The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly
By Marvin Kitman. St. Martin's Press (New York, 2007). 318 pp., $25.95.

"Do you want to be lectured by some 8-foot guy telling you you're an idiot ... and he gives you the last word, then he interrupts and goes to commercial? I don't know, I wouldn't." One might guess that these are the words of one of Bill O'Reilly's many detractors; they are in fact those of Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, speaking to the fate of the guest on his network's "The O'Reilly Factor."

It is merely one of many memorable quotes from Marvin Kitman's "The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly," undoubtedly the most complete biography of the Fox News personality and cultural phenomenon to date. Having written the television column for Newsday for 35 years --- a column O'Reilly grew up reading --- Kitman was allowed unprecedented access to the newsman, including some 29 interviews.

The story on O'Reilly is that people either love him or hate him. He is either the defender of all that is good and true and decent or a charlatan and a bully who passes off spectacular diatribes as journalism. Kitman seems to buy into neither version, taking pains to portray O'Reilly as eminently human though not always sympathetic.

He shows the reader O'Reilly the mischievous youth, the pugnacious college student who raised the hackles of students and faculty alike with his provocative writing for the school paper, and the high school teacher who collected $1.75 from each student in his class to purchase an air-conditioning unit that had been denied him by the school's administration. Through it all, one is impressed by how much of O'Reilly's professional bearing was there from the beginning.

Described in detail is O'Reilly's well-publicized feud with liberal pundit Al Franken (now a candidate for a Minnesota Senate seat). Kitman gives a play-by-play of Fox News' legal action against Franken over his provocative book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," the cover of which featured an unflattering picture of O'Reilly with the word "lies" from the title positioned suggestively nearby. The lawsuit turned into a debacle for Fox, whose lawyers' claims of copyright infringement for Franken's use of the network's "fair and balanced" met with laughter in the courtroom.

While Kitman's biography is comprehensive, one wonders whether much remains to be said about O'Reilly that has not already been said by O'Reilly himself, and readers may be forgiven if they do not share Kitman's enthusiasm for the O'Reilly phenomenon.

Still, his discussion of the man in the sweep of television journalism is most insightful. He concludes in the end that "O'Reilly as a proponent of subjectivism and activism in the news is more in the channel of Ed Murrow than Walter Cronkite and his successors."

As a television writer, Kitman also has a unique gift for packaging the O'Reilly phenomenon in pithy terms: "He is perpetually upset. Every night he brings passion to the tube. The need not to 'let those bastards get away with it' is an eternal flame, a nuclear pile of anger continually recharging itself."

Of course, a major demographic seems to be overlooked in all of this: those people who do not give a great deal of thought to Bill O'Reilly and who are only vaguely aware that there are cable news networks given over almost entirely to people screaming at each other. Whether or not this group will agree with Kitman's assessment that "it's probably a better world having people like him on the TV news" is unclear. In any event, Kitman gives interested parties a very human view of "The Man Who Would Not Shut Up."

---CNS Brent Kallmer is a former research fellow with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Department of Social Development and World Peace and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.