O’Reilly Is Factoring In a Few New Fights--With the Right

There’s nothing unusual about pugnacious talk-show host Bill O’Reilly’s being in a fight. The real surprise this time is the one he’s fighting.

In the last two weeks, O’Reilly has come under attack from the right, from the same ideologues who helped make the Fox News Channel personality one of the most popular figures on cable television.

Earlier this month on “The O’Reilly Factor,” he had a riveting confrontation with Bible-toting Stephen Bennett, a Connecticut minister who speaks out against the adoption of children by gays and lesbians.

After O’Reilly called Bennett a “religious fanatic,” two conservative groups, Concerned Women for America and the American Family Assn., urged members to protest.

“I got 100 e-mails telling me I’m going to hell,” O’Reilly said. “That’s a little personal.”

Last week, the Wall Street Journal--normally friendly “Factor” territory--published a column by its chief editorial writer, William McGurn, who called O’Reilly “unhinged” for his behavior toward the writer as a guest. His headline: “The Blowhard Zone.”

So many battles, so little time. It’s not as if he’s ignoring other ends of the spectrum, either. The rapper Ludacris and his fans are mad because an O’Reilly segment led Pepsi to drop the musician as a spokesman. O’Reilly’s fight with Hollywood personalities over disbursement of Sept. 11 charity funds continues.

Whether calculated or not, the dispute with conservative groups may be as shrewd as the actions of a politician who adroitly positions himself in the center just before an election.

When Bennett went on the show, he tried to appeal to O’Reilly’s Irish Catholicism by reading Bible quotations against homosexuals.

O’Reilly would have none of it. He couldn’t understand why Bennett would object if a troubled child in foster care were adopted by a loving gay couple. Bennett couldn’t understand why O’Reilly was advocating gay rights.

The Concerned Women for America seemed hurt, as if slapped across the face by a brother. Writing to O’Reilly to protest, the organization’s president slipped in a proverb: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”

“If you do something wrong, if your slip is showing, your family is the one that rushes to your side and helps you and corrects you, because they love you,” said the organization’s president, Sandy Rios. “He embarrassed himself, and as a friend of his show, I was embarrassed.”

Similarly, McGurn--who appeared on a segment about two women kidnapped to Saudi Arabia--seemed betrayed.

“I did not come at this as an O’Reilly hater,” he wrote. “I regard Fox News as a national treasure and even wrote a column for this paper a few years back about Mr. O’Reilly at a time when he was whining that the New York Times would not even mention his name.”

Rios reacted just like an ideological opposite who went on the show and couldn’t get a word in edgewise. “He was completely twisting the facts,” she said. “He manipulated the entire discussion. Even if he disagrees with Stephen, he should have at least let Stephen have his say. I would never support anybody, including Bill, who bullies their guests.”

Not surprisingly, O’Reilly sees things differently.

“We’ve always said, ‘Don’t let your ideology hold you captive,’ ” he said. “Now if they feel betrayed because I make a point that it’s better to have a child with a stable home, even if it’s run by homosexuals, than to be in the unbelievably chaotic atmosphere of foster care, if they feel that’s a betrayal, then that’s on them. We gave them more than enough time to come on the program and explain their point of view.”

People who pigeonhole O’Reilly as a conservative wouldn’t have expected the exchange. A conservative on some issues, he supports gun control, opposes the death penalty and is an environmentalist at heart. He fashions himself a populist.

O’Reilly says now what has always been hard for people at Fox News to admit: that he once had a hard-core right-wing audience.

“I think our audience has changed,” he said. “The e-mail reflects [that] a very wide cross-section of America watches the ‘Factor.’ ”

The ratings do too. O’Reilly routinely has a bigger audience than cable competitors Connie Chung and Phil Donahue combined. And if he wants that audience to keep growing, he’d be wise not to be too predictable.

O’Reilly recently gave an interview to a gay newspaper, the Advocate, and spoke to a convention of gay and lesbian journalists.

They’re by no means allies; the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination disagrees with O’Reilly’s opinion that gay people should keep their sexual preferences to themselves. But GLAAD appreciates that O’Reilly has backed them on a key issue and knows he reaches a constituency unlikely to listen to gay activists.