Bill O'Reilly's historical counterpart

[Guest jpurdy2003]

I got this from msnbc's website. Apparrently history repeats itself.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6243014/#041015

 

Boake O'Reilly? (Keith Olbermann)

 

You could have knocked me over with a feather last night when the media critic Michael Wolff answered my question about how deep the damage to Bill O’Reilly could go, and concluded that if there really are tapes of O’Reilly’s purported conversations with his associate producer, it could finish him.

 

Wolff’s not exactly going out on a limb here. The attorney in Andrea Mackris’s suit against him, Benedict Morelli, says “O’Reilly is going down.” O’Reilly himself said he might “go down.” Given the subject matter, I wish they’d both come up with a different phrase.

 

This just brings me back to Boake Carter. I invoked Carter’s name as a historical parallel to O’Reilly in this space yesterday, and then again on 'Countdown,' but time kept me from explaining the reference— and it needs considerable explanation.

 

Carter was, in short, the preeminent news commentator in this country in the mid-to-late 1930’s. Other primordial radio newsmen have survived by reputation to the present day— Edward R. Murrow, H.V. Kaltenborn, Lowell Thomas, even Walter Winchell. But for four or five years, Carter was better-known and had higher ratings than any of them. Twice he won the annual listeners’ popularity poll. And then came a fall so great that it was as if he had never existed.

 

He was Russian-born of British parents, and surviving recordings of his commentaries for CBS sound like every comedian’s half-way decent impression of the generic-sounding Englishman. He signed on with “Ello— Boake Carter speaking,” and ended his broadcasts with “Cheerio.” And in between, in a voice reminiscent of the old-time actor Clifton Webb, he railed against all things moderate and liberal. Graduating from spot coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and trial to a regular nightly news show, Carter became a severe isolationist and a member of an overtly Anti-Semitic organization, Carter could claim that the sinking of an American gunboat on a river in China by the Japanese was part of a secret plot by President Roosevelt to engage the country in an Asian war. He defended Japan’s actions.

 

Carter’s story is chronicled in an obscure but useful scholarly text called “Those Radio Commentators,” by Professor Irving Fang, who at the time of its 1977 publication, was in charge of the radio-tv program at the University of Minnesota. That Carter is not better known today than Professor Fang give you a hint as to what happened next.

 

As Carter became more and more extreme in his commentaries - Fang calls them “increasingly irrational”— pressure on CBS and his sponsor General Foods grew. And suddenly, on August 26, 1938, CBS canceled his newscast. For more than a year, at a time when radio news was king, Carter had no outlet. He devoted himself to public speaking, his syndicated newspaper column, and a series of books with titles like "Why Meddle In Europe?" He appears to have given just one interview about his dismissal, in which he insisted he’d been “purged” by the Roosevelt administration, and, when asked to explain what he meant by the term, made a cutting gesture across his own throat. Finally, in September 1939, with the CBS cancellation never fully explained, he got a thrice-weekly commentary program on the Mutual Network.

 

And the wheels came off. He unexpectedly aligned himself with Roosevelt, the man he’d claimed had “purged” him two years earlier, going so far as to write the president frequent letters and praising him unabashedly in print and on the air. Then he broke with the anti-Semites and announced he was converting to a strict sect called “Biblical Hebrewism.” He began to fill his commentaries and columns with almost indecipherable biblical stories and prophecies. Apparently at the suggestion of the religious group, he divorced his wife, married one of the members, established a kosher kitchen— and a haven for other sect members - in his home.

 

Even after one of the leaders, an African-American named Abner Goldberg, was arrested for draft evasion, Carter stuck with his new epiphany. He brought the sect’s leader, Moses Guibbory, to America and declared on the air that Guibbory’s book would be as influential as the Bible and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Upon moving into the Carter home, Guibbory told him to divorce the second Mrs. Carter but insisted all three of them continue to live under the same roof. Mutual Radio gradually cut back his schedule and moved him from primetime, to late afternoons, to noon. And in 1944— a little more than six years after his unexplained dismissal by CBS— came the announcement that Carter was dead, his age variously given as 41 or 46.

 

The cause of death was listed in the Los Angeles Times as, fittingly, “apoplexy.” Later accounts cite a cerebral hemorrhage, a stroke, or a heart attack. But those later accounts are fewer and fewer. The name “Boake Carter” has appeared in The New York Times, for instance, only in passing, and only three times, since 1968. The last reference was in 1981 - in the middle of Lowell Thomas’s obituary.

 

The story of Boake Carter has been ringing in my head for months as I’ve contemplated the continuing dizzying ascendancy of Bill O’Reilly. I won’t bore you with comparisons of their rises to prominence— criticizing O’Reilly is not only a fully-staffed industry, but my adding to it could easily be seen as a competitor’s hissiness. But the parallels in impact and tone are obvious, and the ominous lesson of Carter’s crash should be cautionary.

 

I don’t know if O’Reilly has a fall ahead of him reminiscent of Carter’s. I certainly hope not— Carter’s borders on tragedy. But the pattern seems vaguely similar, and Michael Wolff’s comments raise the very clear prospect that the ordeal can await any who treat so much, so contemptuously, and so publicly.

[Buckeye23]

I think O'Rielly's reputation will be tarnished win or lose here.

 

It's interesting that this lady claims that she was sexually harrassed, then quit and went to CNN, THEN came back to O'Rielly.

 

I mean come on, if it was so bad the first time around, why come back for a second tour? She says that he promised to stop. But I mean really, if it was bad enough to get you to quit the first time, why even open yourself back up to the possibility of it happening again?

 

I think O'Rielly has the upperhand here. However, that all depends on whether or not these alleged tapes actually exist.