More O'Reilly Love

Bill O'Reilly once worked for Channel 7 in Denver -- and even though he's been gone a long, long time, he still keeps a close eye on media in these parts (or, more likely, he has his minions do it for him). As a result, several local scribes have been pilloried on

, his nationally broadcast Fox News soapbox -- the latest being

TV-and-radio writer Joanne Ostrow, who starred in the "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day" feature that concluded his April 9 program.

In the segment, O'Reilly focused on his favorite topic -- himself -- by critiquing how the media in general handled coverage of his recent shout-fest with fellow Fox mouthpiece Geraldo Rivera. He said most organizations reported things pretty evenhandedly. Apparently he didn't see -- or didn't want to acknowledge-- the segment on MSNBC's Countdown in which host Keith Olbermann gleefully declared Rivera to be "the best person in the world" for ripping into O'Reilly regarding a Virginia crash in which a drunk illegal alien killed two young women.

However, O'Reilly said the exception to this fair-and-balanced approach was Ostrow, who wrote in a piece headlined "O'Reilly Meltdown a New Low" that the Big O had "spewed racist bile." He went on to call her a far-left ideologue. "Ridiculous?" he asked rhetorically, then answered his own question by muttering, "Off the charts..."

Being denigrated by O'Reilly puts Ostrow on a growing roster of local targets, including Dusty Saunders, her Rocky Mountain News counterpart, and Post columnist Cindy Rodriguez, the subject of this blog. In the fall of 2005, Rodriguez bated O'Reilly in three separate columns, as if desperate for the increase in stature that being on O'Reilly's hate list apparently conveyed in her mind.

Of course, O'Reilly's attacks are more about his own mammoth ego than anything of substance, but who cares? Thanks for not forgetting us Coloradoans, Bill! -- Michael Roberts