When I first got the job, blacks wanted me to get on white people and women wanted me to get on men. I just wanted to tell the truth.
You want to understand men, run a country paper.
Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
"I don't tell jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
After having national success on a syndicated program called Inside Edition, I went back to school. And not just any school: At the age of forty-six, I earned a master's degree in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. It was while studying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I worked up the game plan for The O'Reilly Factor. The rest, to use a cliché, is history.
The Factor concept is very simple: Watch all of those in power, including and especially the media, so they don't injure or exploit the folks, everyday Americans. Never before in the United States had a television news guy dared to criticize other journalists on a regular basis. The late Peter Jennings, a friend, told me I was crazy to do it. "These people will not allow anyone to scrutinize them," he said. "They will come after you with a vengeance."
And so they have.
Journalism has already come to be the first power in the land.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.
Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.
Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
Most rock journalism is people who can not write interviewing people who can not talk.
