Excerpt: Who's Looking Out For You?

ByABC News via logo
September 22, 2003, 5:32 PM

Sept. 23 -- In his new book, Who's Looking Out For You?, popular Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly unleashes his trademark sharp criticism, taking aim against politicians, Hollywood and the media, but he also offers readers some personal advice.

He asks readers to question how much their closest friends, families and lovers do for them, and he discusses the personal responsibility that we all have in these uncertain times.

Here is an excerpt:

Introduction

"It ain't me, I ain't no millionaire's son." John Fogarty, "Fortunate Son"

Let's immediately tee off a few sensitive souls out there by beginning with some "racial profiling." Here goes: If you have started to read this book, the chances are that you're an independent type, but your skin color and ethnicity are not predictable. I don't actually know you, but I know a lot about you. That's because there's a certain profile that O'Reilly watchers, listeners, and readers fit most of the time. Sure, there are drive-by viewers who watch The O'Reilly Factor as they would a gruesome accident, fascinated but repelled at the same time. And there are snobs who tune in just to shake their heads over the boorishness of it all.

But the everyday American who understands what the Factor concept is all about is generally a person who wants to live life honestly and make his or her own way. That person is often responsible, generous, aware that others around them also have lives to live, and unabashedly patriotic. You, very likely, are one of those people. In the beginning of the show, the fall of 1996, the elite media tried to marginalize the Factor concept by assigning it a "conservative" label. That's how they tagged us, hoping that label would frighten away those not on the right. But as millions of Americans of all political persuasions watched on television and read my first two books, The O'Reilly Factor and The No Spin Zone, the establishment press fled, dazed and confused. How could a cable TV news show have such a robust impact when network TV news was losing audience every quarter? The so-called elite scribes couldn't figure it out, and they still can't.

The warfare between the folks who liked The Factor and the eggheads in the press who looked down upon it became quite intense at times, but finally the numbers got too big. Millions of Americans tuned in daily to watch and also listen on the radio, causing many in the media to finally wave the white flag. TheAmerican people had made The O'Reilly Factor into a powerful entity-and the momentum the folks provided resulted in The Factor being nominated by the American Television Critics Association for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information in 2002. In 2003 your humble correspondent, me, was chosen by the industry magazine Television Week as the second most powerful person in TV news! Yikes! (The NBC news chief, Neil Shapiro, was first.)