After eating dinner with Rev. Al Sharpton at famed Harlem restaurant Sylvia’s recently, Fox News Channel‘s Bill O’Reilly told his radio audience he “couldn’t get over the fact” that there was no difference between the black-run Sylvia’s and white-run restaurants.
“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all…. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M.F.-er, I want more iced tea .’“
O’Reilly also said his fellow patrons were ‘tremendously respectful’ as he ate dinner with Sharpton.
The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America called attention to the questionable quotes by distributing a transcript and audio clip on the Internet.
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Both Fox News and O’Reilly believe O’Reilly is simply a victim of a left-wing smear campaign, and he was misquoted and misunderstood.
Media Matters for America Senior Fellow Paul Waldman appeared this morning (Sept 26 ) on NBC‘s Today show to discuss the controversy generated by the comments. When asked for his reaction to O’Reilly‘s defense of being “taken out of context”, Waldman replied, “If Bill O’Reilly got caught robbing a bank he would say he was taken out of context”.
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