Bill O'Reilly's mad as hell (but really, what's new?), feels unfairly targeted (but really, what's new?), and says his recent comments were taken out of context (you get the picture). What Media Matters, and later CNN, did, according to O'Reilly, was twist his well-meaning lesson on racial stereotypes into something ignorant and racially charged.

O'Reilly was still simmering last night. "They're making it something that it isn't," he said in an interview by phone from New York. "Anyone who listens to the tape [of the radio show] and is fair-minded will tell you this was an intelligent conversation about race. . . . Aren't they supposed to be in the business of honesty over there" at CNN?

His point, he said, is that "some whites fear blacks based on irrational notions. They're afraid to go into Sylvia's, they're afraid to go to Harlem. But there's nothing different in Sylvia's than any other place in the U.S."

What Bill O'Reilly is failing to see is that his extremely elementary discussion about stereotypes, the moral of which seemed to be that not all black people are criminals/rappers, nor do they all refer to waiters as "motherfucker," was, in its obviousness, an insult to blacks and whites. Anyone out there who didn't already know this simple fact is probably not going to be convinced by Bill O'Reilly's shockingly civilized experiences at Sylvia's and the Anita Baker concert.

O'Reilly himself said it best when he prefaced the story of his dinner with "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference." Was he really trying to convince his white listeners that black people can be civilized? Or was he trying to convince himself?

[WP]