Indiana University

News Release

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Last modified: Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Content analysis of O'Reilly's rhetoric finds spin to be a 'factor'

  1. Print this page

Commentator uses name-calling more than once every seven seconds in 'Talking Points Memo'

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2, 2007

Editors" This study, published in the academic journal Journalism Studies, was conducted and released without any involvement of any special interest group. The researchers received no grant funding for this study. Additional data, charts and the full text of the study are available online at https://journalism.indiana.edu/papers/oreilly.html.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.

The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

"It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities," said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. "He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint."

Maria Elizabeth Grabe, associate professor of telecommunications, added, "If one digs further into O'Reilly's rhetoric, it becomes clear that he sets up a pretty simplistic battle between good and evil. Our analysis points to very specific groups and people presented as good and evil."

For their article in the spring issue of Journalism Studies, Conway, Grabe and Kevin Grieves, a doctoral student in journalism, studied six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.

A 2005 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that while 30 percent of Americans viewed Washington Post and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward as a journalist, 40 percent of respondents considered O'Reilly to be a journalist.

"We chose Bill O'Reilly because he has one of the most powerful political voices in the media today," Conway said. "But we wanted to get beyond the left versus the right finger-pointing, which seems to dominate most of the discussion of O'Reilly and other media pundits."

Grabe added, "The promo of his show as a No Spin Zone -- that's where he opened the door for us."

What the IU researchers found in their study, "Villains, Victims and Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly's 'No Spin Zone': Revisiting World War Propaganda Techniques," was that he was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes -- such as "villians" or downright "evil" -- to people and groups.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

Among the findings:

"Our results show a consistent pattern of O'Reilly casting non-Americans in a negative light. Both illegal aliens and foreigners were constructed as physical threats to the public and never featured in the role of victim or hero," the authors concluded.

An earlier version of the study won a top faculty award from the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.


Web Version

https://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/5535.html

IU News Room
530 E. Kirkwood Ave., Suite 201
Bloomington, IN 47408-4003
Email: iuinfo@indiana.edu
Web: https://newsinfo.iu.edu