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Video

Bill O'Reilly's Viral Meltdown

VIDEO: Blowhard's ego-tastic tantrum delights his foes.

Norman Misura 21 May 2008TheTyee.ca

Norman Misura is a Vancouver-based writer.
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Papa Bear's big growl.

Why did Bill O'Reilly's vintage meltdown go viral, inspire copycats and get more media play than any video in recent memory (over a million just on the YouTube site alone)? Mainly because O'Reilly makes a career out of being a louder-, holier-, and righter-than-thou talk show blowhard. So it's really no wonder that the public and news media seized on the Inside Edition clip where we see the unvarnished O'Reilly bullying his co-workers.

In the clip, O'Reilly loses his temper, using even, gasp, the f-word. And why? All because he is confused by the teleprompter and doesn't recognize a well-known phrase.

In the deeply divisive and heated U.S. political climate, the image of "Papa Bear" O'Reilly (as Steven Colbert calls him), playing the prima donna is irresistible to his foes on the left. While he has repeated over and over that he is not affiliated with any political party, O'Reilly is one of the pillars of U.S. right wing TV and Republicans make up the vast majority of his audience. In 2000, The New York Daily News reported that he is a registered Republican. O'Reilly Sucks, a self-admittedly biased site, lists him as one of the top conservatives in the U.S. Colbert, who created his ironic talk show persona based on O'Reilly, last week was among the first to spoof the clip.

In his book, The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, The Bad and the Ridiculous in American Life, O'Reilly writes, "You might be wondering if whether I'm conservative, liberal, libertarian, or exactly what.... See, I don't want to fit any of those labels, because I believe that the truth doesn't have labels."

Well, in this little clip we glimpse a truth about Bill O'Reilly not usually shared with his 2.5 million viewers. Watch his antics, and affix your own label.

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