Bill O'Reilly: It's Not about Churchill Anymore - U of Colorado President Betsy Hoffman Has "Gotta Go"
Reported by Marie Therese - March 3, 2005
On last night's O'Reilly Factor (3/02/05), Bill interviewed two like-minded guests - David Harsanyi, a conservative opinion columnist for the Denver Post, and Dan Caplis, conservative radio talk show host who together with his partner, Craig Silverman, have hauled Ward Churchill over the coals in Colorado. Caplis and Silverman are both attorneys. O'Reilly interviewed Silverman on Monday night. During last night's segment O'Reilly went into overdrive on the topic of U of Colorado President Betsy Hoffman, repeatedly calling for her to be fired. At the same time he backed away from Ward Churchill. Now we can see that - all along - the REAL target of all of this dust-up has been, not Professor Churchill, but Ms. Hoffman, the President of the University of Colorado. Somebody in Colorado or elsewhere does not like this woman!
You might want to start off by reading O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo, entitled Professor Ward Churchill Is a Traitor. It's a beaut!
I did not have time last night to write up my own transcript of the interview. However, FOX News has posted their own transcript on their site (as well as a video feed), I would suggest watching the video feed as I frequently find errors and omissions in FOX's partial transcripts, which they freely admit have been edited for clarity. Click here: Is the University of Colorado Out of Control?.
COMMENT
The things I found most disturbing in this segment were (a) Bill's unbalanced scheduling of two guests who were clearly on the exact same page vis a vis Churchill and Hoffman (b) his prior friendly relationship with Dan Caplis (c) Caplis' making the statement that Hoffman would have to "engineer the dismissal" of Ward Churchill in order to keep her job ("I think that if she fires Churchill, if she engineers that, she'll survive") (d) O'Reilly's saying that Churchill "stole a painting" which is not true - Churchill is accused of possible copyright infringement in 1980 (e) O'Reilly's attempt to link an old U of C football scandal to the Ward Churchill case and (f) Harsayni claiming that Paul Campos is a liberal.
Campos is a law professor from the University of Colorado whose only claim to fame before Ward Churchill is that he's authored a book on obesity. In addition, he writes a column for a Colorado conservative newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. If you'd like to get a taste for the Campos brand of "liberalism," here's a link to an interview he did on The O'Reilly Factor on February 9th: Ward Churchill's Cult of Personality.
