Personally, I’m way past tired of media pundits using generalities as an excuse to make their point. Whether it’s Contessa Brewer or Bill O’Reilly starting off a sentence with “Some people think” or “Some people believe”, it’s just their way of posing a question and using “some” to give the appearance that pundit is being all objective and above the rancor.
Wednesday night on the O’Reilly Factor, Bill referred to there being “extremists on both sides” but when pressed by guest Laura Ingraham to name names, O’Reilly punted saying he didn’t want to “legitimize” them with the vast publicity his show would surely afford them.
I won’t speak for the left, but I’m sorry Bill; if there are extremists on the right, I’d like to know about them. Surely you’d warn the folks.
You can go to the comment section of the Daily Kos (this is how easy it is not to use the word “some”) or the Democratic Underground or the Huffington Post and read the death fantasies their readers have for conservative politicians and activists. Even media pundits and celebrities (i.e. Julianne Malveaux, Nina Totenberg, Alec Baldwin) have come out and publicly called for the deaths of Republicans they didn’t like.
While the language on sites like Free Republic (which O’Reilly has previously singled out) can be quite mean towards the left, I don’t recall ever seeing liberal death wishes, yet to make his I’m-above-it-all point, he lumps Freep in with “extremists”.
Should I ever appear on another cable show and am posed with the usual generalization, I may stall the interview by asking the host to be specific, just as they would demand of me. If I responded to a question by saying “liberal groups want to kill people” and I couldn’t offer a quote and/or specific group as an example, the rest of the interview would be my sitting through justified ridicule.
If Carol Costello can start almost every one of her segments with “Some people say…” or O’Reilly can rant on “extremists on both sides”, it’s only fair to know who they’re talking about.
