TJ Walker breaks down Bill O'Reilly's tense ESPN radio appearance, where hosts pressed him on false sports claims he'd made. O'Reilly got upset and hung up. Walker says it shows the difference between controlling your own show and facing real pushback as a guest.
Chapters
Bill O'Reilly gets a taste of his own medicine. Some people love Bill O'Reilly. Some people hate him. He is the undisputed king of cable news. He has the number one ranked show.
On all of cable news for the.
Last more than 12 years.
And sometimes it's the top rated show period of cable.
So wildly successful, he's clearly doing something right. But this recent example of where he was on ESPN radio shows, there is a huge difference between being the host and being a guest. Now, sometimes being a guest is a lot easier than being a successful host, but sometimes being a host is a lot easier. As the host, you control the shots.
You control the agenda.
You can shut other people down. Well, Bill O'Reilly was on an ESPN.
Radio show just the other day to.
Promote his latest in his Killing series of books that have all become New York Times best sellers, most of them number one best sellers. Well, the ESPN hosts decided to have some little fun. So they asked him about questions regarding his football career and attempted to embarrass him. Bill O'Reilly has talked about how good he was as a football player in college. It turns out it wasn't a varsity team, it was a club sport. So as a sports league, they had a sports channel.
They had a lot of fun mocking him for talking about that.
Then it turns out that he got some of his chronology a little confused.
Claiming that he tried out for the.
New York Mets baseball team the same day that Tom Seaver was there. And it turns out Seaver had been.
Playing for the team for four years before, before O'Reilly would have been able.
To show up there. So a lot of things just didn't seem in place. And then of course, they played the footage of the infamous footage of O'Reilly getting very upset on the set of his old syndicated talk shows where he curses.
It's a funny clip, but I don't.
Know that it really is relevant to anything. So Overman got. Not overman. Bill O'Reilly got upset and hung up on them. This, of course, allowed his arch nemesis, Keith Olbermann to make Bill O'Reilly the worst sports person in the world for his show. It was all a lot of fun. Is this going to hurt Bill O'Reilly? No, because he's on national TV three hours a day, one hour live, two hours rebroadcast. He has tens of millions of people watching him every week. And to his credit, he goes on talk shows everywhere. He goes on the View. He is a savvy, savvy media promoter. And even though I don't think he handled this interview perfectly.
It's not going to hurt him because.
He is constantly in the media with his own show. He's constantly in the media on other people's shows, even if they are perceived as liberals and anti his position. He goes everywhere. That's why his books all go to number one in the New York Times bestseller list. But it does show you have to be ready for anything, no matter how famous or successful you are. You got to be ready for the tough questions.
