The O’Reilly Factor Vs. Hot Air

Last night on his show, Bill O’Reilly read off what were supposed to be blog comments about the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. You can see the whole segment on this video, which features Bill talking to my friend, Amanda Carpenter from the Washington Times,

For those that don’t want to watch the video, here’s the comment they attributed to Hot Air,

O'Reilly smears Hot Air

One problem: that’s from the comment section on Hot Air, not from the blog — and there’s a world of difference between the two. It would be no different than if I went to the message boards on Bill O’Reilly’s website and attributed some of the quotes there to him.

Understandably, Allah was royally p.o.’d about this although personally, I have to admit that I’m slightly jealous of the fact that he was libeled on the O’Reilly Factor.

Here’s some of what Allah had to say about this subject on Twitter last night as the story broke,

If O’Reilly’s staff doesn’t know the difference between posts and comments, they shouldn’t be commenting on this. End of story.

Michelle’s going to deal with it. Esp. the part where it’s attributed to a “blog posting,” which is a flat out lie

God d*mn it. It’s so frustrating to have me and Ed disdain all the garbage about “Hussein” or whatever and then get smeared anyway

Yeah, send them to me, please. If he hits us again soon, I’ll make him choke on them

It’s not worth causing headaches for Carpenter yet. If we start getting accused of being a hate site, I’ll respond forcefully

He’s not going to retract anything. He pulls this crap on Kos all the time

A couple of things.

I can just tell you from what I know about how these shows work, Amanda Carpenter wouldn’t have had anything to do with the graphics referring to that comment as a “blog posting.” So, she would have been hearing them on the air for the first time and wouldn’t have had any way to judge whether they were accurate or not.

As to O’Reilly, it’s hard to say if he knew what he was quoting was inaccurate or not. Whatever the case may be, if he didn’t know then, I’m certain he’s aware of it by now. With that in mind, if he cares about getting it right, he definitely should do a retraction and he needs to make sure that the people compiling this info for him in the future know the difference between a comment and a blog post.

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