Content analysis of O’Reilly’s rhetoric finds spin to be a ‘factor’
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.
Tobias & Bush, Torturing Africa With Abstinence
Back in April 2004, Tobias sparked a controversy by declaring, at the Berlin Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS that “Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective… It’s been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what’s happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working.”
Regardless of whether he actually believes in such ideological positions or not is irrelevant; Randall Tobias has been one of the leaders spearheading a Bush Administration push to shift US international family planning policies towards a “faith based” approach and re-channel US foreign aid away from secular organizations and towards religious groups that, per one major survey, are predominantly Christian. Starting as head of US global AIDS policy and moving up to head USAID, some would go so far as to call Tobias a leader in an international war on woman’s reproductive rights.
while the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons. Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the United States is allocating more funding, on average, to nuclear weapons than during the Cold War. The Bush administration is pumping this money—more than $6 billion this year—into renovating the nuclear weapons complex and designing new nuclear weapons. Such hypocrisy is one of the main obstacles to nuclear arms reductions because it runs the risk of shattering the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in which the nuclear-armed states pledged to begin the process of disarmament if the non-nuclear states opted not to pursue the deadly technology.