[July 06, 2009] OPINION: At Times, O'Reilly's judgment bad Tweet Jul 05, 2009 (Herald & Review - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- If you read Bill O'Reilly's column in the Herald & Review on a regular basis, you know he hates The New York Times. Although O'Reilly often has decent points, and he's certainly entitled to his opinion, his dislike for the Times sometimes impairs his judgment. His column in Wednesday's Herald & Review was one of those times. As usual, O'Reilly's complaint was the Times is slanted to the liberal point of view and the newspaper, according to O'Reilly, has an agenda to make Barack Obama popular and to make Obama's national health care program a reality. His example was a recent poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News. The poll asked, "Would you be willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans have health insurance?" Fifty-seven percent responded yes, 37 percent were not willing and 6 percent had no opinion. O'Reilly then points to another poll question: "Who did you vote for in the presidential election?" Forty-eight percent said Barack Obama, 25 percent answered John McCain and 19 percent said they did not vote. O'Reilly's protest is that the popular vote tally in November's election was 53 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain. His claim is that the Times "stacked the deck" with Obama supporters to skew the poll results. More accurately, the Times poll had a lot fewer McCain supporters than the popular vote. But O'Reilly is comparing apples to potatoes. Voting in an election and answering a pollster's question are two distinct activities. It's obvious you can't vote for "no opinion." If you don't care enough to vote, or can't make up your mind, you stay home. In a poll, however, you can say "I don't know" or "I didn't vote." In addition, people lie to pollsters. Some people who didn't vote or voted for McCain probably told the pollster they voted for Obama. People don't want to be associated with the losing side. Finally, scientific pollsters don't gauge the accuracy of their polls on how people say they voted. The aim is to get an accurate sample of the nation, and the best way to check that is through known factors such as demographic information. On a smaller point, O'Reilly misses an important historical nuance. He claims the Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, didn't much like the press but understood the need for honest information. First, the press in Revolutionary War times was undoubtedly biased. Most editors were unabashedly political and published stories that reinforced their point of view. There were newspapers, of-ten in the same community, that favored the American revolutionaries and others that argued defying England was wrong. Jefferson, Adams and the other Founding Fathers believed a free press was essential because it would allow all sides of an issue to be presented by a wide variety of newspapers. The Founders also insisted the government should not control the press. The Times rightfully can be criticized for a lot of sins. There have been instances of stories that are blatantly one-sided, and there is a tendency for the Times to not believe a story is important until they deem it worthy. There is an aura of arrogance that runs through the paper I find annoying. If O'Reilly wants to criticize The New York Times, he should have at it. That's the sort of freedom Jefferson and others embraced. O'Reilly's criticism would be improved if he didn't let his disdain for The Times get in the way of honest and credible analysis. To see more of Herald & Review, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.herald-review.com Copyright (c) 2009, Herald & Review, Decatur, Ill. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]