Saturday, December 8, 2007

The Radio Factor


Bill O'Reilly has a radio show? Really? Oh well here it goes.

It starts out with a couple of talking points. It is followed by recent news. This is what grossly offended me. O'Reilly blatantly went on the offense against Hellen Thomas for asking questions about whether or not our military was killing innocent civilians. He then defends Don Imus and discusses whether or not he deserves a second chance. I surprisingly agreed with him and believe he had some well put points about Don Imus's past as a shock jock and how he truly did not go out to hurt the Rutger's Woman's basketball team. He lost me however when he talked about how the NY Times and the Washington Post are destroying the country. I found this very ironic seeing as the radio (which this was on) and the newspaper are both versions of old media trying very hard to remain in the game, and this seemed like a shot at newspapers in general.

The show then goes into it's main topic of the night....forgiveness. I was truly surprised before hand that the show would be on this. One of the main principals of Christianity is forgiveness, but this seems to have escaped many neo-cons so it was a nice gust of wind to know that it is still there somewhere. They then had an expert on religion come onto the show and discuss forgiveness from the standards of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This was my favorite part of the show and I actually enjoyed it until Bill started taking calls from his viewers. I was overly agitated as he said he believed he was put here by god to protect people and then when somebody showed him up on religion he backed off by saying it wasn't his side to argue on a post-life. Bill then gave signed copies of his books to all of his callers and a few of his emails ( trying to be a bit like Oprah, Bill?).

The show ends with Bill talking to a person who was a scholar on the Jewish faith. The caller argued against the religion expert and this was easily one of my favorite parts of the show. Bill plugged his book and his upcoming tv episode with Al Franken then signed off.

Now, as I have stated previously in past posts, I am not a fan of Fox News. I guess in turn that makes me not a fan of Bill O'Reilly (or as Al Franken calls him Bill O'Lielly). That being said however, I was more than impressed with his taking on of a hard hitting topic such as religion and forgiveness coexisting in the world. While I did not agree with many of his arguments, I actually enjoyed listening to the show which can now be found on a podcast through Itunes. I doubt that I would actually listen again, but I left with a bit more respect for Bill O'Reilly.

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