The ever controversial conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is not attacking liberals or Bill Clinton this time around, but instead he’s attacking gamers and iPod owners. On his radio program “Radio Factor”, O’Reilly compares video game consoles to drug use. “American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine. Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality – ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like.”
He goes on to talk about the recent launch of the PlayStation 3, which was met with lines that formed for days and was met with a rash of violent behavior in the United States. “The problem with this stuff is that some people can deal with it constructively… but other people get addicted to it, just like opium, just like drugs and alcohol… So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country.”
O’Reilly then goes on to say that gamers are doomed to fail in life. “The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the ‘knows’ and the ‘know-nots’, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines…. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.”
Finally, O’Reilly takes a shot at Apple’s iPod. “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… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.” We report, you decide.
