Bill O’Reilly is getting “a bum rap,” said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. For the past week, the irascible Fox News pundit has been roasted in the national media for comments he made about his visit to Sylvia’s, the legendary Harlem soul-food restaurant. “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-f’er, I want more iced tea!’” O’Reilly told radio listeners. “It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb . . . There wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”
To understand those remarks, said Juan Williams in Time.com, you have to put them into context. O’Reilly was interviewing me at the time, and we were discussing how gangsta rap had promoted a stereotype of blacks as “ignorant, oversexed, and violent.” He talked about his dinner at Sylvia’s, and how the people he saw there were totally unlike the thugs glorified by rappers. But because O’Reilly is an outspoken conservative, the liberal “watchdog” group Media Matters strung together his juicier quotes to make him sound like a racist. It’s a cheap shot.
If this were an isolated instance, said Dorothy Parvaz in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, then maybe O’Reilly would deserve some slack. But he’s a veteran race baiter who always complains that his inflammatory cracks are taken out of context. This ignoramus once said that screening Muslim men isn’t “racial profiling” but “criminal profiling,” and claimed that poor residents of New Orleans who didn’t flee Hurricane Katrina were drug addicts who “weren’t going to get turned off from their source.”
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O’Reilly is more hapless than racist, said John Derbyshire in National Review Online. Believe it or not, he was saying, all blacks are not drug-dealing thugs. America has a prosperous, educated, law-abiding black middle class! “Are there actually people who don’t know this?”
Unfortunately, yes, said Errol Louis in the New York Daily News. Much of O’Reilly’s “angry white-male audience” still subscribes to ugly stereotypes about African-Americans. So he journeyed far uptown to Sylvia’s—to dine with the Rev. Al Sharpton, no less—in an attempt to challenge those biases.
To more sophisticated folks, said Tony Norman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, O’Reilly may have sounded patronizing. But as he freely acknowledged in that same interview, he grew up in a family that viewed blacks with fear. “In his own, bumbling way, O’Reilly was trying to emerge from the cloud of tribal associations he inherited during his working-class Irish youth,” and for that, he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
