Fox News host Bill O’Reilly believes he’s been fair to President Barack Obama.
“I haven’t bashed the president. I have not attacked him personally,” he said on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Tuesday night. “I have not bought into the opinion that he wants to damage the U.S.A. I have not bought into that. What I have done is analyze what he’s done in a fact-based way.”
O’Reilly then spent the rest of the seven-minute segment criticizing nearly every element of Obama’s presidency, including healthcare, poverty, race relations and foreign policy.
This was not the first time the conservative host had made such claims about the fairness of his coverage.
“I know Barack Obama, I’ve interviewed him three times,” O’Reilly told Seth Meyers last year. “I think he’s a patriot, I’ve said that.”
His problems with the president were purely about policy, he said.
However, last year, while criticizing Obama’s fight against ISIS as his “greatest failure,” O’Reilly showed decades-old photos of the president in traditional African attire at a wedding.
“Many Americans, including this one, believe Barack Obama’s emotional attachment to the Muslim world has hurt the USA,” O’Reilly said.
“Details on the ceremony, the exact location, whether the reports that Barack Obama was the best man are very difficult to verify at this point,” he said. “What we can tell you with certainty is that Barack Obama has deep emotional ties to Islam.”
Obama is a Christian, but linking him to Islam ― and insinuating a connection to terrorism ― has been a right-wing talking point for years.
See O’Reilly’s latest comments in the clip above, posted online by Media Matters.
