Is the subject of an article in Slate. Count me squarely in Olbermann's corner on this one. There are few people on the planet I find as loathsome and ridiculous as Bill O'Reilly and I love watching Olbermann consistently taunt him into making an even bigger ass of himself. I think the Slate article nails the two competing personalities pretty well. I'll post it below the fold:
So, if the dispute isn't political, why do they persist? Lemann's piece portrays O'Reilly as driven by class resentment, a sense of inferiority acquired as a byproduct of attending a minor college, and his failure to connect with the big time while at CBS News. "No matter how big a star he becomes, he's eternally the guy who was banished from the charmed circle," Lemann writes. But rather than healing his injured vanity, O'Reilly's high-profile success at Fox seems to have increased his vulnerability: The upside is that he's the hero to his 2 million nightly viewers; the downside is that he's the Maximum Enemy of tens of millions--many of them the "swells" who wouldn't give him the time of day in his youth and early career. Olbermann, who graduated from Cornell, is just the ticket for O'Reilly's tortured ego.I'm sure that O'Reilly will reject my layman's analysis, but drop Olbermann on the same couch and I venture that he'd accept my diagnosis that he's only happy professionally when he's goading somebody out of their gourd. In the past, Olbermann's Satans were his bosses--at ESPN primarily, and at MSNBC, where he did a previous tour of duty. In O'Reilly, Olbermann finds the perfect target of his sarcasm and sadism: somebody bigger and more powerful; somebody who takes his bait and runs every time he casts a line; but also somebody who can't fire him or make him miserable enough to quit. That O'Reilly and Olbermann compete in the same time slot is pure gravy for Olbermann. That his ratings are up in recent months is a maraschino cheery on top of the gravy.
I'd say that's pretty close. O'Reilly is just so obviously full of shit; it's the only explanation for his popularity, really. For anyone who is the least bit observant, his insecurity absolutely bleeds out of every pore. And if you wanna watch something funny, look at this video of Olbermann doing an impression of O'Reilly.
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I watched a brief bit of O'Reilly this weekend (I swear I'm going to parent-lock Fox News the next time my mother-in-law visits -- TV's a waste of time, Fox News is worse than a waste.) He had on Ann Coulter and they were talking about immigration -- old Bill looked like the height of reason next to the utterly insane Coulter.
I watch Olbermann quite often. He mixes a lot of humor with his news reporting, which is great. I think that the only reason he ridicules O'Reilly so much is because there's a big audience for it. Lots of people hate O'Reilly, and Olbermann is providing a loud voice for them. I would say that his ratings spike is a direct result of his O'Reilly bashing, which only encourages him.
I have only listened to Olberman on Al Frankken's radio show. I find it terribly amusing that O'reily seems to be losing his mind as criticism of him grows. It's all the more amusing because his reactionary rhetoric has coincided with a sustained drop in ratings that I suspicion are simply because he is abviously losing it. If he would have laughed it off or ignored it I think he would have not sustained the loss in viewers. I, for one am glad he is suffering an apparently serious meltdown. . .