Who is Bill O'Reilly

Most readers probably have an opinion on Bill O'Reilly, the anchor of Fox News' successful TV talk show The O'Reilly Factor. Kitman, a self-professed "liberal TV critic"--who admits, "I don't agree with much of what [O'Reilly] says, but I like the way he says it"--probably won't change a lot of minds with this book. But it's difficult to imagine a better-researched or less-biased work about such a divisive figure as O'Reilly, a man who once told the son of a 9/11 victim to "shut up" on the air. The unauthorized biography draws on 29 interviews with O'Reilly and five years of research, tracking O'Reilly from his beginnings in Long Island through years of aggressive reporting and management faceoffs (10 news jobs in 15 years) to his perch atop the New Media pyramid and the scandals that have dogged him since. Fans of his bestselling autobiographies may find Kitman's anecdotes familiar, but O'Reilly revilers may be surprised to learn that O'Reilly at first aspired to found a magazine like the Village Voice, and the man sued for sexual harassment in 2004 is a teetotaler. Kitman's reportage on this paradoxical, maddening yet inspiring man does a fine job in letting the reader decide.

Taking a different approach than the spate of recent books about television commentator O'Reilly, Newsday media critic Kitman neither excoriates nor glorifies the broadcaster. Instead, Kitman presents O'Reilly as an independent thinker who is unafraid to forcefully air his views. Drawing on interviews with O'Reilly, his friends, colleagues, and critics, Kitman evokes O'Reilly's early rebellious spirit and pugnacious character. Though not from the working-class background he likes to portray, O'Reilly's Irish Levittown boyhood was hard-knuckled in its own way. Kitman details O'Reilly's move into journalism and rise in television, against the grain of conformity that dominated among broadcasters before Fox News president Roger Ailes chanced a new formula. Kitman also details the myriad run-ins O'Reilly has had with other journalists and commentators, from Molly Ivins to Al Franken, who have denounced O'Reilly's credibility and attacked his politics. Kitman's book is unlikely to change many opinions about O'Reilly, but at least it may lower the volume of the discussion. -- Vanessa Bush