Bill O’Reilly Tries to Understand Lady Voters
The opinions of American women voters have been much on the mind of the media. Even more perplexing to the media’s pundit class than your average women voter has been single women voters. But rather than any realistic examinations of the issues that concern single women the media has been content with a series of wild explanations: from questionable scientific “studies” to even more spurious “insight” into single women’s minds. All of this adds up to fictional media-fueled narrative that single ladies aren’t the smartest voters in the booths.
So cue Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly who felt the need to weigh in on the subject matter Halloween night when he aired a video of his producer Jesse Watters interviewing costumed single women about their political opinions. Certainly the mixture of Halloween, single women, and a serious subject like politics would produce hilarity! Turns out it wasn’t funny at all, but O’Reilly sexism is surely scary enough to be the stuff of Halloween legend.
See the video below:
Over at Slate Amanda Marcotte has her take on O’Reilly’s video which she describes as a series of interviews with:
…sexy young white women on the street, all of them in costume and ready to party, so Watters could leer at their single lady voter breasts and condescendingly make ‘can you believe they have a right to vote?! faces at the camera in response to the women’s selectively edited answers to his questions.
Marcotte is right to point out that O’Reilly and his producer are using selective editing to fulfill a familiar media meme: those silly single women voters who know almost nothing about politics! Of course, O’Reilly’s construction of this sizeable (and growing) voter bloc is a complete misrepresentation. As Marcotte says, all of the women O’Reilly interviews are white and young when in reality the group itself encompasses women of many ages and ethnicities with a variety of economic and social concerns. But hey, why let facts get in your way when you can resort to sexism instead of gathering facts.
Maybe next time O’Reilly will send his producers out to investigate the real concerns of single women voters. But we highly doubt it.
Published by Kate McCarthy on 11/02/2012