Bold Fresh Fox News guys invade Tampa

O'Reilly has been a star for the past decade at Fox, and he garners some of the highest television ratings on basic cable anywhere.  Beck is the "upstart", though as we chronicled in a CL piece late last year, the former 970 WFLA radio host has had a meteoric rise in all media in recent years, but became huge just in the past year (he just celebrated his 1st anniversary on Fox).

But we mention Dr. George Tiller at the beginning of this post, because that's where O'Reilly, who as a regular "Factor" viewer we believe has toned down his belligerence on the air in recent years (after being mocked for it in the Robert Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed), was frequently discussed after Tiller's killing last year.

O'Reilly is pro-life, which is great.  But he had a real mad-on for Tiller for years, using his top rated program on 29 different occasions to castigate Tiller as "Tiller the Baby Killer."

After Tiller was gunned down by Scott Roeder last summer, some liberal bloggers charged that O'Reilly was responsible.  It wasn't just liberals.  Conservative David Frum on his Web site last year engaged in an Internet conversation on the subject.

On Fox these days, O'Reilly is a downright moderate - at least when it comes to his opinions of Barack Obama (not that he doesn't have plenty of guests who regularly bash Obama on a nightly basis such as  Dick Morris, Laura Ingraham, etc.).  He's proven himself to be almost an elder statesman of sorts in comparison with Beck and hothead Sean Hannity.  He wasn't moderate at all in discussing his feelings about Dr. Tiller.  And he was never balanced.  But a lot of women in this country thought Tiller was a hero.  Last year, I spoke with one, Sherry Svekis, who had an abortion from Tiller:

“He spent the time to understand what a woman’s position was. Why she was there. What her physical and emotional situation was … he’d try to work with her and whomever came with that person to support her.”

Svetkis says she’s aware it’s a bit unconventional to want to tell the world about a surgical procedure from more than 20 years ago. She says her family and friends were aware of her abortion.

But, she says, when she heard of Tiller’s death, “It was like I needed to make my experience as public as possible as to what an incredible, compassionate man this was, and how important this service was.”

She continued, “There are so few people who can do it. And those that are and the people that can do this procedure are being intimidated out of their rights, and I view it as terrorism.”

You can read that original post here.