Drop the keyboard and step away from the blog...

Via insty comes a transcript of Bill O'Reilly's interview with blogger/radiohost/ author
Hugh Hewitt.

Bill spends a lot of time complaining that blogs "don't have to follow rules" and are "pipelines of defamation", among other things. He also complains that that Air America exists to promote a political agenda rather than make a profit.

Bill, welcome to a little thing called free speech. That's the beauty of the internet in general and blogs in particular - anyone who has something to say and access to a computer with a network connection can say something. Sure, you can spend a lot of money, but you can also get a free blogspot blog and say whatever you want. That's free speech in action. That's a form of democracy and communication that wasn't available 10 years ago. It's the modern equivilant of nailing the treatises to the church door, except everyone can have their own door.

The thing about blogs and the internet is that nobody has to read your site, or trust it. Sites that people trust or enjoy will be successfull, sites that won't will find themselves talking to themselves.

Sure, Air America is a radio station that exists purely for political purposes, but so what? If the lefties want to spend millions to preach to themselves how Bush stole the election, that's their right. Air America is worthless politically because the only people who listen to it are people who already agree with their message.

I don't really understand Bill's point. Even if he hates blogs, how does he expect to make them follow "rules"? Make free speach illegal?

I sense that Bill's getting a little nervous with the competition. I used to watch The O'Reilly Factor, but once I got into reading blogs, I decided I prefered in-depth analyisis to 30-second sound bites. The only tv news show I watch regularly is The Dennis Miller Show. Dennis Miller is a guy who gets blogs - and his varsity panel has included a host of bloggers, including Cathy Seipp, Moxie, and Michelle Malkin. Sure, the show suffers the same sound-bite over issues problems that all TV talk shows suffer from, but unlike O'Reilly, Miller doesn't go out of his way to browbeat guests who disagree with him. And he seems to welcome bloggers as a way to augment current media rather than fear them as competition.