Bill O’Reilly found many new ways to politicize the coverage of the missing Malaysian plane last night. Let us count the talking points he worked into a nearly 11-minute, self-serving segment with colleague Bernard Goldberg about the unworthy reporting of everyone else: Benghazi, IRS, “corrupt” liberal media and bias on behalf of Barack Obama. OK, the Obama part was mostly Goldberg but O’Reilly accepted it as fact – right after he complained about other news hosts’ baselessly speculating.

Oh, yeah, and there was a lot of self-congratulating to go with all that:

"One week ago, I told you exactly what happened to that plane," O'Reilly announced.

Actually, O’Reilly had opined about what happened. It’s not like he had any special knowledge or did any real reporting. Heck, he never even left his studio to investigate a single fact. He continued:

Now I’m not a genius, it was obvious. Obvious from the facts that the pilot or pilots took the plane off course intentionally and it eventually crashed.

…But the media misled you. It exploited the airliner story to manipulate viewership. It allowed charlatans to put forth preposterous theories and that denigrated the entire journalism industry.

…That is the truth. Even as late as yesterday, the corruption continued.

O’Reilly whined, “I got hammered by some dishonest, contemptible media people” for “telling you the truth” seven days earlier. Then he boasted, “We will always tell you the truth on The Factor. And we will always present facts to back it up.”

Media critic Bernard Goldberg immediately followed O’Reilly’s Talking Points commentary. I give props to Goldberg for calling out a “retired general” on “this network” whose conspiracy theory “speaks to the credibility, in my view, of the entire network.” But the bulk of the criticism – the names named, such as CNN and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, were from other outlets.

O’Reilly attributed the problem to the “decline of the entire journalism industry.”

But Goldberg was the one who actively carried the ball into partisan-exploitation territory. “I don’t know if it began but it certainly got noticeably worse” with Barack Obama’s election, Goldberg opined. “Journalists traditionally chronicle the news. They chronicle history. But when Barack Obama came along – because he was a historical figure, they decided they wanted to help shape history.”

Any facts to back that up? You know, the way O’Reilly promised he “always” does? Nope. O’Reilly didn’t even ask for any.

In fact, Goldberg continued with his baseless speculation without interruption:

And I think they moved from covering the news to wanting to shape the news.  …Most importantly, they went from old-fashioned media bias, which has been around for a while, to media activisim. That’s in the old media.

Rather than ask for facts, O’Reilly agreed. Plus, he found an excuse to work in his own political exploitation:

”So that’s the reason that Benghazi, Libya, the IRS, and other important stories…are being virtually ignored by many - ”

Before O’Reilly could finish his sentence, Goldberg added, “That’s the ideological part, right.”

Funny, I didn’t see any facts backing up those assertions, did you? Or is blaming the liberal media – without considering, say, the way that the media acted as lapdogs over the invasion of Iraq - exempt from fact-checking? Not only did Bill O’Reilly join the Iraq-War Cheerleaders club, “liberal” New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who published a series of articles suggesting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, therefore falsely bolstering the Bush administration’s case for war, now works for Fox News.

But there was more hypocrisy. O’Reilly went on to mock those who use emails or tweets to make a point for them. “So they’re not asking it, they’re asking it on behalf of Baron Von Frankenstein in Bavaria,” he sneered.

That happens to be the very technique that O’Reilly used last week when he just happened to read an email  on the air from a viewer “mad as hell” that there has been more coverage of the missing plane “than the total coverage on Benghazi.”