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After the Shootings, Partisan Media Offer Dubious Comfort

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Remember Bill O’Reilly? He hosted the top-rated show on cable news until Fox News forced him out amid sexual harassment allegations — and settlements — in 2017.

He occasionally invited me on his show, especially when he needed a foil for his endless populist-conservative complaints, particularly about the “Democrat-run Chicago” when President Barack Obama was president.

But, as Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks used to sing, “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”

Bill only went as far away as his own pundit purgatory, a podcast at BillOreilly.com, to continue his bloviations.

I found him there while searching online for reactions to the unspeakable horrors of the shooting that killed seven and wounded dozens at a July Fourth parade in the usually peaceful Chicago suburb of Highland Park.

From his new perch, presumably far from Chicago, O’Reilly claimed to uncover the real problem: the state’s Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

 

“You won’t stop crime — drug crime, drug gangs — because they are minority gangs!” he shouted, jabbing his finger at the camera like a restaurant customer whose coffee was served cold. “That’s why you won’t stop ’em, you phony! You aid and abet this murder in Chicago every blinking day. You! Don’t be sanctimonious with me!”

Ah, O’Reilly hasn’t changed much, except maybe becoming louder and angrier, if that’s possible. Passionate anger works well to build an audience, especially among conservatives looking for any explanation for rampant gun violence except the most obvious, which is the high number of guns on the street and in the wrong hands.

In conservative media, such as O’Reilly’s old haunt at Fox News, the pundits couldn’t ignore the horror as casually as they have avoided much coverage of the special congressional committee probing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

So the network’s pundits pumped up the volume on just about every possible long-distance diagnosis for the Highland Park horror and its suspect, 21-year-old Robert Crimo III from nearby Highwood, no matter how far-fetched.

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