The hardest hitting talk-show host on television is coming to Fairfield.
Bill O’Reilly, host of the widely popular and controversial “O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel, will speak at the Quick Center on Sunday at 3 p.m. as part of the University’s Open Visions Forums series.
“O’Reilly deserves a place in the journalism history books for helping to make Fox News the dominant cable TV news operation of the last decade,” said Dr. James Simon, an English teacher who coordinates Fairfield’s journalism courses and is the faculty advisor to The Mirror.
“While there was traditionally some sort of separation between news analysis and opinion, O’Reilly has combined the two into a TV format that is now imitated by all three cable TV networks at almost every hour of every night. But other people just don’t do it as well as he does,” said Simon.
O’Reilly headlines a list of Open Visions speakers that also includes intellectual magazine editors Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, and civil rights leader Mary Frances Berry, among others.
Students at Fairfield are generally thought to be evenly split between political parties and ideologies, but most agreed O’Reilly would be entertaining, whether or not they agreed with his outspoken conservative views.
“While I disagree with where he’s coming from, it’s still nice to have someone of his stature come and speak at the university,” said Evan Troubridge ’07. “It’s always nice to hear the other side of the story.”
During his tenure at FoxNews, O’Reilly has risen to such a status that one of the most popular new politically oriented shows on TV – Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central – was founded as a spoof on the “O’Reilly Factor.”
He has ignited debate over whether businesses should wish customers a “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”, and feuded with one of his rivals on cable TV, MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, who often dubs O’Reilly the “worst person in the world” at the conclusion of his shows.
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