Why Does Bill O'Reilly Hate The iPod?

Arik Hesseldahl

What exactly does Bill O’Reilly have against the iPod anyway? In a recent radio rant, he held up Apple’s popular music player and the Sony Playstation 3 as example of how “American society is changing for the worse because of the machines.” Later, overcome with disgust, he loses his ability to speak in complete sentences: “I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America…” Takeouts of his talk are here.

It’s not exactly clear to me where O’Reilly is going with this, but it appears to have something to do with jihadists killing people, his inability to have a conversation with “computer geeks."

I’m a little unclear as to what my neighbor – O’Reilly’s employer, Fox News Channel is across the street from my office – is trying to say. Because there are “jihadists killing real people,” which I don’t dispute, he seems to think that “computer geeks” shouldn’t be making products to sell to the American public like video games and iPods. Is that it? I’m not entirely sure what his point is, but I’ll do my best to respond.

No less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan praised the virtues of video games. Reagan entered the Oval Office about the time people first started playing “Space Invaders” and later “Pac Man.” The games were good for the reflexes, he thought, and as such would help encourage a generation of military pilots and soldiers with sharp hand-eye coordination and nerves of steel under fire. Here’s the direct quote: “I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.” The date was August 8 1983.

Anyhow, that’s what Reagan, a man O’Reilly professes to admire, had to say on the subject of video games.

I still don’t get what he’s got against the iPod. (Perhaps he thinks Apple should ditch it and start building jihadist-killing machines?) But it certainly is incongruous with all those promotions for his podcasts promoted on his Web site. Take a look here at www.billoreilly.com and scroll down a little, and you’ll find a picture of an iPod with the head of a bald eagle photoshopped onto the screen. Click on it, and it takes you to a screen where O’Reilly promotes podcasts of his “Radio Factor,” which are available only to “premium members” of the Web site. And what does “premium membership” cost? $4.95 a month or $49.95 a year.

I’ve never met, watched, read or listened to O’Reilly, and now I think I now have a hint as to why. If the existence and popularity of the iPod is his idea of a threat to America – a device whose existence is apparently making him a slightly richer man assuming that “premium memberships” to his Web site are selling well – then I know exactly how much I have to learn from Bill O’Reilly, and you could fit it all onto the tip of a pencil. I wonder if pencils are a threat to America too? They were pretty popular once.