"Lynched"
Do words matter?
Rated:
Tagged with
Earlier this week, when Michelle Obama commented that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, Bill O’Reilly stated that he was not yet ready to “go on a lynching party” against her.
For the sake of context, here is the transcript from his Radio Factor show (2.19.08):
O’REILLY: Maryanne, Woodbury, Connecticut: What say you, Maryanne? Maryanne…
CALLER: I’m here.
O’REILLY: ...you’re on the air.
CALLER: Here I am.
O’REILLY: OK.
CALLER: I just wanted to say that I think Michelle Obama is an angry woman…is speaking, I think, with her real voice for the first time. And…
O’REILLY: But how do you…what do you base that on? You’re basing that on what?
CALLER: Well, your representative asked me not to talk about this, but I have a friend who had knowledge of her and said to me months ago, “This is a very angry,” her word was “militant woman.”
O’REILLY: All right. What I want you do then, Maryanne, if…I want you to stay on the line.
CALLER: OK.
O’REILLY: Because it’s not fair to Michelle Obama for you…
CALLER: Oh no, all I’m saying is…
O’REILLY: ...because we don’t know who you are, and we don’t know who your friend is, but we want to know. We want to know, OK. But it’s not fair at this point for you to say, “My friend said X and Y,” because we just don’t know. But if you would give us your information, we would like to talk to your friend. And then whatever your friend tells us, we’ll track it down. We’ll do it in a fair and balanced and methodical way. That’s how we’re going to cover this campaign…all of them, all of them. So stay on the line, give us your information. If indeed Michelle Obama is angry about something, if she has a history, we would like to know that, and then we can put it into some kind of context so that we can be fair to everybody.
You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they’re thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don’t agree on a lot of things, and I think I’ve made that clear over the years, but he’s trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there’s another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they’re rooting for Obama.
That’s wrong. And I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels…that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever…then that’s legit. We’ll track it down.
1-877-9-NO-SPIN. Right back.
O’Reilly insists (as he always does when he’s caught saying some racist, misogynistic, bigoted thing) that he was “taken out of context.”
What do you think? Do words matter? And is it okay to use potentially offensive language if you assert that you meant no harm to the person who ended up offended?
Sorry only site members can participate in this discussion
I think it matters when you are a public figure like Billy O’Reilly and when you have made racially antagonizing language in the past as he has. I do not believe that he meant it in a racist manner but who knows he is a very misguided and angry person.