Bill O’Reilly gets an online spanking

It all started with Mr. Bill making some comments on his show on Fox News. He commented that some Web sites had picked up a San Francisco Chronicle article about a local station dropping his radio show — which was wrong, he said, because the show was merely moving to another Bay Area station.

But then he got angry. Quoting the rant:

“All over the country, we have people posting the most vile stuff imaginable, hiding behind high tech capabilities. Sometimes the violators are punished, but most are not. We have now have teenagers ruining the reputations of their peers in schools on the Internet. Ideologues accusing public officials of the worst things imaginable. And creeps gossiping about celebrities in the crudest of ways.

“The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes. For example, the guy who raped and murdered a 10-year old in Massachusetts says he got the idea from the NAMBLA Web site that he accessed from the Boston public library. The ACLU’s defending NAMBLA in that civil lawsuit.”

Them’s fighting words.

So damn near every respectable blogger responded, as quoted in this article.

There is one thing that Mr. Bill has that other folks don’t have is that he has a megaphone to spread his voice. The problem is that the minute he starts bad-mouthing the ‘net, his megaphone is no louder than anybody elses.