Debating Bill O’Reilly

Executive Summary

• All Time Best Rhetorician
• How to Debate Bill O’Reilly

All Time Best Rhetorician

No one does more with less than Bill O’Reilly. We say this after analyzing rhetoricians from the past, such as William F Buckley, as well as other modern day rhetoricians. Bill rarely has more than a surface understanding of any topic he is discussing. He uses the following techniques to defeat people with far greater subject matter knowledge.

• The comment “Going too deep, and we don’t have time” – Whenever a guest begins to delve into the detail that would undermine the sweeping generalizations used by O’Reilly, Bill uses this technique to prevent the audience from learning the actual facts.
• Interruption – If he does not like where the answer is going, he simply interrupts the interviewer, and will occasionally bring up the concept of reciprocity, that he needs his chance to speak, when he deprives his guest the same opportunity
• Assumption Agreement – Can push back on any guest once they have made their point by setting up a simple question that the guest feels compelled to answer in the affirmative. His most famous being “Do you want America to win the war in Iraq.” If the interviewer say no, is patriotism is questioned, if he answers yes, Bill then says that the guest will then agree with whatever position Bill is arguing for. (Letterman actually had the proper response to this which was “It depends on what the definition of winning is.”
• Uses the “you are in fantasy-land” or “you must know nothing about x or y” in order to back his guest into a corner. He did this very effectively against Ron Paul in a debate about Iran.

Bill O’Reilly is a master at what he does. He is so confident that actually defeated and demeaned Dr. Richard Dawkins, who was the father of evolutionary biology and is a superstar professor from Oxford. His book The Selfish Gene is one of  the most influential and best books in popular biology and has been for over 25 years. Its doubtful that Bill O’Reilly could ever read a single one of Richard Dawkins scientific papers and understand it. We don’t mean in a few months, we mean that with all the free tutoring, Bill O’Reilly could never understand what Richard Dawkins knows. However, Bill treated him like he was some student from a technical college, and utterly disrepected him. What makes this even more amazing is that Bill O’Reilly was debating religon with Dawkins, and actually was able to put Dawkins and by extension most of the scientific community on the hook for not having answered every single one of the questions related to the origins of man, the universe and essentially everything.

How to Debate Bill O’Reilly

The only way we can see to stay with or defeat Bill O’Reilly (and he wins almost all of his debates) is to interrupt him and to come out aggressive and stay aggressive. Many guests seem to become intimidated by him which may have something to do with his height or facial characteristics. Almost anyone pitted against Bill will have more subject matter expertise as he is both poorly educated and not well versed in his the topics of discussion. Bill is debating in areas far beyond his areas of expertise and it’s important not to forget that he was at one time an anchor for the lightweight gossip show Inside Edition. Fox News has no education or intellectual requirements for their editorial shows (Glen Beck has a high school degree — and it shows) and this matches Fox’s general demographic of people who study and read very little and are too distracted to perform any deeper thinking. However, O’Reilly’s rhetoric is so effective, that his lack of knowledge rarely matters. The best strategy is to both interrupt Bill as well as point out Bill’s lack of knowledge in the area.