Bill O’Reilly has been railing against Democrats and corporate sponsors who are associating themselves with the YearlyKos convention, on the grounds that there is a lot of filth and hate spewing from the DailyKos website. While the former is his right and the latter is likely true, virtually all the examples cited come from commenters and the hundreds of site “diarists” rather than front page posters.
John Aravosis has done a bit of digging and found that “O’Reilly’s own Web site contains some of the most hideous hate you’ve ever seen.” Among those he found were some oblique death threats against Hillary Clinton, which some yahoo has now reported to the Secret Service.
Now, I seldom take anonymous comments left on message boards particularly seriously and see no reason to do so in this case. Nor do I think holding O’Reilly responsible for his failure to moderate the hundreds of messages his site gets makes any more sense than expecting Markos Moulitsas Zuniga to do that for the tens of thousands of words written at DailyKos every day.
If I’m reading Aravosis correctly, he agrees. Rather, the point is that O’Reilly is fanning the flames against DailyKos for something of which he himself is “guilty.” As Aravosis notes, the site even has a rather explicit disclaimer: “BillOReilly.com will not be held liable for any user activity on the message boards. We do not actively monitor user-submitted content.”
Of course, hypocrisy by O’Reilly and others who rely on hyping the sins of their political targets is so common as to be a given. It’s worth noting from time to time, however.
