Did O'Reilly really believe that no one would check up his statistics from this phoney "Paris Business Review"?

It doesn't matter to him whether it exists or not. His target audience is either too ignorant or too apathetic to care about whether the facts supporting an argument are true, or they are willing to accept lies so long as these lies support their own position on an issue. They believe that overall they're right so details like the occasional lie are irrelevant.

Here is Heather Mallick's take on the donnybrook (from a piece in The Globe and Mail).

Actually that is a really interesting question as to if he believes it is a lie as well. Here in Australia we were lucky enough to have "OutFoxed" a documentary on the behaviour of the Fox news network screened last night. And one section was on O'Rielly and how someone actually refered to how they wanted to sue him for defamation, and his lawyers advised against it on the grounds that he is such a pathological liar, that it would be near impossible to prove that he actually knew he was lying. I just wonder if all the networks will try get themselves one as well..

Did you see someone actually put up a page for the Paris Business Review? There isn't much on it but they do make fun of the whole thing:

The Paris Business Review has determined that losses from a widely publicized boycott of French products could reach into the billions of dollars, and possibly as high as a gazillion dollars.

I couldn't help but laugh about this. Could anyone imagine if Ann Coulter married Bill O'Reilly? ;-)

O'Reilly can't live without making up stuff. He simply couldn't function without doing it, so asking whether he knows he'll get nailed on it is beside the point. Even the good information he has comes from research interns so it's not as if he's very close to the fact finding side of his show. It goes without saying that if a nightly news anchor simply made up stuff like this, the right would be talking about it for the next ten years. Which shows that even the right doesn't take O'Reilly seriously except as a kind of spectacle or as another persecuted conservative.

What kind of person would marry Coulter? I'd really like to see. A rich, famous conservative certainly wouldn't. O'Reilly is already married I think.

There's a (poor quality) version of the CBC "Sticks and Stones" show at DC Indymedia.

I loved the PBR page. If I didn't live in Brazil I would have bought one of those mugs.

It's impressive that O'Reilly believes that threats are a way to convince people to join you in an idea.
First I threaten you, then I lie to you to make my threat seem worse, then I call my producer at home at night and talk dirty to her, then I deny all of this.
And Wednesday on the Factor........

BOR reminds me of...me....when I was in high school.

Our debate team was the only one that had ever beat the teachers in a debate!! How??

We lied, we made shit up...it's unfortunately all to effective of a strategy, especially in this day and age of sound bites and 4 second snippets.

The truly sad thing is that if all those dittoheads would get off thier lazy asses just long enough to look something up on snopes, or do some real digging of thier own, thier whole world view would come tumbling down.

We talk a lot about questioning our news sources, "taking everything with a grain of salt", etc. But at least in one sense this idea is absurd. News organizations and media figures must have some kind of recognized authority, such that I shouldn't have to check every claim they make. If I read Bob Woodward's interviews with Bush and think to myself "maybe he's just making this up," then reading the book in the first place becomes absurd. We do not have enough hours in the day to go on fact checking hunts for all our sources of information.

Of course, our news sources make mistakes, draw wrong conclusions, etc. This is why they correct themselves and why we have a variety of sources we should consult. But that still doesn't remove us from the situation in which we must on some level trust the claims of authorities.

Many on the right, it seems, would love for all our recognized authorities to go out of existence. That way there would be no common sources of knowledge which the country as a whole could consult, whether they be academic researchers, major newspapers, or government assessments. Everything would be a private, ideological choice--for right wingers you have FOX, Drudge, and WSJ editorial page. You wouldn't choose your news sources based on reputation, their tendency to lie, etc., but on how well they fit with you ideologically.

Heather Mallick is a role model to us all. She is funny, clever, insightful and most importantly open minded. She is the kind of person you want to have a debate show, not O'Rielly over there on Fox. Americans should check out a program that she has appeared on in Canada. Studio Two-TV Ontario...If you can get it. It is truely what debates should be....An exchange of facts and ideas and has made me change my mind about issues many times. Its a shame that American TV execs still believe that you can't lose when you cater to the lowest denominator.

The Mallick post-mortem is priceless, I'm wiping tears from my cheeks.

Dende blogger, I've been thinking a lot about Republican attack politics lately. All the flap about Howard Dean, a sense that he makes some Dems flinch because he'll incite and invite those attacks more than some blander candidates, has made me think again that their viciousness is a function of them. This blog entry says it better than I can: ...the Right doesn't cast slurs on people because they are communist, anti-American, or cross some line of non-radical, patriotic acceptability. It casts slurs indiscriminately as a routine task of political warfare. We don't get this, and tie ourselves up in knots trying to predict and avoid picking leaders and using language that will flip the attack switch.

