Bill O'Reilly, host of the controversial and partisan Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor, did not quite go on the lynching party against Michelle Obama, but he certainly took some shots at her by playing the "angry black woman" card against her. Consider this quote from O'Reilly during his ongoing attempt to define Sen. Obama through his own narrow-minded perspective (I pulled this from the Web site Media Matters). Now, I have a lot of people who call me on the radio and say she looks angry. And I have to say there's some validity to that. She looks like an angry woman. Did you ask her about that?" Throughout the segment, he attempted to get two women (Vogue magazine contributing editor Rebecca Johnson and Human Events columnist Michelle Oddis) familiar with Michelle Obama to try and paint her as an angry black woman who hates her country, is not warm and fuzzy and is somehow insensitive - all very sexist portrayals that serve only to demean the women who do not fit into certain stereotypes of how we feel women are supposed to behave. O'Reilly worked hard in an attempt to try and get the two women to validate his clearly prejudiced opinion of Michelle Obama. Both of the women, however, defied his best efforts to shape Michelle Obama in O'Reilly's image of her. Maybe O'Reilly will come to realize that his dangerous stereotypes of women (happy-go-lucky and cheerful all the time with big smiles), in general, and black women (angry, haters of America and ungrateful), as a whole, are very dangerous. O'Reilly needs to leave these stereotypes, which he put in stereo for his right-wing-leaning viewers, where they belong: in the past.
Media Matters on O'Reilly segment about Michelle Obama:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200809170008?f=h_clips
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