O'Reilly claims 'tent city' story is 'bogus' -- with his own bogus 'facts'
Bill O'Reilly's been on a jag the past couple of months claiming that the mainstream media are dying on the vine because of their "far left" bias, which he think is killing them economically. Last night on his Talking Points Memo segment, he continued this thesis by pointing to a couple of cases.
The first is the swine flu story, which he says so confused him and his staff they just didn't report on it. So up front, we get an admission these may not be the sharpest journalistic tools in the shed.
Then he continues:
O'Reilly: Second example: In early March, reports out of Sacramento, California, said a very important story was a homeless camp featuring hundreds of people damaged by the recession, was a very important situation.
[video clip]
O'Reilly: Wow! Can you believe it?
Guess what? Story's bogus!
The Economist magazine, a British publication, writes, quote: "the tent city had actually been around for close to a decade. There may have been a foreclosed homeowner or two among its denizens, but ... almost all of the people there have problems with mental health, drug abuse or both."
Again, it took a British magazine to tell the truth about a false story generated by the U.S. media.
But if you actually read read the Economist piece, you can see clearly that its intent is not to "debunk" the "tent city" story but to argue that it's not important.
It attempts this with a shoddy and shallow piece of reporting; if the writer was only able to find "one or two" foreclosed homeowners among the tent city residents, he wasn't trying very hard. Indeed, he likely wasn't looking at all; MSNBC's Chris Jansing (in the piece O'Reilly clips) was able to interview three of them for her piece. Indeed, a more honest journalistic effort -- such as that from the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago -- makes clear that it's a complex story, but there's no question that the recession is a major driver in the very real expansion of California's homeless population.
As for the camp having existed in some form or another in that locale for some time, that in fact had already been widely reported -- including by, among others, O'Reilly's arch-nemesis, the New York Times -- over a month ago:
Mr. Johnson, a former NBA basketball player elected to office last year, had taken to giving tours of the camp, which sits on a rugged chunk of land beneath a crisscross of electric wires. On one recent walkthrough, he said a smaller version of the tent city had been “swept under the rug” for years, but had grown in recent months as a building bust pushed normally blue-collar people to the brink.
It had also been widely reported a couple of weeks ago by the Associated Press -- as the city was closing the encampment down (a fact which didn't make it into O'Reilly's reportage):
Media reports often portrayed it as holding hundreds of people and many victims of the recession, but city homeless advocates said people have congregated there for years because of its proximity to a food bank.
Moreover, the larger thrust of the story -- that these kinds of encampments are growing nationally -- remains unchanged and unchallenged, because it's factually incontestable.
The best part of O'Reilly's rant, though, was at its end:
So you can see the propaganda on the wall, ladies and gentlemen. These days we can't believe what we hear, or what we read.
So true, so true. Especially not when it's reported under the auspices of Fox News.
Next he'll be quoting Al Jazera saying that the Iraq War didn't happen...cause he has a history of agreeing with the foreign papers...
Each side has their own Blow Hard. And to think Blow Hard Olbermann used to get a pay check from Fox!
LOL LOL LOL. Oh the Humanity.
Yeah, others have tried to make that same comparison...didn't work then either.
Well, for starters, how about the fact that Olbermann actually checks his facts, and when/if he finds any to be wrong he then acknowledges and APOLOGIZES for it. When's the last time Falafel Orally apologized for breathing and taking up space?
FB
99%
So Olbermann actually makes mistakes? LOL LOL LOL
Just like every human being on the planet. The issue isn't making mistakes. It's (1) is there an attempt to report things truthfully and (2) when there are errors in spite of 1, are you big enough to admit error and make a public correction. Bill does neither.
I await your reasoned response. Absent that, I won't be spending any more effort on your posts.
Do NOT hold your breath.
But I like turning blue...;-)
Olbermann makes mistakes and is man enough to admit it -- are you, troll?
Olbermann may be biased, but he does not make up the news.
the size of the tool in your shed.
“Why would anyone with a functioning brain believe this guy?”
Some guy with an eating disorder
he seems awfully irrelevant to me.
shut up
move to rwanda
they stuck their heads in the sand about the crazy wingnuts too
... but we will continue to try to fix America, thank you very much.
Perhaps you should move to Alaska or Texas and work for succesion.
the Rwandan genocide was, in a significant part, fueled by the media frenzy which polarized the population to a point where they carried out such extreme crimes against each other.
