Oh, Really, Bill? Once Again, O’Reilly Can’t Admit a Mistake | Hatewatch

The AP story reporting the results was headlined, “The Big Story: AP Poll: Majority harbor prejudice against blacks.” And here’s the bottom line under that unambiguous headline: “In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.”



I wrote O’Reilly and Factor producer Nick Robertson early this week, asking sweetly if they might put me on to defend myself and show that what I said was based on real data. Today, in an E-mail from Robertson, they refused.

Although O’Reilly never made this point on air, Robertson also said via E-mail that the AP poll “did not specifically break out anti-black attitudes among WHITES. The poll was about anti-black attitudes among ALL Americans.” I had merely made an “unproven assumption,” he charged, that most whites had anti-black attitudes.

In fact, the study, if you bother to look into it, found that implicit anti-black attitudes among whites went from 49% in 2008 to 59% in 2012, a shift of 10 percentage points. And explicit anti-black attitudesamong whites went from 57% in 2008 to 60% in 2012. In other words, the change was more marked among whites than the population as a whole. (And by the way, I didn’t say more than half of whites were “racists,” as O’Reilly claimed; I said, as you can see above, that they had “anti-black attitudes.”) In addition, I spoke today to Josh Pasek, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of communications studies at the University of Michigan, who said that while some of the underlying numbers were sometimes fuzzy, any change among whites clearly had been “in a basic anti-black direction. There’s nothing significantly trending in a pro-black direction, “ he added.

In other words, O’Reilly was totally wrong. It wasn’t the first time.

Oh, Really, Bill? Once Again, O’Reilly Can’t Admit a Mistake | Hatewatch