Three University of Indiana scholars have released a study based on “content analysis” of O’Reilly’s nightly opening “Talking Points Memo,” the brief commentary beginning his nightly Fox News show, “The O’Reilly Factor.” Study authors have proven scientifically that only four in ten Americans actually think O’Reilly is not a sensational tabloid loudmouth, but “a journalist. Further, after many charts and numbers, they conclude that he’s really just a big right-wing bully. They said that “O’Reilly injects fear into his commentaries” along the same lines as 1930s radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, whose pro-fascist rants made him infamous. Nothing wrong with fascism, of course, assuming you’re a fascist. The study finds that when it comes to name-calling (defined as giving “a person or idea a bad label to make the audience reject them without examining the evidence”), Coughlin’s radio broadcasts only averaged 3.42 incidents per minute, while O’Reilly managed an amazing 8.88 name-calling insults per minute, which equates to an insult every 6.8 seconds.

O’Reilly hosts one of the best-rated shows on cable television, though only among the least desirable “over-50″ demographic, which sadly does not afford the best advertising dollars, whether he’s a curmudgeon-coddler or not. Still, he’s stuck on cable, so take him with a grain of salt… or lithium, which is also technically a salt. I recommend the latter.

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