Bill O'Reilly's Boston University College of Communication Homecoming

PODCAST: Dethklok foe Malcolm McDowell speaks [MP3]

PODCAST: Happy Thriller Day, from John Landis [MP3]

5 Comments

• Daniel Gewertz said:

  Good piece, too, Chris. My report from the scene:

  Here’s the most amazing thing about the evening: Live questions from the audience were not allowed! Audience members were invited to write down a question on index-cards before the program began! One assumes this was a fool-proof method to ensure there were no rude, confrontational or hardball questions asked of O’Reilly. Bill-O, therefore, was the only person allowed to be bellicose. And Mr. Wheatley could, of course, cherry-pick a handful of audience questions that were as soft and polite as his own were. I don’t know what kind of rabble-rousing radical questions they were expecting from this polite, well-healed, moderate crowd, but BU clearly wasn’t taking any chances.

  Here’s how the dean described the evening to me in our interview:

  “The key to making this work is having someone of Bill Wheatley’s stature as the interviewer. In some ways we’ve turned the tables: the control of the microphone lies not with Bill O’Reilly, but his questioner, and Bill Wheatley will be able to stand toe-to-toe with O’Reilly, having served as Tom Brokow’s producer for many years.”

  I kept my mouth shut upon hearing this description, but I couldn’t help thinking: Really? Toe-to-toe? First off, producing Tom Brokow, perhaps the biggest blowhard in TV network news history, must make one an adroit enabler of bombastic ego-maniacs. And secondly, can you imagine a retired executive vice-president able to go “toe-to-toe” with a truly talented bully like O’Reilly? Wheatley was a polite milquetoast throughout.

  Here's a gem from the O'Rweilly golden gullet: Greta van Susteren is a liberal! Yep, the same Greta that pals around with Todd Palin!

  Biggest applause line of the night -- Referring to O’Reilly’s 2006 call for a boycott on the entire state of Vermont, and his incessant hounding of a “lenient” Vermont judge who supposedly gave a child rapist a maximum of 60 days in prison, Bill-O bellowed: “I’m not ashamed of my behavior, because I happen to think that raping children is wrong. I repeat: raping children is WRONG!”

  Lots of clapping. What a brave stance: Bill-O is against the raping children. Only thing is, the sentence in question was misreported in the first place.

  October 26, 2009 10:32 PM

• BU'09 said:

  The prologue to this article is a little disingenuous. How could the writer write for the Muckraker without knowing it was an in-house publication? BU has one of the few remaining truly independent student newspapers in the country, the Daily Free Press, which would pick up a piece like the one described in a heartbeat. It's not like the (barely read, nearly invisible) Muckraker was ever considered the real outlet for BU news and opinion. In my four years, the Muckraker was there as a nice glossy marketing tool in the COM lobby; it never pretended to be something it wasn't.

  On second thought, the entire opening of this story, which takes up a good third of it and has practically nothing to do with O'Reilly's speaking engagement, seems a little self-serving. Cry censorship, get pageviews.

  October 27, 2009 6:13 PM

• Chris Faraone said:

  Really BU '09? Do you truly think I would have put that in there if it wasn't completely relevant? And that I'm motivated by page views? Muckraker was a joke - noted. Thought I mentioned that. But the discrepancy I identified back then was certainly not.  

  October 27, 2009 11:27 PM

• Mike Cluster said:

  Nice piece, Chris. I graduated from COM in 1960. The building and curriculum were new when I attended and the students totally operated WBUR. Those were some of the best years of my life.

  November 5, 2009 12:27 PM

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