Jeany: You are right, the slurs are a routine tactic. But we often draw the wrong conclusions, I think, from this sad fact. We say to ourselves: "That just proves that dirty politics works and so we have to do it as well." The problem is that there are reasons why the slurs work, and that's because they key into some real feeling Americans have about politics, not because they'll believe any kind of slur. We've thrown a whole lot of (justified) mud at Bush over the last few years as well, and a lot of it has stuck--about 40% of Americans can't stand the guy and will never believe him again. Our next step should have been to present a coherent message that people could embrace. We didn't do it and Kerry never really did it. I admit it was hard to do in the black and white world of war Bush had set up, but we had to do it.

Here's where your suggestion is right on. We should worry about figuring out our own values and choosing energetic, attractive leaders who reflect them. Howard Dean is great. The right tell themselves, and everyone who will listen, that Dean is too left. Nonsense. He's a great populist figure who refuses to distance himself from the legacy of modern liberalism. I know plenty of people with good opinions about Dean (not all Dems), and among them is a former Perot and McCain fan who really wanted Dean. At worst people think he's strange. But he's not too left and he's not an embarassment. Dean as DNC chair will be the best thing to happen to Dems in a long time.

My worry is that Dean has given some indications that he is going to try to discipline elected officials who get weak-kneed. I have no problem with forcing elected Dems to get a little backbone, but that's the responsibility of the grassroots, not of the DNC chair, who should rather be selling and uniting the party, not trying to influence its political content.

here is the site of that paris business review. in case no one has posted it yet.

http://www.parisbusinessreview.com/

American politics have become as ignorant and disgusting as Americans themselves. Americans deserve a president like GWB.

The truth is, is that O'Rielly is akin to a circus freak.....He's is the Jerry Springer of Political debate. He is sucessfull for the shock value of his program. Americans love this kind of trashy drama and the idea that this is real gets them. Jerry Springer and his "guests" were exposed as frauds....O'Rielly will be too. It's just too bad that his liberal guests aren't in on the script.

His liberal guests should be knee-capped. Their egotistical desire for TV time gives his show the flimsy veneer of 'balance' it needs to have credibility with even his loutish audience.

How Mara Liason can sleep at night is beyond me.

i need help to disprove my conservative relatives. does any one know where to find any actual credible figures, or an article showing that french trade went up since the calls for a boycott??

i need help to disprove my conservative relatives. does any one know where to find any actual credible figures, or an article showing that french trade went up since the calls for a boycott??

2002 France products imported to USA 28,240.1 2003 France products imported to USA 29,219.3

2002 USA products imported to France 19,015.9 2003 USA products imported to France 17,053.0

(figures are in millions of US dollars)

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4279.html

BTW;

"Aeronautics accounts for the largest portion of our bilateral trade. Contrary to a common misperception, agrifoods (essentially beverages) made up only 8 percent of French sales to the United States in 2002. Wine represents 3 percent of total sales."

http://www.info-france-usa.org/franceus/trade.asp

I don't watch O'Reilly or FNC, so I don't know when they started calling for a "France boycott", so I only provided the statistics for 2002 to 2003. I also made sure to leave all restaurants which serve freedom fries during the same time period. (BTW hopefully everyone realizes that the French Fry was actually "invented" in Belgium..) So.. While we (the US) bought more French products and services from 2002 to 2003, France actually bought less US products and services during the same time period.. However the statistics for 11 months of 2004 indicate that the US will likely buy about the same, or slightly more, from France in 2004, as we did in 2003, and the French will buy more from the US in 2004 than in 2003. (It could even surpass the record set in 2000, almost certainly due in large part, to the weakening dollar, and not in response to anything O'Reilly has ever said.. if they even know about him, they probably just laugh at him too..) And if anyones cares, the US has run a continuous trade deficit, (we buy more from them than they buy from us), with France since 1992. Figures are available from the Census website page referenced above.

I would say like everything O'Reilly seems to be saying, the idea of a US boycott of French goods is an absolutely provable lie. Although the mugs you can get from the Paris Business Review are cool..

The census website is really interesting. Anyone have Bill O'Lie-lley's email? I'd like to let him know that the U.S. trade deficit with Canada is over $622 million...