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A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor

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Abstract

There has been a significant rise in opinion and talk-based programming on American cable news channels since the mid-1990s. These news analysis programs are often politically partisan in their interpretive approach. This article examines one of the most prominent and popular of these shows, The O’Reilly Factor using the theoretical tools of structural hermeneutics. The program produces a radically simple and partisan schema for interpreting the news, but to do so it relies on the constructed persona of the host, a complex underlying meaning structure formulated around binary oppositions, and a number of rhetorical techniques. The show simplifies, but is not itself simple. To simplify the news in a way that suggests partisan conclusions that still seem relevant rather than cartoonish, individual episodes and segments of the show frame issues in terms of a meaning structure that leads strongly to partisan conclusions, but affords an appearance of the reasonable consideration of diverse views. It is suggested that this kind of deep analysis of meaning structures is important for making sense of how news analysis programs and mediated partisanship function as a cultural system.

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Notes

  1. I have classified The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper 360, Special Report with Brett Baier, and the FOX Report with Shepard Smith as traditional news programming based on the relative importance of describing events objectively over interpreting and debating the meaning of those events.

  2. Citations in this format (The O’Reilly Factor date) are transcripts directly from the show made by the author.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith, and the Editors and reviewers of Theory and Society for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the participants in the Workshop in Cultural Sociology at Yale University for their considered and enthusiastic responses in the very early phases of this research project as I determined whether and how to approach the topic of The O’Reilly Factor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, PO Box 208265, New Haven, CT, 06520-8265, USA

    Matthew Norton

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Correspondence to Matthew Norton.

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Norton, M. A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor . Theor Soc 40, 315–346 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9143-7

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