Whitney Houston's passing has occasioned the usual outbreak of bloviation from shouting heads in the media, with Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace getting the most attention for their predictable moral grandstanding and outrageous claims. O'Reilly and Matt Lauer duked it out today on the Today show, then Good Morning America had Ms. Grace square off with legal analyst Dan Abrams. Both were made to look silly by their more sober and sane interlocutors.
Let it first be said that I don't take Bill O'Reilly seriously as either a journalist or a public intellectual, he is simply the ringleader of Fox News. He is an entertainer, first and foremost, and even I have to admit that O'Reilly is as good at what he does as Carrot Top is at smashing props. In fact, has anybody ever seen the two of them in the same room together? Very similar methodologies — hmmmm.
What elicited all the controversy recently was when Mr. No-Spin said that "Whitney Houston wanted to kill herself….the hard truth is that some people will always want to destroy themselves, and there's nothing society can do about it." Then he asserted to Lauer that "the media looked the other way…..they exploited it!"
Ah, now this is where Bill's genius kicks in: swathing himself in moral armor when accusing others of exactly the kind of behavior he's guilty of himself. The ostensibly high-minded Factor has never met a sensational death or exposed body part that it didn't pounce on like fresh meat. Any opportunity to run a videotaped "catfight" between women gets run in an endless loop on his show, while Pope Bill waxes apoplectic about the depravity therein revealed. The truth is, he just wants an excuse to run the salacious clip over and over again. Why do you think his ratings are so high?! It's TMZ without the idiot staff howling in the background.
As for Nancy Grace-lessness, the former prosecutor turned one-woman news coven, her idle speculation that Whitney Houston was murdered was met with righteous indignation by more responsible people in the media. "I'd like to know who was around her," Grace said on CNN, "who if anyone gave her drugs, and who let her slip, or pushed her, underneath that water." In the name of stirring up the bee-hive to make ratings, Nancy Grace would accuse Gandhi of torturing a lamb. She, the former prosecutor, hates perps, and thinks due process is a joke. Guilty until proven innocent is her operating principle. Again, she is about as serious a figure as Joan Rivers, and — to her credit —equally annoying.
Unfortunately, the net result of all this phony indignation and wild speculation is that both O'Reilly and Grace get what they were looking for all along: more air-time. They don't give a whit about Whitney — they are nothing more than vultures circling over the culture looking for fresh carrion, something that's putrid and lurid and sensational, so they can wring every last drop of the public's lust for vicarious violence and human tragedy. To pretend they are anything else is hypocrisy of the first order. So what else is new?