Bill O'Reilly's Big Head

Five years ago, when my daughter was just 13, she e-mailed "The O'Reilly Factor" about how much she enjoyed the program. She received an invitation to watch a live broadcast in the Fox Studios and to meet host Bill O'Reilly. We sat through the taping and met the surprisingly tall host afterward for a brief chat.

At the time, I was writing a column for another newspaper and had mentioned Mr. O'Reilly favorably. But that was long before Mr. O'Reilly's head had swelled to the size of Dan Rather's, and when "The O'Reilly Factor" was truly a no-spin zone.

The O'Reilly show at that time was unique in that it was definitively fair and balanced and one could decide for oneself after hearing both sides of an issue who deserved to win the debate.

I've tried to pinpoint exactly when Mr. O'Reilly lost his humility and I've determined it was a short while after September 11, 2001. Mr. O'Reilly had initiated an investigation into what the Red Cross was doing with the donations it had received to help the victims of 9/11. He alleged that some of these funds were being allocated to other Red Cross programs. The investigation was a solid piece of journalism and Mr. O'Reilly deserved kudos for a job well done.

Then I noticed that in subsequent stories over the next few months he would manage to interject his achievement in exposing the Red Cross scandal into the conversation. I started noticing that Mr. O'Reilly would preface his comments with remarks like, "I did this or I did that."

The Factor was in fact becoming more about Mr. O'Reilly than the issues. We were constantly being reminded that his books were on the New York Times best-seller list, or about the great column he had written for WorldNet Daily, or his radio program.

He even periodically had a segment on his program where he would sit for a critique from Arthel Neville about his performance. Get it? It's all about Bill. I kept wishing she would say something honest like, "Bill, stop talking about yourself!"

Even the end of the program, where he reads e-mail from around the world, is really just another way of broadcasting what people think about Bill.

One of the things I had originally enjoyed about the Factor was that Mr. O'Reilly asked the tough questions that we at home would have asked of any controversial individual but which were rarely asked by most journalists. The program also addressed whatever issues were in the news.

The Factor would always present divergent points of view and sometimes the side I least related to would actually sway my opinion by informing me of facts I was hitherto unaware of, but Mr. O'Reilly's self-promotion was such a turnoff that he was starting to resemble Don Imus with his cottage industry Ranch products.

I originally planned to write this column last year, but decided that perhaps I was being unfair and projecting my personal tastes instead of an objective criticism. I just stopped watching the program.

But this is an election year and "The O'Reilly Factor" still has guests worth watching, providing the host allows them to complete their sentences. With CBS mishandling what is quickly being dubbed Rathergate, I've been an insatiable wonk watching cable TV, surfing the Web for great bloggers, all the while listening to talk radio to get as much information as possible.

Earlier this week, Bill O'Reilly, the creator of the no-spin zone, the man who personified fair and balanced journalism when he first came to Fox News Channel, was dismissing the fake documents' importance and blaming talk show and Web-bloggers for the immediate hype of the scandal. He said, "Do you know how fast the right-wing talk show hosts got this story? It was almost within the hour."

He then went on to defend Dan Rather as a professional who would never jeopardize his career with a deliberate hoax. Mr. O'Reilly spoke of himself in the third person, a danger sign that someone has joined the pseudo-intellectual elite.

That did not sit well with one of the sharpest, funniest, right-wing talk show hosts, Laura Ingraham, who expressed disappointment with O'Reilly's statement. She felt that he was missing the journalistic crux of the documents by blaming the talk shows for the scandal.

Callers to the Ingraham show flooded the station with comments that indicated that I was not the only person who had become disenchanted with Mr. O'Reilly's vanity. One caller suggested that Mr. O'Reilly was grooming himself to take a network job and was trying to project a more liberal persona.

Has Bill O'Reilly joined the elite of the mainstream broadcasters? Has he become what Bernard Goldberg described in his latest book - a broadcaster who doesn't recognize how arrogant he has become?

I'm writing this in the hope that Mr. O'Reilly recognizes Robert Burns's best line: "O wad some power the giftee gie us to see oursels as ithers see us."

By the way, my daughter stopped watching the show a long time ago.