That is why we should not ignore these people. They are dangerous, ignorance is not an option.
I thought he died in some hilarious and embarrassing loofah incident.
O'Lielly's Radical Right-Wing crybaby show is so laughable and a joke full of lies for his uneducated, ignorant sheep.
Including the part where Bill-O alternates between being the part of the media and just a commentator.
If we're lying scum, you're included, Mr. Inside Edition.
Dick Cheney's relationship to "the Executive Branch".
.
I don't trust sex offenders...extremely manipulative people.
should use his own staff reports to explain his dead brain cells.
Billo should be the first person to undergo a complete brain transplant.
"Let's talk dirty to the animals"
better save the procedure for someone worthy of an actual brain. This reptilian is not one of them...
Perhaps Bill should go and visit with the people in the tents and ask them why they are there and how their lives came to this.
Say what you mean. Mean what you say. But don't say it mean.
he hasn't already sent Watters out there to ambush them?
because the odds are better that they are unarmed.
“Why would anyone with a functioning brain believe this guy?”
Some guy with an eating disorder
Good 1. ω
The non-sense about Olbermann being the opposite opinion of Orally is completely unfounded. Olbermann takes the lies of Orally and proves they are lies. Orally only makes up news, after all he is on the Faux news channel.
Isn't this the same guy who lied about winning an award for journalism???
The award was won by two reporters working for Inside Edition.
Bill-O's relationship to the program was nothing more than being the host, and having lead-ins spoon fed to him on prompter. ("Fuck! There's no words there!")
Billo didn't happen to mention that he was kneeling, begging and sucking his boss, but they still denied him any award because he was a pathetic liar and really bad reporter.
and the brain rejected him...
Funny, my last YouTube video:
Conservative Economic Success
Is all about all the Tent Cities that have sprung up across the country. I had no idea they were all just figments of my imagination.
Addendum: Though some of these Tent Cities may pre-date the foreclosure crisis, few (if any) predate Bush's term in office, Bill-O.
* There are two types of Republicans: millionaires and suckers.
"Mugsy's Rap Sheet": Recording history for those who seek to rewrite it.
is not one of his strong points. Otherwise he wouldn't put stuff out there since websites like C&L will do some actual research and as usual prove him to be a silly ass.
a longer view of homelessness would include the absent safety nets, just one more component of letting the private corporateers run amok (classic us conservative model)
... whether it's getting rid of cks and balances in credit practices, financing, bankruptcy laws harkening back to dickensenian models, etc.
or ridding the country of social safety nets which is now becoming ltd to tent cities, beggars in the streets and prision.
we bail out the big boys; privateers/predator capitalists need their own special tent cities (still waiting for the thugs who ruined the world economy and devastated the lives of everyone else--to go to prison, possibly a privately owned one, a rendering not likely to be seen. imho)
Those of us who live in Sacramento would have to disagree. There have always been homeless, but nothing like what we've seen recently. Our housing market has disintegrated. That wasn't true before Bush destroyed our economy. Check your facts!
and might actually resemble journalism. Bill O is the biggest pussy of all, he would never actually come to Sacramento and talk to anyone there when he could cherry pick facts from articles by foreigners (useful when they suit his purposes)and get his brain-dead audience all jacked up and pissed, not for the right reasons, about homeless people forced to living in tents.
BillO was right about just about everything he said in the first minute of that clip.
Too bad he didn't leave it at that.
It's good and funny if BillO's audience are wary of the corruption of the press. They just can't see the forest for the trees. But everyones attention needs to be there, regardless of ideological standpoint.
Of course we all know that BillO is himself part of the corruption of the press corps(e), but doublethinking is nothing new in those parts.
Sounds to me like the right is scared s&%tless that Obama is going to turn the economy around and are planting the seed that there was not much wrong in the first place. They will claim that the economy turned around despite the Obama adminstration.
They'll just claim the turnaround was due to the power of prayer.
Praise Jebus, not Obama.
Despite being a pile of garbage while masquerading as a journalist, Bill is correct. The Oprah-tale of tent cities due to foreclosures was misleading. It is true that are a record number of foreclosures, but the population of that tent city was most certainly not the result of such circumstances.
So, Bill is correct about the misleading Oprah story, but he denies the reality of our current economic situation. I would give Oprah and Bill a minus for this story.
that you could site a reference for the statement:
"It is true that are a record number of foreclosures, but the population of that tent city was most certainly not the result of such circumstances."
