Bill O'Reilly won't let it go. Despite the fact that hate-filled comments were found on his own website, despite that a couple of his own advertisers have pulled out, he just won't stop cherry picking some comments on DailyKos to smear the entire half-million person community.
Look, it's a free country. O'Reilly is free to go on these nutty quests if he wants. You're also free to hold him and his advertisers to his own standard.
O'Reilly started this whole thing by having one of his producers do his best Michael Moore impersonation, and confront the head of JetBlue in front of the company's HQ, and putting him on the spot about a few statements on comment threads at Kos. JetBlue had been a sponsor of the YearlyKos convention. And now, because their PR team freaked, they're not. Basically, O'Reilly smelled blood in the water and now he's not going to stop.
Well, fine. Media Matters has well documented the dumb comments posted on O'Reilly's own site. Media Matters also has captured O'Reilly himself saying he'd let al Qaeda blow up San Fran. NewsHounds has a pretty comprehensive list of all the sponsors of O'Reilly's show.
They've got HQs all around the country, probably in your town, or nearby. So, I say, grab your video camera and head over to those HQs and see if they endorse all this stuff. Show the execs the actual screengrabs from Bill-O's site, and play them the audio clip. Post your video of it up on YouTube. Hey, send me the link (ericschmeltzer at earthlink dot net). I will be happy to pass it along to those producers I know over at Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I'm sure they'd love to see it.
Finally, if someone wants to house all those vids under one roof, I've registered ExposeOReilly.com. I'd be happy to transfer it to someone who has some web experience and the time to manage it. Just send me a note and point me to whatever sites you've done before. I won't charge a dime.
The sad part about this is, I think all of us realize that people post hateful comments on left-wing, right-wing, and sites in between. That's just the internet for you. It's never been an issue for the vast majority of bloggers and their audiences, and the left and right blogs have rarely, if ever, gone after each other for comments on the other side's threads. I would never say RedState or another right-wing blog was hateful because of any dumb things on the comment threads. But, if Bill O'Reilly wants to keep up this argument, and create some new standard that's impossible for even his web team to maintain, then, hell, fine. He just better be prepared to meet that standard, and pay the price when he inevitably doesn't.
Go at it.