:cry: :nopity: :rofl:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/14/AR2007011401124.html<snip>
"I certainly took offense when he said there were no conservatives at the network, we were all liberal stooges and Marxist sympathizers," Scarborough says. The "final straw," he says, was when O'Reilly criticized Richard Engel, NBC's Middle East bureau chief, for "suggesting the obvious" -- that the rushed hanging of Saddam Hussein had been "a PR disaster." (President Bush told NBC's Brian Williams last week that the execution video ranked just below Abu Ghraib in terms of the war's mistakes.)
O'Reilly declined to be interviewed for this column, but Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti says he "has exposed media bias for the last 10 years. This is nothing new. We don't know why NBC finds the label 'liberal' so insulting."
Scarborough says O'Reilly is being driven by animosity toward Keith Olbermann, whose MSNBC show "Countdown" has been gaining in the ratings. "He's allowed his anger toward Keith Olbermann to damage his credibility," Scarborough says.
Olbermann, who faces off with O'Reilly at 8 p.m., has been denouncing his rival for years. He positions his program as an increasingly liberal alternative to the "O'Reilly Factor" and frequently bestows on "Bill-O" his "Worst Person in the World" award. "Countdown" was up 60 percent in the fourth quarter over a year earlier, to 656,000 viewers. But "Factor," despite a 21 percent decline during the same period, still dwarfs the competition with 2.049 million viewers.
Several times over the last year, according to three sources who asked not to be identified because they were describing private conversations, O'Reilly's agent called Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC's television group, urging him to tell his MSNBC commentators to back off. O'Reilly also posted an online petition demanding that NBC dump Olbermann.