Without the research that should have been done before a story like this goes to air we CAN'T know! You and Mr. O'Reilly are both just pulling "facts" out of your buttox. And that kind of irresponsible reporting is what should be complained about...it's tearing our nation apart.
policies brought homelessness to this scale. wasn't an issue (on any large scale) before reagan presidency and conservative undo-ing of safety nets and economic policies that saw us jobs shipped out or in-country jobs scaled back to "temps" , etc, etc (trickle down, anyone??)
by the time our recent history is rewritten/recast by the propagandists, it'll all be down the memory hole
Did you even bother reading the LA Times piece that the post links?
Because the details in that story about the situation in Sacramento, which is indeed complex, demonstrate that you have no clue what you're talking about.
I actually read the one from the Economist, which Bill is quoting from. That one indicated that the constituents of that makeshift settlement preceeded the mortgage crisis by years.
The LA Times piece also indicates that the bulk of the population of river-dwellers were comprised of a similar demographic.
Will there be more homeless as a result of this financial mess? I would assume so. It is even worse than what has been admitted to by the Obama administration, if what Bill Black states is correct.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/wa...
I have a suspicion that the homeless population has seen a marked increase after congress passed the welfare reform act in 1996. What do you think?
I think the reason for so many homeless in "the Greatest Country in the World" goes back to Reagan and his Supply-side economics.
Still waiting for the rising tide to lift my boat.
with your very own eyes. I don't care if the people in a tent city are in such situation because of foreclosures and I don't think the people forced to live there care either. The fact is that in the XXI century, in this country... the supposedly richest society on earth, we are having people living in f*cking tent cities.
WTF?
Bill and the rest of the conservatards believe that minor nitpicking makes a huge difference, when it doesn't. It is just a new red herring by the FOX crowd. F*ck them...
Proving the tent city has been there for 10 years only means the poors have been taking on the chin for a long time now. These tent cities are everywhere now and many of them are families that are not alcoholic drug abusers.
The Economist, by the way champions "free trade" and "globilization". Not sure this qualities them as experts on US tent cities.
But I guess we believe what we choose.
Proving the tent city has been there for 10 years only means the poors have been taking on the chin for a long time now. These tent cities are everywhere now and many of them are families that are not alcoholic drug abusers.
The Economist, by the way champions "free trade" and "globilization". Not sure this qualities them as experts on US tent cities.
But I guess we believe what we choose.
scare viewers into not buying their advertisers' products by exaggerating the state of a poor economy. It's far more manipulative to pretend that things are going well when they're not, as O'Reilly is either inadvertantly, or purposely, doing.
his intrepid boy reporter to find out the truth???
oh i know why...cuz that is real news, and he will find out just how many families are living in that tent city right now
The story that mentally people have had to live in a tent city for 10 years isn't news enough? It's not worthy of reporting unless it fills with foreclosure victims? It says a lot about Billohard that he couldn't understand the symptoms of our sick society.
O'Reilly will say anything, something we can rely on. And I love how the right lays the blame for the financial troubles of newspapers on their "far left" bias when one obvious factor is the internet and its impact. Did I really say "factor" in a piece about the king of the loofahs? My apologies.
See? All you have to do to buy into the conservative right wing lunacy is to take actual facts like homeless soldiers, foreclosures and tent cities is to just IGNORE them and pretend they are not there!
The way the subject of homelessness is handled is appalling.. homelessness has been out of control for decades now and no one seems to care.. the current dodge is to dismiss homeless people as mentally ill and/or drug addicted so what you gonna do, like folks with those problems don't deserve shelter, like homeless folks with those problems became homeless because of those problems NOT the other way.. the fact is that most people with mental health and/or substance abuse problems are well housed because they have resources, it's just poor folks with those problems who become homeless and many people develop those problems as a result of the Trauma of not having shelter.. AND most homeless people are not addicted and/or mentally ill.. AND during the course of a year, around 22% of the people enduring homelessness are CHILDREN.. AND homelessness has NOT always been this bad, it fluctuates with social conditions like wage differentials and social supports..
The Dims have been no better than the Repukes..SHAME ON US FOR ALLOWING HOMELESSNESS AND THE LIES ABOUT IT TO ENDURE!
as someone who regularly pays to place the homeless in motels around Las Vegas (the mayor hates homeless people)and as someone who ends up taking care of them in the hospital where I work, my heart is sick over the way that we treat the least of us. I believe we generally treat animals better (and don't flame me because you think I don't like animals, I do). What does it say about us as a country that has always liked to position itself and has been looked to as a beacon of all that is humane when we allow people to live as they do?
