More on the Doyle vs. O’Reilly thing. The National Post somewhat sensationalizes the situation, claiming the feud is “escalating”:
[O’Reilly] also urged his supporters to initiate a writing campaign at Doyle’s expense. Many obeyed, apparently, flooding Doyle’s e-mail box with hundreds of hateful retorts, many of them with expletives to be deleted. Even the New York Times paid attention with an article this week that reprinted many of the postings.
“You’re lucky we don’t attack Canada next. We hate communists here,” wrote John from Virginia.
But the hate mail was also followed by a flood of missives from sympathetic Americans, according to Doyle.
“I think most of these people live in parts of the country that CSI couldn’t use for their storylines because all the DNA is the same and there are no dental records,” wrote Jami from Omaha.
A fellow Globe columnist also reminisced about her public appearance on Fox, opposite Bill O’Reilly in a well-written column:
It’s not enough to show compassion to people you love, the [Dalai Lama] told Canadians this week. You also have to show it to people who hate you. This was lingering in my mind as Nate Fredman, the nice assistant to Mr. O’Reilly, the man who once said to the son of a Twin Towers victim, “Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces,” urged me to appear.
Ultimately however, she found the meetup rather frustrating.
It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response — not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.
The best quip I’ve heard this week about Fox News is that it’s the newsroom equivalent of the WWE.