Joan Walsh Goes up Against O’Reilly on Abortion
Jun/090
Recently on his show, Fox News self-proclaimed “commentator” Bill O’Reilly engages in a heated “debate” with Joan Walsh of Salon.com over abortion, specifically late-lerm abortions and Dr. George Tiller. Again and again, he asks Walsh her feelings on late-term abortions in the context of his lead story for the night, “the far left on the attack”. Rather than summing it up, here’s the YouTube clip.
Bill O’Reilly still maintains that everything he mentioned about George Tiller was true and not inappropriate: calling him “Tiller the Baby Killer”, saying his has blood on his hands, that his legal clinic was an “abortion mill”. “My constitutional rights say I can say what I say,” O’reilly said. “You can say what you say, as vile as you say it, you can say it, and I would never condemn you for saying it. You are misguided, you have blood on your hands because you portrayed this man as a hero.” (Read Joan Walsh’s response here.)
I appreciate that O’Reilly has his views, just as Keith Olbermann on MSNBC has his views. But I’ve not heard Olbermann accuse a doctor legally practicing medicine of murder, launching incessant vile attacks over and over, no doubt inciting the intense hatred in the far-right groups that lead them to bomb abortion clinics, threaten practitioners and as we realized mere weeks ago, kill a man inside his church simply because they disagree with the service he provides. Free speech ends when you incite violence or threaten public safety. It’s why you can’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theatre. I’d like to post here Olbermann’s comment on Fox News and Bill O’Reilly, and the inciting of this domestic terrorism. He suggests that an advertising boycott of Fox News would do nothing, but instead we should politely ask any establishment with Fox News Channel on their television to turn it off, and tell anyone you know who watches Fox News to stop doing so. I for one will do my part, not because I’m for the right to choose and that I believe I shouldn’t be allowed to decide the reproductive rights of any woman, but because I don’t think anyone should have to die for what they believe in. I don’t believe that a television personality, however popular or whatever their ideological vies, should be allowed to incite hatred and violence and ignore all culpability in the matter. I believe that humanity needs to be better than that.
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