There will always be people that need help, that does not make them lazy or bad. Those of you with good brains that work well please tell me how you expect someone who is schizophrenic to continually hold a job? If the medications don't get you, the illness will. How did we get so jaded, angry and apathetic that we can't even muster a little sympathy, empathy and kindness for those that are less fortunate?
seems as if faux noiz just can't help themselves...from being total assholes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/05/fox-...
Is it because they are living proof supply-side economics don't work?
He should be banned from Britain like the Weiner-Savage.
Hell, he should be banned from America.
... and I can assure you the tent cities are real. They might have been there, in a much smaller form, for years -- I don't know that for certain. But my son is a milkman and his business was going to go there to try to deliver milk to them. But before they could do that, the city moved the tent city people to the State Fair arena.
So, yes, they were there. And no, they no longer are. But they still exist, in just a different venue. At the fairgrounds, they will be closer to stores, etc. but come August, when the fair comes, where will they go?
I know they have been there for a LONG time, I am from CA and have seen them grow over the decades.
That makes it all the more disgusting and wrong.
It doesn't matter one way or the other if a few of them are from foreclosures (and you can bet your ass some of them are) the mere fact that they exist and HAVE existed for so damn long should make every American hang their head in complete shame!
What do you mean you can confirm media reports?? Why not send one of your ambush journalism teams to check out swine flu reports or interview the homeless people to get the "facts."
Amazing O'Reilly can fain helplessness when it fits into his needs.
Bill O'Reilly the wizard of situational ethics.
I think I first read that the case for the Iraq war was bogus in The Guardian.
And I didn't think I had anything in common with Billo.
for BillO to claim that you can't trust the press and point at the other media outlets is laughable at best. BillO is a supreme example of America's dishonest press.
'cause it wasn't that long ago that I saw footage of one of those tent cities, and the reporter spoke to an older married couple who seemed quite normal and "upstanding" (like foreclosure victims) and they gave a peek into their tent that was quite small, had what little posessions they had left, plus their big black and white dog laying on their nice rug. But I guess I didn't really see that, eh?
Ah Billo, first it was that there's no homeless veterans and if there are they deserve to be, and now the only tent city residents there are deserve to be there too
"The greatest tyranny is censoring information in order to be better able to control people." - Cristina Saralegui
Question:
What does Bill'O mean when he keeps saying "far left"?
I remember back in my conservative Republican days (I grew up eventually), "far left" meant "communist". Liberal was just plain "left wing".
Of course, it's all relative. When you're a fascist, anything left of center is "far left". Does anyone ever call Bill'O out on the hyperbole of excessive use of "far" in his language of ask him what he means?
From the real bible, the new testament. You (should know, Bill) the one starring jesus christ: lord, savior, messiah. One third of the monotheist's mono-god. The one who is supposed to be the motivation and model for the christian religion.
Matthew (you know, Bill, a disciple from the new testament (q.v.))
Chapter 5:
7: Blessed are the merciful / for they will be shown mercy.
10: Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness / for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
22:But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother[b]will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,[c]' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
Matthew 6
24: "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
Not the right wing version. The one in which every one gets to make it up as the go along:
O'Reilly (not a disciple and who does NOT appear in the new testament (q.v.))
Chapter 5:
Fuck the poor, for they are a drain upon my money.
I'm an Agnostic Quantum Deist (all praise the big bang and those who thirst for her truth), but this christ guy and his posse had at least some good ideas. Too bad the right wing doesn't read and follow them.
Now read leviticus (the *old* testament, the one without christ. Compare and contrast w/the new testament(q.v))
The right wing seems to be a bit more familiar with this and take their marching orders from it. Even where christ specifically overrides it.
Where does this leave you, B.O., levitican?
Challenge the xians at every opportunity. Expose the lie.
E Pleb Neesta --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b56e0u0EgQ
GODISNOWHERE
Campaign Finance Reform Now! We can't allow rich donors to own our government.
"I don't care who does the voting as long as I do the nominating." -- Boss Tweed
I'll make up a verse for fox news:
E Pleb Neesta:
3:14: Blessed are those who report the truth / for they will be called "journalists."
EPN
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