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If you don't like his show, don't watch. I believe there was another study done that dispelled the numbers in the one you name. Funny how people just pick and choose what meets their own agenda.
A. It wasn't me who named it.
B. I'm sure your memories of this 'other study' are too fogged now to remember it, but if by some faint chance, a glimmer of its source were suddenly to be recalled, do feel free to post it.
C. The word 'agenda' is not a mythic shield capable of deflecting arguments that you otherwise can't mount any actual evidence against. It goes in the same category as 'Bush Derangement Syndrome'...
Here is a follow up piece by the authors of the study. Apparently O'Reilly Team attempted (surprisingly) to discredit the study.
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As authors of a study on Bill O'Reilly's rhetoric, we would like to thank the Los Angeles Times, other journalists, media watch Web sites, and bloggers who have brought our research to a wider audience. We are pleased that our work has sparked vigorous debate.
At the risk of sounding like dry academics, here is unspun information in response to the May 10 Blowback piece by Ron Mitchell (senior producer, The O'Reilly Factor).
Mitchell accuses us of methodological bias. Ironically, the procedures we used for the study are scientific practices to guard against the bias that Mr. Mitchell is so concerned about. Perhaps it will ease his concern to know that prior to publication, the study went through two rounds of anonymous peer review, passing rigorous inspection from the social science community.
The mischaracterization of how we counted name-calling could be cleared up by reading the study [pdf]. We did not count "liberal, conservative, centrist" as name-calling unless they were linked to a derogatory qualifier. O'Reilly's reference to "kool-aid left" is an example of what we counted as name-calling. Or is the reference to folks of a particular political persuasion as a cult on a suicide mission fair and balanced reporting?
Mr. Mitchell objects to our comparison of O'Reilly and Father Charles Coughlin. A careful read of our paper will reveal that this comparison is specific to rhetorical use of techniques like name-calling, not—as Mitchell implies—anti-Semitism.
O'Reilly himself insinuated our study was connected to a $5 million grant from George Soros and that we are allied with the Media Matters operation. We received no funding for this study and Media Matters probably came across the research the same way dozens of journalists and bloggers did: from the press release issued by our university.
With these issues cleared up, we hope the debate continues.
Here is a follow up piece by the authors of the study. Apparently O'Reilly Team attempted (surprisingly) to discredit the study.
Yes, they did, via a letter to the editor of the LA Times, and the gist of it came down to this...
Brooks also failed to tell Times readers that the researchers admit they had to make several changes to their "coding instrument" because the first attempts generated "unacceptably low scores." That's code for: they tried and tried until the results fit the preconceived notion of name-calling on the Factor.
-- Ron Mitchell (Fox News, May 2007)
What Mitchell is complaining about is the standard use of the statistical measure called Krippendorff's Alpha (K-A) which tests the consistency of a panel of judges in rating the same or similar material. If for instance an ice skater were to receive all 5.8's and 5.9's, but the Bulgarian judge awarded a 1.0, K-A would flag that. On pre-tests conducted with surplus O'Reilly episodes, one judge who was flagged had not bothered to read the instruction booklet, and another had grossly misundertsood it. The instructions were rewritten for clarity, judges were retrained (twice actually) until as a group, their ratings of surplus episodes produced consistently valid K-A scores, indicating that no one judge was scoring in a manner divergent from that of the other judges. Only then did the judging included in the study itself actually begin.
A single name is still not contextual. This is about Mr. O'Reilly, so it would be helpful to either compare and contrast, or provide some explanation for the inclusion of Mr. Olbermann's name.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lilypad
Keith Olbermann
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