Howard Kurtz' Media Notes: "Bill O'Reilly and NBC, Fighting To Make Themselves Seen?"

With the holidays over and Fox News' annual "War on Christmas" that is but a thinly disguised battle for ratings and relevancy on the shelf again until after Halloween, WaPo's Howard Kurtz (aka Howie the Putz) tackles the war he says is being waged between Fox's pathetic blustering Bill O'Reilly and NBC as news network. Granted, the irony of Kurtz questioning the relevancy of anyone else cannot be lost here considering that Howard's relevancy has been historic-only for a very long time, but let's be charitable for a moment and pretend that Kurtz has something useful to say here.

However Kurtz seems to make a few assumptions here that I will call a stretch to be polite. The first is that anyone cares about O'Reilly. The second assumption is that NBC is fighting in the same way at Bill O, and the third seems to be that ornery O'Reilly is only dishing it out as fiery as it's served to him. Fact, however, tells us that O'Reilly has been waging war with just about everyone for a very long time; it seems to be Bill O's modus operandi for getting any ratings, dating back even before September 11th but a constant since. He flamed George Clooney for having the "nerve" to raise money for 9-11 victims, he told everyone to stop buying any French product 'cos they didn't love Bush's Iraq war plan (didn't work well - turns out that Freeport and Westbury, Long Island don't make good champagne or brie or he's flamed Vermont for having a judge that followed the law and "boycotted" our maple syrup (which was great for the Vermont economy, btw: we had bigger profts as a result).

Lately, however, O'Really's ::cough:: most consistent target is NBC because they made the decision to stop pretending Iraq is not in a civil war and because they had the "gall" to hire Keith Olbermann. Translation: Bill O's ratings are down in the same time period on Fox for which Olbermann's ratings are up on MSNBC.

From Kurtz' Sunday column:

A war of words between Bill O'Reilly and NBC has erupted into a shouting match that is overheated, mean-spirited and incredibly entertaining.

"NBC News has gone sharply to the left," the Fox News star said on his radio show in early January. "They are an activist network now. They hate Bush across the board."

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, far left, has had nasty words for NBC News, and his rival Keith Olbermann, left, may be the reason, according to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, above. Geraldo Rivera, right, has defended O'Reilly.

Such comments prompted MSNBC's Joe Scarborough to break with his fellow conservative. "Why does Bill O'Reilly hate NBC so much?" Scarborough declared on his show.

Beyond the name-calling -- which nearly matches the mud-fight quality of the Donald Trump-and-Rosie O'Donnell smackdown -- is a serious debate about the Iraq war and the nature of media bias. But the cantankerous talking heads are also showmen who know that a bench-clearing brawl can be good for ratings.

O'Reilly, who has hosted the top-rated cable news show for five years, has long berated the mainstream media for lurching to the left, while casting Rupert Murdoch's network as one of the few balanced outlets around. O'Reilly is frequently on the offensive against liberal judges, professors and others -- he recently told an antiwar activist who appeared as a guest that she was a "lunatic" -- but his assault on NBC seems particularly personal.

"I'll admit it. I don't like you guys," O'Reilly told NBC's Andrea Mitchell during an interview 10 days agoin which he grilled her about alleged bias among her colleagues...

"I certainly took offense when he said there were no conservatives at the network, we were all liberal stooges and Marxist sympathizers," Scarborough says. The "final straw," he says, was when O'Reilly criticized Richard Engel, NBC's Middle East bureau chief, for "suggesting the obvious" -- that the rushed hanging of Saddam Hussein had been "a PR disaster." (President Bush told NBC's Brian Williams last week that the execution video ranked just below Abu Ghraib in terms of the war's mistakes.)

O'Reilly declined to be interviewed for this column, but Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti says he "has exposed media bias for the last 10 years. This is nothing new. We don't know why NBC finds the label 'liberal' so insulting."

Scarborough says O'Reilly is being driven by animosity toward Keith Olbermann, whose MSNBC show "Countdown" has been gaining in the ratings. "He's allowed his anger toward Keith Olbermann to damage his credibility," Scarborough says.

Olbermann, who faces off with O'Reilly at 8 p.m., has been denouncing his rival for years. He positions his program as an increasingly liberal alternative to the "O'Reilly Factor" and frequently bestows on "Bill-O" his "Worst Person in the World" award. "Countdown" was up 60 percent in the fourth quarter over a year earlier, to 656,000 viewers. But "Factor," despite a 21 percent decline during the same period, still dwarfs the competition with 2.049 million viewers.

Several times over the last year, according to three sources who asked not to be identified because they were describing private conversations, O'Reilly's agent called Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC's television group, urging him to tell his MSNBC commentators to back off. O'Reilly also posted an online petition demanding that NBC dump Olbermann.

First, Scarborough is an ass who models his show largely to reflect his O'Reilly wannabe status. He also shows his ignorance when, elsewhere in the story, he whines that O'Reilly says NBC/MSNBC claims there are only left-wing extremists on the networks. If anything, MSNBC falls pretty far to the right - just not as far as Fox and O'Reilly.

Chris Matthews' "Hardball" for example often features entire panels of regular contributors who are ONLY right mouthpieces (Tony Blankley, Rita Cosby, Dick Armey, Scarborough, Monica Crowley, to name a few) with Republican-tied Matthews' new favorite Ron Christie, an African American who has never heard a Bush plan he didn't absolutely adore and who seems to be the new Armstrong Williams. Christie, as an African American blogger friend of mine has frequently written to me, "can be counted on to be the token black in any room to insist that no president or party has ever been more supportive of people of color than George Bush and the Republican Party, and even that Bush's federal response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is proof positive of how much Bush loves us since Bush didn't want the poor sections of Nola to be rebuilt and recapture these poor people all over again. Christie is Condoleeza Rice without the pearls and high heels."

Olbermann may mock O'Reilly, yet never with the venom and vitriole O'Reilly does him and NBC. And Olbermann has NEVER launched a campaign to get O'Reilly fired (I imagine he suspects Bill O' can self-destruct just fine and dandy on his own, nor invited Fox News commentators on with the sole purpose of tossing hand grenades at the guests as O'Reilly did with Andrea Mitchell (who herself was the spouse of uber Republican and long-time Fed finance chair Alan Greenspan).

No, what O'Reilly can't stand is that a number of people like and respect Olbermann in a way O'Reilly cannot hope to achieve AND he can't stand that NBC would ever deign (and then, only occasionally) to report the news rather than what Tony Snow and Dick Cheney tell them is the news.

Boo frickin hoo.