: Colmes claims that Mr. Obama has been receptive to Medicare and other entitlement cuts, but is speaking in general terms and therefore isn’t as specific as O’Reilly wants…

Part III: O’Reilly (clearly frustrated), calls Colmes a liar, and comes close to dropping an s-bomb on the air, characterizing Colmes’ argument is “bull-blank” and “jack”. The 63-year-old host proceeds to point his finger at his longtime co-worker no less than a half-dozen times, but later apologizes for calling Colmes a liar (while still maintaining he wasn’t being specific in terms of exact cuts). 

But it doesn’t end there on Tuesday’s show: John Stossel, longtime ABC News reporter now Fox News libertarian, doesn’t stick with the original segment topic he was invited on The Factor to talk about. Instead, he tells O’Reilly to his face that he was “obnoxious” and “out of line.” 

The next day, there is no memorandum from Roger Ailes or Bill Shine (Senior VP of Programming) stating that no one else at the network should talk about the incidents. Instead, the other opinion shows—knowing that they’ve got a hot story—use that freedom to run with it, give it legs. 

The hosts of The Five predictably support O’Reilly in his argument that the President doesn’t have the ability or courage to cut spending. Juan Williams, filling in for the show’s lone liberal, Bob Beckel, gamely defends Colmes. 

Three hours later, Kirsten Powers—the “female Colmes” who progressives loathe for actually having the audacity to occasionally go against the usual talking points of her party—confronts O’Reilly directly on his show, says he’s “100 percent wrong” in his argument against the President. She goes on to detail $400 billion in cuts toward federal healthcare spending Mr. Obama proposed, even tweeting out the PDF she used after the segment to drive home her point. 

Remember, O’Reilly is the LeBron James at Fox News: He’s the network’s highest-paid, most influential, most revered player on the team. He’s authored multiple best-sellers, he’s host of a program that destroys everything in the ratings and has since 2001, and is such an influential personality that he receives regular guest invites on CBS, NBC, ABC, The View, Letterman and Leno. 

Yet here’s Kirsten Powers, a liberal contributor, a fellow employee at Fox News who gets infinite crap on a daily basis from fellow liberals for sleeping with the enemy, telling him he’s full of it on his own program. 

You want to know why Fox is #1? 

Let me answer a question with a question: Could you ever picture this scenario happening at MSNBC or CNN? 

Let’s use MSNBC as an example since it’s more opinion-based (hell, it’s ALL opinion-based now): 

Rachel Maddow invites Michael Steele (former head of the RNC and current MSNBC contributor) on her program. They get into an argument over whatever, things get heated. Maddow calls Steele a liar, saying his perspective is complete BS. 

Could you ever, EVER, see O’Donnell calling out Maddow for her treatment of Steele? How about The Cycle? Would S.E. Cupp rush to Steele’s defense while Touré mocked him while defending Maddow? 

Would, say, Steve Schmidt (MSNBC contributor, former McCain campaign manager) come on Maddow’s show the next night and say to her face that she was totally out of line?

The answer, from what we’ve seen, is no. Sure, there is disagreement between guests, small-time players on the network…but not to this degree, not to this level of candor.

Hardball has its share of yelling (mainly from the host) but does that disagreement carry into other shows?

Not on your life. 

Note: This isn’t a moral argument based on good behavior or a better code of ethics. Rather, it is simply one that focuses on which network is more compelling in terms of its personalities and the manner by which they interact with each other. 

And that’s why there’s Fox, and there’s everyone else. It is much like the dynamic of the Howard Stern Show: A mix of characters all willing to take on Howard and each other, and in the most honest of ways.

There simply is no filter on Howard’s show, and the audience revels in being able to witness a family fight on an almost-daily basis. Most importantly, none of the fights are planned or scripted. 

It just happens, just like it does in homes every day across the country. People can relate and therefore can appreciate what they’re hearing. 

Lawrence O’Donnell sat in judgment of the O’Reilly-Colmes brawl just hours after it happened, mocking the former for losing his cool. 

What O’Donnell doesn’t get, what his network will never understand, is that this is the kind of stuff that makes O’Reilly and Fox untouchable: They’re willing to attack each other based on their opinions and principles, all while his brethren at MSNBC wouldn’t dare call out its own in a similar situation. 

Debate and strong opinions are what cable news is all about, even when those opinions are directed at those you may run into at the company cafeteria. 

Fox News gets that. 

Everyone else…well…just look at the numbers.

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Liberal Prick Alan Holmes Takes Cheap Shot at Rick Santorum‘s Handling of the 1996 Death of his Newborn Son

It's who they are, they just can't help themselves. Great job by Nick Lowry for calling Holmes out for basically being an a-hole:

In a wild exchange on Fox News’ Happening Now, longtime contributor Alan Colmes lost it a little bit when National Review‘s Rich Lowry pressed him over an attack on Rick Santorum‘s handling of the 1996 death of his newborn son. Colmes used Santorum’s reaction to the death of 2 hour-old Gabriel as an example of “some of the crazy things he’s said and done,” prompting immediate, sustained pushback from Lowry, and death-stares from Colmes.


The segment was pegged to Santorum’s polling surge in Iowa, which Colmes argued wouldn’t last “once they get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby who died after childbirth and played with it for a couple hours so his other children would know that the child was real…”


“That’s a cheap shot, Alan,” Lowry interrupted, the first of many interruptions that would leave Colmes sitting back in his chair, staring daggers at Lowry, and asking to be alerted when it was his turn to speak again.


The incident they’re referring to is the 1996 birth of a premature baby boy to Rick and Karen Santorum. The child only lived for two hours, and the Santorums dealt with the tragedy in an unusual way:


The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak — the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum’s book, ”Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,” she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.


What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish — others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ”Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ”Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.’ ”


It’s a story that I have heard mocked by many liberals (and mistold, by others, as having followed a miscarriage), and I agree with Lowry that the intensely personal arena of human grief ought not be cheapened into political fodder. Within reasonable limits, I don’t think anyone should be judged for things they say or do in the face of extreme grief.


The fact that Karen Santorum publicized the event means that, to some extent, it is an appropriate subject for public discussion, but then it should be handled in a delicate, respectful manner. While I think Lowry was taking a cheap shot of his own when he accused Colmes of “mocking” the Santorums (and with his deployment of the coded phrase “Manhattan liberals”), neither was Colmes’ characterization that they “played with” the dead child fair or particularly sensitive. He probably shouldn’t have brought it up at all, but his critique, while cold and lacking in relevance, fell well short of mockery.


UPDATE: Colmes has tweeted that he called Santorum and his wife and apologized for the comment, an apology which was accepted.

RELATED: Rick Santorum Accepts Alan Colmes’ Apology: ‘I Know Alan Is A Very Good Person At Heart’

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