Tell President Obama: No Super Bowl interview with O'Reilly!

Bill O'Reilly's outrageous opinions and willful disregard for the truth have been at the heart of some of FOX News' most shameful moments.

So why is President Obama granting O'Reilly an exclusive pre-Super Bowl interview?1

This blockbuster interview legitimizes O'Reilly, and legitimizes his hateful opinions as actual journalism -- the last thing President Obama should do on the biggest television day of the year.

It's unfortunate but understandable that the president would interview on Fox. He has granted a pre-game interview to a journalist from the network broadcasting the Super Bowl for the past two years -- NBC's Matt Lauer in 2009 and CBS' Katie Couric last year.

But President Obama shouldn't have picked O'Reilly, a commentator whose opinion-driven show and history of inflammatory, hateful remarks put him in an entirely different class.

Even O'Reilly readily admits a distinction between his show and "objective journalism"2 (whatever the FOX News, fun-house-mirror version of objective journalism might be).

It is deeply disappointing that President Obama would choose to embrace and legitimize a personality who so singularly embodies so much that is wrong with our media today -- and even worse that he would do so before literally hundreds of millions of viewers.

Tell President Obama: No Super Bowl interview with Bill O'Reilly!

1 "Bill O'Reilly to Interview President Obama," New York Times, January 6, 2011

2 Media Matters, November 15, 2010

Sign the petition


We've reached 68% of our 3rd NEW goal of 75,000 signers! (51,418)

The petition reads:

"Your scheduled Super Bowl interview with Bill O'Reilly will act to legitimize one of the nation's most inflammatory purveyors of hateful and willfully distorted commentary.

That you would chose to do this with so many in America watching, is outrageous and extremely unfortunate. Please, don't interview with O'Reilly."

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