Fox News Channel’s decision to fire Bill O’Reilly caused me to reread a piece I wrote about Fox back in 2004. Were I to grade Fox, now, independent of O’Reilly, I would give them 1.5 cheers.

An excerpt:

Back to foreign policy, where Fox fails to earn the third cheer. Even here, though, there is some good news, and it’s mainly due to Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly is neither liberal nor conservative nor neo-conservative. Rather, he is a populist. Night after night he talks about how he’s looking out for “the folks,” a term I’ve never heard him define. I get the impression that “the folks” means, to O’Reilly, what former President Richard Nixon referred to as “the silent majority,” a large group whom Nixon imagined populated the United States and favored the Vietnam war, but, somehow, never bothered to speak up in favor of it.

So what is the good news? Simply this. O’Reilly is neither incisive nor particularly thoughtful. But O’Reilly seems to have a high opinion of his own intellect. Because of that, he often hosts smart guests whom, I get the impression, he thought he could refute, but sometimes can’t. Moreover, these are often guests who are more articulate and whose views are fresher, than the guests and views you typically see on the liberal networks. In December, for example, he hosted a University of Chicago law professor named Geoffrey Stone, who argued that U.S. defeat in Iraq would be good. O’Reilly regarded this as traitorous and that was about the extent of his argument. But Stone pointed out that if the U.S. government responded to defeat by exiting Iraq, many American lives would be saved. O’Reilly became muddled when faced with this argument — he didn’t know what to do with it. And millions of Americans got to see a guy with some gravitas saying, without animus, that the U.S. government should be defeated.

Don’t miss the part about NBC fraudulently blowing up a GM truck and getting caught.