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Yes, friends, it really happened. Details below. |
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Posted on February 25, 2005 Chuck Fager on the Bill O'Reilly Show, Fox TV News The O'Quaker Factor -- Foiling Faux News's Fake Exposé I. The Prelude It's true. Out of the blue, a week or so ago, the O'Reilly show on Fox News called. They wanted me to come on and talk about what we do at Quaker House, with special reference to the case of Jeremy Hinzman, a soldier who left for Canada with his family in December 2003. The request was both puzzling and daunting. Puzzling because there was no "news peg," as we journalists say, for the inquiry. Jeremy left North Carolina more than a year ago. He had had a hearing before the Canadian immigration agency in early December, almost three months ago. But no decision had been announced, and I made plain to the Fox producer that I had no expertise in Canadian law and would not pundificate thereon. So I fretted about it for a day or so, then figured, why not? It was a chance to speak for peace to a very large audience, and NOT be preaching to the choir. The date was set: Wednesday February 23. It would be risky, though. O'Reilly is known for ambushing and bullying guests. So I spent a lot of time over a long weekend preparing, or trying to: thinking up talking points, working to boil them down to quick sound bytes, trying to anticipate assaultive questions. Then the day came. A white stretch limo pulled up outside Quaker House, to take me to the studio in Raleigh for taping. The limo was a triumph of tacky, a four-wheel slice of Las Vegas: strip lighting inside that changed rainbow colors, a cutout mirror on the long ceiling, with tiny embedded lights mimicking the night sky; a TV and bar (but BYOB; only water and soda in the cooler).
Living Large . . . for a few miles Sitting in it, I felt like I'd just won the Elvis Impersonator Contest, Over-60 Division. Or was having a fantasy flashback to the junior prom blowout I never had. Whatever. We arrived early, and spent an hour cooling our heels in a conference room, with nothing to watch but an hour of Fox "News." It was a sobering and revealing experience: in that hour, about 45 minutes was devoted to a fawning celebration of the visit by the person in the White House to Germany, Mains and Wiesbaden, to be specific. Half of that time the focus was on the side-trip to an army base in mid Germany. This was standard fare, with troops in desert camo arrayed around Himself like the photo backdrop that they were. Then there flashed on the screen an interminable series of platitudinous quotes from the speech (E.g., Your Sacrifices Have Accomplished Much; More hard Work Lies Ahead; We Will Always Remember The Fallen; and other equally moving bon mots.) As this teleprompter tirade unrolled, the video behind it soon shifted to long shots of enormous naval formations, long lines of big warships steaming urgently -- well, somewhere, and firing rockets, big guns, and other weapons at -- well something. This seemed very curious, but my grasp of German geography is somewhat tenuous, and it wasn't til I got home that I was able to verify that Mainz and Weisbaden are in central Germany many many kilometers from any chunk of ocean. In sum, Fox "News" was running a twenty-minute political info-mercial. I'd call it a campaign ad, except that the campaign is over. Isn't it? Then we were led into the studio, where I was fitted with an earphone and parked in a chair in front of a bookcase featuring the works of Mark Twain on its shelves. (A good choice, by the way; Twain was a dedicated and eloquent anti-imperialist. There's even a whole website devoted to his anti-imperial writings. ) Thru this earpiece I was obliged to listen closely to the first half-hour of O'Reilly's show, as we didn't know when he'd call on me. He opened by continuing his witchunt against controversial academic Ward Churchill . Churchill has made disparaging comments about some of the victims in the Twin Towers attacks. As I listened, however, my sense of the brouhaha changed, and became much more somber: I realized that Churchill is but a convenient tool, a club; the real target here is the university campus as a place where dissent is, or at least used to be, tolerated or even encouraged. That became clear in the show's first segment, in which he ranted less against Churchill, but rather aimed his invective at the University of Hawaii, which recently brought Churchill in to make a speech. This insight was reinforced by the next segment, in which he brought in Michael Faughnan, whose brother died in the Twin Towers, and who recently (Feb. 16) published an open letter to Churchill challenging his views and suggesting that they talk about their differences. The interview with Faughnan was remarkable: Faughnan said he had heard from Churchill, to the effect that he would be interested in some dialogue about this, and Faughnan said he was prepared to talk, to see if mutual understanding and perhaps some rapprochement might be possible. This was a remarkably open and gracious attitude on Faughnan's part; he could have been a Quaker, or even a Christian. (Caution: irony alert.) But once Faughnan said that, O'Reilly spent the rest of the interview demanding that he abandon this irenic posture and refuse to speak or have any other contact with Churchill. By now, the point of this assault was clear: it was not Churchill, but the idea of open dissent that had to be squashed. Faughnan, to his credit, calmly persisted that he was willing to try dialogue with Churchill, whether O'Reilly liked it or not. As is his habit, O'Reilly said to him, "I'll give you the last word, sir," then interrupted and hectored him one last time. All this, I repeat, was going on inside my ear, while I was sitting in a small chair staring into the blank round eye of a camera, awaiting my turn. Then it came.
Go to a complete transcript of the interview, with
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