Bill O’Reilly dedicated part of his interview Sunday to two of his favorite pastimes: touting his own popularity and ridiculing MSNBC.
The typically brash Fox News pundit, who has a well-known obsession with his own ratings supremacy, told Howard Kurtz that he’s welcomed as a guest by talk show hosts like David Letterman largely because he’s such a draw.
“I bring ratings to those shows,” he told Kurtz. “So when I go on Letterman or I go on the morning shows, their ratings go up. That’s why they have me on.”
And when it came to the ratings-challenged MSNBC, which just suffered another historically poor quarter, O’Reilly couldn’t resist twisting the knife. Why, he wondered, doesn’t someone just put the liberal-leaning cable news channel out of its misery?
“MSNBC’s ratings cannot really get much lower…No one’s watching them during the day, and very, very few at night,” O’Reilly said. “It’s not a news organization, alright? It’s a cable channel that promotes left-wing causes. Not a news organization. What I am amazed at is that NBC just doesn’t pull the plug. I mean, once you fall behind CNN — which they have, CNN is now beating them — where is there to go on this thing?”
On behalf of MSNBC, I would like to apologize.
Actually, very few people are watching cable news at all.
So Reilly’s supremacy amounts to being the tallest midget.
His cognitive dissonance must be deafening.
“I bring ratings to those shows,” he told Kurtz. “So when I go on
Letterman or I go on the morning shows, their ratings go up. That’s why they have me on.”
It’s exactly this sort of unbridled arrogance that causes me to throw heavy objects at my TV when I see Billo’s mug on the box. And because of my reactions Mrs darr in her wisdom has banned my watching this arrogant excuse for a human being. He is insulting, talks over his “guests”, and is insufferably arrogant.
The only reason Fox has the number of viewers it has is because it’s basic cable. MSNBC and CNBC are premium.
Cable news compared to network news viewership is minimal.
I’ve always wondered why NBC didn’t pressure the cable companies to include their news programs in basic cable like Fox did.